I called Roundguard dangerous when I saw it at last year’s PAX West, and now that I’ve played the full version, I’m standing by that. It’s a deliberate fusion between several genres that are all known for being highly addictive, blending the shoot-and-loot of a Diablo with the flashing lights and trick shots of Peggle, all put together with a gentle sense of humor.
It’s not necessarily the kind of game that eats up weekends or ruins lives. Instead, it’s more insidious, as Roundguard is made to be played in short, intense blasts. You’ll spend 20 minutes here, an hour there, and before you know it, you’re 80 hours deep.
Roundguard was developed in Unity by Wonderbelly Games, a three-person team based in Seattle and Redmond, Wash. Two of the creators, Andrea Roberts and Kurt Loidl, are veterans of the Xbox department at Microsoft, with experience working on games such as the Fable franchise.
The game debuted today for Steam, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch for $19.99. In a surprise announcement this morning, Wonderbelly also released the game on the Apple Arcade.
Roberts described Roundguard to me at PAX last year as “what if Peggle played Dungeons & Dragons.” The titular Roundguard is a group of three adventurers, who have been sent into a monster-infested castle to rescue a captive king. You progress one room at a time, clearing out all the hostile locals while collecting all the treasure, relics, and equipment upgrades that you can.
However, each room is, like Peggle, a sort of pachinko puzzle. You defeat monsters by launching your adventurer at them from the top of the screen like a hostile, axe-wielding pinball. With each turn, you hope to smash as many pots for gold as possible, while beating up monsters, grabbing potions for health and mana, and eventually, landing on the moving cushion at the bottom of the screen rather than the spikes below it.
This is where the rogue-like facets of Roundguard come in. Your path through the castle, the monsters you face, and the treasure you find are mostly randomized. The challenge comes from getting as far as you can by carefully managing your resources – health, mana, equipment, other upgrades – and trying to build an effective character from whatever random scraps the game dishes out.
Early in the game, this is a straightforward process, but as you develop your character, you rapidly acquire abilities and gear that can lead to more complex, fast-moving strategies. The three available characters all have a broad variety of active skills you can find and equip, such as double-jumping or being able to charge enemies in mid-air. Imagine a pinball table where you could micromanage which direction the ball is going at any given time, and you get an idea of how mid- to late-game Roundguard can be played.
It’s a weird combination, but it’s also surprisingly satisfying. A lot of the appeal of a rogue-like dungeon crawler is in taking whatever random nonsense the game sticks you with and gradually forging it into a usable character. In Roundguard, that process also allows you to gradually overcome the basic rules of the game, where you go from being totally at the mercy of the game’s physics engine to being a sort of telekinetic pool shark. It’s particularly fun with the right combination of skills on Shade the rogue, where you can burn an entire mana bar on repeatedly double-jumping straight back into a single monster’s stupid face without ever having to land.
There are a lot of indie rogue-likes coming out lately, and it’s worth mentioning here that Roundguard doesn’t take itself seriously at all. A lot of the games in this sort of space, such as Darkest Dungeon or Slay the Spire, tend to be dark fantasy dramas, telling stories that are as grim and relentless as their core loops.
Instead, Roundguard feels like a Nickelodeon game show from the ‘90s, complete with an eccentric host. The monsters are all more goofy than threatening – goblin beat poets, emo teenage skeletons, angry ogre grandmothers – and the adventurers are, if anything, weirder than they are. It’s a gentle parody, and crucially, it never gets around to winking directly at the camera like a lot of other media would. It’s funny, but doesn’t feel the need to let you know that it’s in on the joke.
If you get defeated, the game just shrugs, apologizes, and sets everything up so you can try again, as if the whole castle is just a film set. It really takes the sting out of even a sudden, unfortunate failure.
Roundguard does have a few rough edges, though. The biggest problem is that most of the actually desirable abilities in the game don’t come from boss rewards or treasure, but seem to show up as randomly-generated bonuses you can find on new pieces of equipment.
Most of the game’s challenge comes from resource management. Naturally, that means that the best abilities you can get are the ones that give you more resources, such as free healing or a higher mana cap.
However, most of those abilities seem to show up as randomly-generated extra bonuses on new weapons, armor, and active skills. In my best runs so far, I’ve lucked into getting some combination of passive buffs that allow me to rapidly regenerate my character’s health and mana faster than the game forced me to spend it.
As such, it means that it’s easy to end up with an effective but underwhelming character build. A lot of the fun from a dungeon crawler is finding new and better weapons and armor for your character, but in Roundguard, it’s easy to get gear in the early game that you can’t afford to replace. I often find myself abandoning a big potential upgrade because it doesn’t have the right passive buff, which doesn’t feel great.
It’d make more sense if the passive buffs that can be assigned to weapons were instead gained from boss relics, because that’d encourage you to seek out more dangerous fights. As it is, the ideal path through Roundguard seems to be to avoid conflict as much as you can in favor of hitting treasure rooms, since most of the bosses don’t drop loot that’s half as useful as what you can find as an equipment bonus.
As complaints go, however, that’s fairly technical. Roundguard is a relentless time-killer of a game that’s easy to get into, but more importantly, it’s also easy to put down. If you want something that’s fun and absorbing in short bursts, while also being challenging and suitable for all audiences, you can’t do much better than this right now.
