I almost missed my deadline for this article about my experience with Loop Hero, because I spent most of the last two days playing the game. I think this tells you most of what you want to know.

Loop Hero is a pixel-art genre-bender that combines elements of RPGs, roguelikes, auto-battlers, card games and real-time strategy games. You are put in charge of a lone adventurer with no weapons and a death wish, and you are challenged to build him and the dungeon at the same time, without making the dungeon too difficult to survive.

It’s more complicated than it sounds. You die a lot in Loop Hero, but somehow it’s rarely frustrating. Even when I lost an initially promising runthrough to what amounted to pure bad luck, it was easy to dust myself off and try again. And again. And then it was 3am.

You start each round of Loop Hero on an empty map, with a few hostile slimes for company. You don’t control your adventurer directly. Instead, they’re dropped onto a random tile on the map and immediately begin running forward, fighting off anything that stands in their way.