The bar for getting me to write up a new roguelike has never been higher. I don’t care how many twists you throw into the formula, developers. I don’t care how imaginatively you have reinvented the wheel of permadeath and unlocks. I am tired of this genre/wantonly adhesive cultural phenomenon. I wish for it to die in shame and ignominy.
You’ve made a roguelike in which attacks are performed by assembling a manga page, you say? Well… go on then. Here’s a trailer for The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike.
Watch on YouTube
“Each turn, you receive new panels,” developers Mono Entertainment explain on Steam. “Placing them on the page creates your action sequence. Place panels according to the situation, build the ultimate page, and defeat your enemies!”
Taking damage tears holes in the paper, and you can’t plug manga scenes into holes, so you’ll ideally nobble all your enemies in a single turn, before they strike back. It would be lovely if the pages you assemble made sense and flowed properly as in an actual manga – it looks like there’s some repetition, going by the trailer.
How do you unlock new varieties of panel for combat? By means of, amongst other things, “surreal little mini-game events”, such as barbecuing fish and confronting bears, possibly because the bears are trying to eat your fish. There are three characters who together form a Streets Of Ragey ensemble. Akira is a hitman who likes guns and punching. Yoko is good at mobile attacks – behold her teleporting in the trailer. And Suzuki is some other kind of assassin who can lay traps.
There’s a puzzle mode which gives you a limited selection of panels with which to complete an encounter, and a bonus mode in which Yoko and some “playboy” called Yuki have a drinking competition. I cannot read the Japanese dialogue in the gifs, so I can’t currently give you any sense of whether Yuki is a massive creep, but odds seem fair.
Some additional background: Mono Entertainment were founded by a New York University design graduate, and are also the creators of Ignistone and Clock Rogue. “The Fable” is an actual manga series published by Kodansha, with millions of readers: it’s about a super-assassin capable of killing anybody in six seconds, who is trying to live a normal life at his boss’s instruction.
I’ve just realised that this is one of those dang deckbuilders as well – the manga panels are effectively cards, innit. Those fiends! They snuck that one right by me. Anyway, this one’s launching on 5th November, and there’s a demo on the way.
