You run into this stone when you start each run and a few times thereafter, giving you plenty of opportunities to swap familiar abilities. After defeating elite monsters called familiars and coming across a particular stone, you can equip a pair of their abilities. I preferred to safely pellet my enemies with rifle blasts from afar, but you’ll come across items and abilities that make many play styles viable.įamiliars are another way Crown Trick cleverly empowers you to shape Elle’s combat style to your liking. Rifle shots winnow down your enemies from afar and penetrate those standing in a line, stave swings make up for their mediocre damage output by giving you a bit of range and enhancing your abilities, and axe swings unleash a whirlwind that’ll slice and dice enemies standing in any tile adjacent to your own. Each supports a distinct combat style that offers a dramatically different gameplay experience. Though she’s cute as a button, Elle knows her way around a rifle, axe, sword, staff, and a slew of other deadly weapons. Combat feels a lot like Superhot, except battles are turn-based and play out in hazard-laden rooms comprised of square tiles hearkening back to Fire Emblem games. This gives you plenty of time to strategize your next move, something you’ll need to make a habit of if you want to surmount the game’s fairly punishing difficulty. If you sit still and do nothing, your foes follow suit. Unlike in almost every other roguelite, your enemies only move or attack when you do. It also doesn’t hurt that Crown Trick offers some of the most thought-provoking fun I’ve had in months. Once you wrap your head around Crown Trick’s complex combat system, you’ll have a tough time putting it down! Witnessing Elle and the crown’s endearing evolution was a heart-warming joy that helped keep me pining to play Crown Trick when I wasn’t. By the final act, the pair are thick as thieves and finally resemble a team you’d expect to see in an RPG. As Elle clears more of the nightmare realm, the crown begins to trust her and share amusing tidbits of lore that flesh out its dank world. At first, the pair are comically at odds sweet, naive Elle and her perpetual optimism irritate the crown, which doubts Elle’s fitness to wear it and treats her with laugh-out-loud funny condescension. Nothing better exemplifies its engaging tone than does Elle’s relationship with the crown. Though Crown Trick opens darkly, it’s brimming with light-hearted silliness and snark that’ll keep you smiling. The crown imbues Elle with special powers, and the pair ascend towering dungeons to vanquish Vlad and save both worlds. A baddie named Vlad has breached the nightmare realm’s seals of power, empowering his forces of destruction and violence to overpower both the realm and Elle’s world. After she dons it, it comes to life and gives her the lay of the land. Confused, she stumbles across the game’s titular crown. You play a vibrantly pink-haired child named Elle who awakens in the realm of nightmares. Nonetheless, it accomplishes that goal and offers ample charm along the way. In typical roguelite fashion, the game’s plot does little more than contextualize its real draw: dungeon-crawling.
Balance issues and dubious design choices dampen the experience, but Crown Trick is a testament to the compatibility of these two dissimilar genres and is the most addictive roguelite I’ve played all year. Partly thanks to its turn-based underpinnings, Crown Trick feels like playing a more thoughtful, tactical version of Hades-one brimming with multifaceted combat, progression systems I still struggle to stop thinking about, and a spirited aesthetic that kept me smiling even on my 40th wipe. Still, I was intrigued. So when the game debuted on PlayStation 4, morbid curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a go, expecting an interesting but unplayable experiment.Īnd I’m glad I did, because NeXT Studios proved me very, very wrong. When I first heard that Crown Trick meshes elements of both genres, I was sure the combination would lead to disappointment. Turn-based RPGs and roguelites are strange bedfellows.
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