Rogue Lords is a dark fantasy turn-based RPG roguelike, in which you play as the Devil, utilising your disciples to take over the world. The game is split up into different books, each of which are a different chapter in the story. The characters are all taken from gothic fiction and folk tales, featuring such characters as Dracula, Dr Frankenstein, Bloody Mary, The White Lady, Lilith and more. The game does an excellent job in capturing the creepy atmosphere, with the graphics doing a fine job of expressing this style.
Within each of the books, is a world map split into different zones. Each zone has a unique event to it. The first type of event is a ‘book’ event, which is essentially a story chapter. Then you have interactive story events, in which you have to pick different options to cause various effects. These could be improving your characters traits, changing effects on the overall world, or other arbitrary story elements.
Then, there are grim reaper zones which allow you to purchase new skills and relics with the souls you have collected, and River Styx wells which let you replenish your devil points. And finally, there are the battle zones, standard battles and elite battles, which offer better rewards. Rewards come in the form of skills or relics, skills are the basic commands used in battles, with relics being items that offer some kind of permanent upgrade.
The battle system of Rogue Lords is at first sight simple, but actually offers some decent amount of depth to it. You take three disciples into battle, of which you pick before you start the book, and carry them with you throughout that full chapter. Each round provides a certain number of ability points, which can be used on different skills. There are 5 ability points for the whole team to start with, with each skill costing a certain amount, stronger ones costing more. Once used, each skill needs to be recharged by a separate skill too. Foresight is key.
Damage is dealt to either HP or SP, and to defeat an enemy, it needs to reach zero before providing the killing blow. This is true for your disciples too, and it only requires one to die for the player to fail the whole book. Fail the whole book, and its back to the start – there’s no save scumming here. Disciple improvements are made through collecting new skills and upgrading existing ones, and due to the roguelike nature of the game, each run on a book can feel very different. It’s honestly a lot of fun.
That would all be great, but there’s one mechanic that is really fun, and that is devil mode. As you are playing as the devil, not your disciples, you can intervene at key moments. You can switch around effects, reduce health, and do more nefarious deeds. It’s not only in the battle segments, but in the story events too – if a story choice only has a 40% chance of getting a good outcome, you can shove that up to 100%. You only have a limited amount of points to use, which need to be replenished, but it offers an extra way to interact with the game.
On the technical side, the game runs well with only one minor problem, and that is sometimes it seems as if sound effects can be ‘stuck’ specifically, the sound effect for someone writing, seems to get stuck on loop in the background, though restarting resolves it. Rogue Lords is currently sitting on Steam for 15.59, and I think that’s a great price. It’s a really fun game, and I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of this genre.
You can purchase the game on Steam here.
