Iris and the Giant Review (katz)
Common wisdom states that roguelikes can’t have stories because the core loop is too repetitive; if you play 50 run-throughs of a game, you don’t want to see the same cutscene 50 times. And roguelike players, as a whole, don’t care about story. So most games don’t bother.
But where some see a commonsense genre convention, others see a challenge. I’ve been keeping an eye out for roguelikes that tell interesting stories. One of the very few — and certainly the most successful — is Iris and the Giant.
The gameplay is straightforward: Columns of enemies advance on Iris, and she dispatches them with a deck of attacks that hit one enemy, all the enemies in one row, all the enemies in one column, and so on. There’s a certain level of abstraction here that’s difficult to grasp at first, but which you can use to your advantage — you can use obstacles to block enemies from reaching you, and knowing which actions end your turn (playing cards) and which don’t (opening chests, picking up crystals) allows you to sneakily navigate dangerous situations.
Also like Inscryption but unlike most other roguelikes, the win state doesn’t require killing all the enemies. This adds flexibility to your strategy as you work out which enemies you need to kill to reach stairs, chests, and other goals and which ones you can safely ignore. I’d like to see more roguelikes introduce combat-orthogonal goals like this.
Now, I really enjoyed Iris and the Giant — largely because of the effectiveness of the story — and a score this positive is going to look like a very resounding recommendation. But while I do recommend it, I think most serious roguelike fans won’t enjoy it quite as much as I did. The issue is the metaprogression. While I was first playing, I found the progression to be silky smooth, each major obstacle feeling initially insurmountable before being mastered. But once I had beaten the game and unlocked most of the collectibles, I found that there wasn’t much to lure me back. The levels are static and mostly linear. The memories and invisible friends don’t really alter the base strategy. There are two additional paths after you defeat the giant, but while they’re challenging, they weren’t unique enough to really compel me.
The main constraint here is that, whatever the metaprogression may add, Iris is still Iris. But that’s also fundamental to the story. So while I don’t see most players putting more than 10 or 20 hours into Iris and the Giant, I also don’t really want to say the game design is wrong. It’s a story, and when it ends, it ends. And what’s so terribly wrong with that?
Read my full analysis on Medium: https://medium.com/@gwenckatz/going-rogue-iris-and-the-giant-95586e72831c