If you've ever enjoyed shuffling and rotating items to fit into an inventory grid, do have a play of the free demo for Backpack Hero. It's a roguelikelike dungeon crawler that's all about inventory Tetris, filling your knapsack with weapons, armour, and items that can gain powerful bonuses and synergies depending on their placement. It's an interesting and fluid bit of buildcrafting, and has me excited for the full game next year.
You can play the Backpack Hero demo in your browser on Itch.io.
It's a fairly standard fantasy dungeon crawler at first glance: pick a node on the dungeon map, walk to it, then battle the baddies, buy from the merchant, grab the treasure, or whatever. Combat is turn-based, with your weapons each costing a certain amount of energy (which replenishes each turn), magic wands using mana (which replenishes between fights), your armour giving a little bit of automatic block each turn, and your shield able to add extra block for an energy cost. But it's all about that inventory Tetris.
With no 'paper doll' to equip gear and no fixed character classes, you can use any item in your bag at any point. My last run trounced the demo's final boss with a mishmash of murder including a shiv, a poison dagger, a magic wand with a whole chain of mana batteries, a club, a belt of knives, angelic wings, and two hats, like a rogue attempting to dodge a stagecoach fee for checked luggage by wearing all their plunder at once. In most dungeon crawlers this build would be a mess. Here, it was a carefully curated murder machine that could pivot between a deadly offense of turn-one kills or extreme turtling.
To get far in Backpack Hero, you need to build for bonuses and synergies. Many items buffs nearby items of a
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