Steam Curator
Mighty Quest: Rogue Palace takes its series’ penchant for Epic Loot and marries it to a roguelite framework. In doing so it captures some of the thrills of colored gear-ARPG character building and smooshes that progression into bite sized 15 minute randomized sessions.
For the most part, it works: Rogue Palace is a fun, lighthearted ARPG roguelite with diverse biomes and a lot of unique heroes to traverse them with. There’s a pretty explicit upper limit to the thrills it can give due to its hero-focused approach to gearing, but the trade off is that what gear does exist is never irrelevant.
In itself it’s probably not a compelling enough reason to get the Netflix subscription it demands, but it’s worth a download for those who already have one.
Epic Loot is a concept that Rogue Palace plays with in a fundamental way; most games that have epic loot have non epic loot too, and its in that gradient and escalation where the satisfaction is usually found. But Rogue Palace starts you off each run with gear that’s a few notches more distinct and powerful than you’d usually expect.
That’s thanks to it’s gearing philosophy that marries each new piece of equipment you get from each room to one of twenty unique heroes. Their helm, chest, weapon and more carry abilities and stats that align to their style, which is why every piece of gear that drops is immediately recognizable and immediately powerful. And in the context of a briskly placed bite sized ARPG, that makes a whole lot of sense.
Where inventory management and grey loot would be there’s instead a simple question of whether or not your new drop is worthy of your build or if you just want to scrap it for resources on the spot.
It’s a fun system that crystallizes the feeling of hitting higher power threshholds every minute or so: new pieces will frequently be many orders of magnitude better than your current towards the end of your run, the consequence being that Rogue Palace will frequently ask you to introduce a disjointed loot piece to your build due to their sheer numerical strength.
It demands flexibility from you: You’ll have to think on the fly of what stats and passives you’re willing to lose to get that extreme boost of defense or whatever, and it’s also why halfway through any run you’ll look like you’re leveling through Outland if you’re doing it right.
The downside to the hero centric building is that it will become a known quantity by the time you’re 8 hours in. You don’t exactly need to be scanning wikis to know what every piece in the game is, seeing as how each is tied to one of the twenty mascots.
Make no mistake, Rogue Palace doesn’t have infinite aspirations like the genres its sourcing from does.
But the flipside to that is its armory is not only full of visually recognizable and mechanically distinct gear… but also the fact that it instills ‘collect em all’ drive to its runs.
The gear pieces are not only your primary mid-run progression mechanism but also one of your largest cross run incentives. Getting every piece of a given hero’s build will unlock them as a permanent starting character, able to enter a run with a low stat version of their iconic loot and active and passive abilities that make them play differently.
They also start in a different biome: Rogue Palace ultimately boils down to the same start weak end strong rogue progression that escalates into you fighting the final boss over and over, but a sprinkle of non-linearity keeps it fresh.
Your end point is always the same but it’s level pathing more resembles spokes on a wheel than it does a ladder to climb. At any given time you’ll only have 2-3 paths to choose but they’re meaningful in how they let you slide into an adjacent biome and also because they preview which gear piece its combat will drop; letting you trend towards certain items if not select them outright.
But just as meaningful is the varied aesthetics you move through while you’re fighting. Rogue Palace is a pretty game: its got a simple and colorful cartoon style that unifies a whole bunch of diverse landscapes under the banner of the game’s story premise: you’re journeying through the mind and memories of an ailing king; which is also why a shattering visual effect is on screen at most times and clears of it obstacles between you and your character.
It gives the levels the opportunity to add walls, alleyways, and buildings while still retaining a tight-by-isometric-standards camera angle… it’s a clever trick and let’s the combat arenas be filled with details yet unobstructed with clutter.
Clutter will occasionally get in the way of the moment to moment gameplay though; not via visuals but via control. The fast paced predominantly melee combat doesn’t always mesh well with lack of a physical control stick.
Heavy auto-lockon supplements this and works well for the most part; but also calls into question why breakable environmental hazards exist in such high quantites, the presence of which are magnets for the auto-lock on even when you’ve got enemies you want to hit instead.
It’s a notable miss in a combat system that’s otherwise cathartic. Varied enemy and encounter design demands more than just mindless tapping. You’ve got the usual swipes and projectiles to dodge roll out of but also some involved mechanics: like a boss who can be baited forward by killing crystalline pillars first and a final encounter that will strip you of your gear until you can reclaim them piece by piece from their breakable prisons.
Inter-level skill ups aren’t the most exciting by genre standards, usually buffing specific attributes that your build may not even have. The excitement found within the gear and the special passives they contain usually make up for that, even if I wish they went a little further.
It's ambitions don’t exactly betray the realities of its mobile exclusive Netflix subscription birth but If you meet Rogue Palace where it is, it’s incredibly fun. It’s moment to moment combat is solid if unremarkable, but it manages to bolster its simplicity with its enjoyable, varied aesthetic, the satisfaction from its hero collecting, and its gearing system that’s more than just a superficial nod to its inspirations.
You’ll pretty clearly identify once its well runs dry, but it’s flow is incredibly consistent up until that point.
As a value add to a service you might already be paying for and a bite sized experience that loses nothing from being played on the toilet, Mighty Quest Roge Palace is a no brainer within that realm. Is that a low bar to clear? Maybe, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t clear it.
