NOTE: only played the demo

honestly a fun little roguelike. the backpack inventory management system is fun, the gameplay loop is simple while having room for some complexity, and the artsyle is very charming.

if i hadn't played so many of these, i might even have bought it right away! as of now, though, it doesn't do anything unique enough to make me want to sink any real time into it.

Organizar inventário em vídeo game é um transtorno obsessivo-compulsivo gostoso demais, esse sim pode ser categorizado como saudável né?? Acho que sim.

A satisfação que é organizar e reorganizar sua mochila mágica pra descer o cacete das mais variadas formas em inimigos com sprites fofinhos é mto boa viu.

Essa mecânica deixou o loop roguelite do jogo pra mim muito interessante, visto que só fica entediado entre uma run ou outra quem quiser, porque além das builds padrões de arminha e magia, tem build de jogar bebida nos bicho, build de atacar sem gastar energia nenhuma, build de pedreiro, build de encantar e converter os inimigos com musiquinha, build de pokémon (onde os próprios pokémons tem suas próprias bolsinhas pra colocar itens que só funcionam neles kkkkk), build com itens aleatórios que vão aparecendo a todo turno, e mais um monte de coisa experimental que não repliquei, mas vi em vídeos e em fóruns, coisas totalmente complexas pra minha mente de mamaco.

Em mais de 30h de jogo eu mal explorei algumas delas, magia num geral passou batido por exemplo, porém já vi coisas obscenas feitas com a mesma. No final do jogo eu me ative a algumas builds de arqueiro que ficaram insanas, era tanto dano atrelado a tanto efeito que os bichinhos só derretiam do outro lado.

O aspecto de gerenciamento da vila e o story mode num geral é bem qualquer coisa. Enfeitar a vila e construir coisinhas pra liberar mais e mais itens ainda foi uma leve distração, mas a história, vixi...

Dito isso, ótimo jogo pra ouvir podcast!

Now that I have played and completed the 1.0 version I have to say I like it quite a bit better than the beta version. Story mode is fun even though the village building aspect is pretty bare-bones. Unlocking new stuff and finding items in the dungeon that have a use in the village was enjoyable. It gives you an incentive to try out the challenges as well which I thought were pretty well made.
I like most of the playable characters and they all offer their own distinct playstyles. Purse, Satchel and CR-8 are fun but they are pretty overpowered. Pochette is pretty hard to lose with as well. Some items are so good they can carry a run on their own. Tote, on the other hand, is pretty rough. Oftentimes I was barely able to get out of the first zone alive. The game still needs some balancing, especially for Tote. There are also quite a few bugs that really should be fixed. Somehow the 1.0 version is buggier than the early access.
Nevertheless, the game is pretty good and I enjoyed my time with it.

Still raw in the middle.

Backpack Hero is a game that is immensely fun for the first couple of hours. Make no mistake, it’s still far from a game of the year contender even at its highest peaks, but it’s still managed to nail down an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that managed to sap about five hours of my time in what felt like one. There's an obscene amount of promise in these early stages, just as everything is starting to open up to you, and it really seemed like it was going to be solid for the entire runtime.

It’s regrettable, then, that the remaining ten hours I’ve spent with it have been little but tedious retreads, the game long having since run out of fresh things to show me. I’d estimate I’ve got at least another ten hours before I can finish the story mode, and I really don’t feel like putting too much more effort into trying for it. Backpack Hero doesn’t have long enough legs.

The two main factors I’d blame for how rapidly stale the game gets as it goes along come down to repetitious grinding and a total lack of challenge. Backpack Hero offers what would theoretically be dozens of builds — shurikens, gemstones, fish, magic wands and staves — but nothing is as anywhere near as effective as passively tanking up with shoe hats and leather caps and finding any weapon that does eight or more damage per energy. The most viable builds all share the exact same core of gaining dozens of armor on your first turn; after that, you can choose to deal a whole bunch of damage at once, or you can choose to apply statuses that deal damage over time. The best weapons can do both, and it’s exceptionally easy to forge a sword that hits for 11 and applies four poison with every swing while you’re still on the second of nine floors. There’s no incentive whatsoever to go for anything other than a tank-physical damage or tank-damage status playstyle: magic items require mana, which requires committing to manastones, which each take up a bag slot; Satchel’s lutes and triangles are such ridiculously strong status-appliers that you can throw away your starting weapons and spam your shield while passively building charm; Pochette’s minions deal damage for her, so she can just sit up front and click on her shield for the half hour it takes to complete a run.

This is probably the easiest roguelite I’ve ever played. In addition to being the most obviously powerful way to play the game, tank-physical damage (read: sword and board) builds are so easy to set up that you have to intentionally go out of your way not to play them. Passive armor and small-but-powerful shields are everywhere, mostly stepping on each others toes with incredibly minor trade-offs between them (one shield takes up two spaces and gives eight block; another takes up two spaces and gives seven, but also gives an additional passive block for every adjacent piece of armor), so you’re never going to be at a point where you’re left without obscene damage and obscene block outside of the starting one or two fights where you still have default gear. I only ever died once in fifteen hours to a starting fight that was literally impossible to win due to how bad my initial items were relative to how quickly the enemies scaled up against them. The run may as well end the second that you get to the stairs going to the second floor, because there won’t be anything further down that’ll even have a chance to kill you. The ninth-floor boss is universally easier to clear than the first floor introductory fight.

The town building mechanics between runs is almost universally reviled, and with good reason; it’s shallow, and it quickly falls out of importance in exchange for how much micro-management it asks of the player. Realistically, the best way to handle it is to just plop down houses and farms far away in the distance, and build every single shop as close as you can to the path leading back to the dungeon so that you don’t need to walk too far to get your upgrades. Resources for new unlocks are tight in the early stages of the game, but you’ll be completely overflowing with food and construction and treasure to the point that you literally won’t be able to spend it all unless you’re really dying to set up non-crate decorations around town. Putting up building-appropriate decorations increases the “efficiency” of said buildings, which seems to do nothing besides lower the resource costs for the upgrades of that particular building. Directly unlocking the upgrades without the discount requires spending the exact same resources. You’re better off skipping the extra step and just buying the unlocks at MSRP. I’m sure they look nice, but you’re not going to be spending more than a couple minutes in town for every half hour you spend in the dungeon. The decorations are barely useful mechanically, and you aren’t in town often enough to appreciate them visually. It’s a very messy, tacked-on idea that serves only to pad out an already incredibly-padded story mode.

What broke my will, though, was trying to unlock the character Tote. Tote won’t join you unless you carry her totem through six floors of the dungeon and two boss fights, and her totem takes up a slot. Hardly a problem after the first two fights, since you'll have more than enough backpack space for it by then, but it means you’ll be giving up at least one of Purse’s starting items and a bonus boon from Matthew to fit it into your 3x3 starting backpack. Regardless, I got to the bottom of the swamp, showed Tote the totem, beat the fucking tar out of her, and then finished the run. When I got back to town, there was no Tote. I went back into the dungeon, saw that her totem was still there, figured I hadn’t met some condition to unlock her yet, and went back to the swamp. No Tote. Finished the run, went back in, carried the totem to the bottom, still no Tote. I did the exact same run to the end of the swamp with my other two characters, and there still wasn’t any sign of Tote. I looked it up to see if I was missing something, and the closest thing I could find to an answer was a group of people in the Steam forums who said that Tote showing up at all was a random occurrence, and that it took one of them twenty runs before he could recruit Tote. I'd like to remind you here that the average run lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. Even so, I had already met Tote, and I had already fought Tote, and Tote had already agreed to join me, so I think the game just bugged out and didn’t give her to me when it should have. Normally I wouldn’t care about not being able to play a new character — Tote is apparently pretty bad relative to the rest of the cast, anyway — but you need to clear all nine floors with every character in order to actually beat story mode. No Tote means no ending. It seems like my best course of action would be to delete my fifteen-hour save and start from scratch in the hopes that it doesn’t happen again and she actually gets unlocked when she’s supposed to.

No thanks. I’m good.

This is one more game that’s out of early access purely by technicality.

I did play the browser version quite a few times and I did enjoy it but after a while you kinda have the whole game figured out and you're going to have to use the strategies that you know that work or you won't get far. You cannot really "go" for a certain strategy and you have to work with what you got which is of course the point of the game but sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand and it's almost impossible to beat the third act. Balancing is still going on since the full version hasn’t released yet so that might improve but as of right now it's just a decent game that you can pick up and do like one run. Purse, CR8 and Satchel are nice characters but I am not really liking Tote and Pochetta. Pochetta is a chore to play as with all of her pets and managing every one of their inventories. They're just a bit underwhelming and I expected more of them than just being glorified extra backpacks. I do think they are charming and I'd like for them to stand out more with more abilities or maybe even allow them to level up or something. Tote is just weird and unintuitive to play as. She did get a balancing update but I still do not really like her.

Die Kombination aus Inventar Mangement und Rougelike Dungeon Crawler hat mich total gepackt.... wie man an meiner Spielzeit sehen kann. :) Der Umfang ist beeindruckend, denn neben den vielen verschiedenen Items, die für eine Vielfalt als Combos sorgen, gibt es auch noch mehrere Charaktere mit ganz eigenen Spielmechaniken. Nicht alle haben mir gleich gut gefallen, aber man kann sich ja aussuchen, mit wem man spielen möchte.

Mit dem Story Modus bin ich nur teilweise zufrieden. Er erfüllt seinen Zweck und hat mich motiviert, ihn durchzuspielen. Das Freischalten neuer Items mochte ich. Die Bewegung in der Oberwelt, das Mangement der Gebäude, das unterwältigende Finale und die eher überflüssigen Dekorationen wirken allerdings so, als wären sie im Vergleich zum Rest des Spiels auf die Schnelle dazu gestrickt worden. Die Geschichte hinter allem hat mein Interesse auch nicht wecken können.

Wichtig ist aber für mich, dass mir der eigentliche Game Loop unheimlich viel Spaß macht, und dass Backpack Hero durch die unterschiedlichen Builds eine Menge Abwechslung bietet.

É um jogo incrivelmente bom, viciante e ao mesmo tempo meio frustrante.
O jogo em si de gerenciar inventário, progredir nas dungeons, as mecânicas diferentes são muito boas, interessante, divertidas. Há muita possibilidade e me dá vontade de continuar jogando.
O sistema de progresso no modo história porém me dá uma preguiça. Eu ignoro qualquer lógica de vender item ou qualquer coisa assim, é muito complicado. Eu só não vendo nenhum item e vou clicando em qualquer coisa que posso comprar para desbloquear e é isso ai.
As missões porém, podem ser muito divertidas!

Há alguns bugs e dificuldades em jogar com o controle, geralmente não são impeditivos. Tirando a pochette que buga de mais quando há um inventário por cima do outro. Já tive itens que estavam ocupando lugar, mas não estavam lá. Já tive mochila que eu clicava mais de uma vez, fechava e abria o inventário e ela não estava mais lá. Então há muito espaço para melhora.

E a história e dialogo são desprezíveis e achei muito mal escrito :/

Mas reiteiro: é muito divertido e viciante. Não é atoa que tenho tantas horas assim nele e quero continuar jogando.

fun roguelike with an interesting story mode that encourages playing with different builds and synergies although it gets pretty easy after a while
most annoying part of the game is the fact you get 5 playable characters with different playstyles which is cool but your forced to beat a run with each of them to fight the final boss regardless of whether you like the character or not
the game is also pretty buggy, a part of the game is collecting resources to rebuild your town but the game accidentally gave me what looked like a town used by the developers to debug which was entirely rebuilt so my entire town was done from the beginning which was pretty funny.
I enjoyed the game but i kinda wish they just put more effort into the gameplay of the main character rather than make new characters

Backpack hero managed to be a masterpiece and a complete mess of a game at the same time, culminating in what is possibly my most frustrated experience in a long time.

Imagine you play a roguelite like Slay the Spire, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac or Risk of Rain. You start a run, you have fun, you unlock things along the way depending on your actions. It's great, it's a fun time. Now imagine, in-between every run, if you want to unlock anything or even see later levels of the game, you have to run across a huge open field, talk to 10 NPCs randomly scattered along the map (the game won't tell you which one you need or in what order), sit through endless repetitive dialogue that goes nowhere about how your dad thinks it's dangerous to go into the cave over and over and over again. Not only that, but it wants you to build endless buildings, sell loot you've found in the dungeon (the game doesn't tell you if you'll need them for anything or not), and it constantly want you to check in on every single NPC to even receive missions or get the pleasure of going to the next floor in future dungeon runs.

Even if you know what you're doing, it takes forever to get anything done in the main hub.
Every item you ever collect in the dungeon (a lot, this is an inventory manage game after all) is collected in your hub inventory. An NPC may be looking for one specific item, you might even have it, but good luck finding it
* The game does nothing to tell you what is important in the NPC town, so you have to spam every dialogue and every option select for every character just to make sure you don't miss anything.

And to top it all off, the game is insultingly easy. If you have ever played a deckbuilder (roguelite or not) or any form of strategy game, it will be almost impossible to lose as long as you read the effects of what you are using. Heck, even when I completely failed to do that and I accidentally burned my only arrow during my an archer-only "challenge", where every other game would kill you for failing to have any synergy or ways to deal consistent damage, I was able to win because an enemy dropped a rose earlier, letting enemies take very small amounts of damage every time I blocked. I was able to win, including beating a boss, dealing 1 damage at the time. Absolutely ridiculous. After 5+ hours of gameplay, every run feels like this. It is so easy it is almost insulting. There is never any risk, never any challenge, nothing that makes you reconsider your choices, and once you get a powerful weapon or two, never any need to think. Click the same inventory slots every turn, and win for free. Never the need to swap anything out of your inventory, which is a shame because it's one of the main mechanics.

All of this, and I still found myself wanting to play. There is a fantastic game deep down somewhere. Inventory management is fun, and having your inventory slots tied to abilities you can freely use is creative and fun. It is such a shame it is held back by you never needing to engage with its systems due to the absolute lack of difficulty, to the point where I have won games by not adding or removing anything from my inventory. Furthermore, when the game forces you to engage with its systems in the hub world, it strips the game of everything that made it fun, including making the graphics look like Backpack Hero from Wish. It is tedious, stays in the way of what could be a fantastic game, and despite hours of gameplay, you are still stuck with the same starter loadout you begun with. It's a shame.

Was solid but definitely needs more. I will try beating the game with more characters + play some endless mode but there should be more challenges. I feel like luck is pretty strong and with some legendary items you can kind of overwhelm any enemy. I think there should be like some sort of persistent progress somewhere...like a passive buff or a specific item that you keep even after dying somehow. Game has a lot of potential but maybe there will be more to do in the game on or after the full release.

In Backpack Hero, inventory management is the name of the game. All items are held in your backpack, including armor and weapons. They get bonuses depending on what is around them or what else is in your backpack. Leveling up allows you to expand your backpack to hold more stuff.

The gameplay loop is a pretty standard roguelike experience similar to what you see in Slay the Spire.

I will re-review after I play the full release on Nintendo Switch