2021's best indie is now an Xbox Game Pass must-play

They say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing, over and over and over and over again – but what if, in repeating your life in a continual loop and learning a little bit more about the reason for your existence each time, you actually made progress? What if, instead of being doomed to insanity from repetition, it actually saved your life?

That is the core conceit of Loop Hero – the critically acclaimed indie game that spread its roots through the greatest minds in gaming back in 2021, and kept a whole audience of hapless would-be heroes invested in its cycling mechanics for months. The game, developed by Four Quarters and already massively popular on Nintendo Switch and PC, landed on Game Pass earlier this month. And I’ve already sunk a good 20 hours into it, all over again.

Why? Because Loop Hero is a unique blend of roguelike, strategy, and RPG elements that somehow manages to take a handful of ingredients you know like the back of your hand and have tasted before, and combined them into something wholly new. Something delicious, and unexpected. Something moreish, and filing. Something – somehow – unique.

In Loop Hero (as you’d expect given its name) you take on the role of a hero who is trapped in a never-ending loop. But instead of taking direct control of the little pixel figure at the center of the universe, you control the world around them instead; behaving like some ancient, maddened god, drawing mountains out of the earth, creating forests primeval at the edges of the map whilst summoning villages and abandoned libraries by the roadside for your hero to pilfer.

In Loop Hero, some ancient power has removed everything from the universe. Where there was life, there is now a void. Your hero remembers a world, sort of, and will travel the same looping path over and over trying to piece reality back into place as you reassemble something that might be real around them. As your hero grows and learns, you can add new buildings and structures to the loop, conferring bonuses to your confused hero and making them stronger – readying them for the inevitable fight that lies ahead.

It’s compelling. The quintessential ‘just one more go’ bait that roguelikes trade on, but amplified by the sort-of ‘idle play’ that makes Vampire Survivors so captivating and unputdownable. Thanks to hidden tiles, and strange synergies between the various buildings you can place, the game actively encourages experimentation – who’d have thought watching Vampire Mansions turn regular villages into ransacked hellscapes, before upgrading them to towns under a count’s protection could be so rewarding! This means that, even if you know a loop is doomed and you have no chance of getting your Necromancer hero to the level it needs to be to take on the big bad, you can start building the world in various, unpredictable ways. And getting various, unpredictable results.

With a base camp back home that can start giving out seemingly insignificant bonuses as you wrangle resources from the void, and small (but permanent) upgrades you can make to your hero on the back of each successful run, Loop Hero knows what makes the idle play genre so enthralling – and layers more devious mechanics and tricks on top of it. As the game goes on, you’ll begin to realise that all those 1% bonuses, the way you choose to have your river flow through your loop, the seemingly imperceptible interactions between tiles… they all matter. Victory can be as fickle as a 0.5% boost to your HP. Seriously.

You don’t just have to take my word about Loop Hero’s quality, either: the game was nominated for "Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game", "Outstanding Achievement in Game Design", and "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year" at the 2021 DICE Awards – where all the game designers and industry eggheads gather to celebrate genuine innovation and advancement in the industry. Flanked by winners like Unpacking, It Takes Two, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Loop Hero still stands on its own – trying to piece together the world around it, just to better understand its place in this broken universe.

Loop Hero is available now on Xbox Game Pass for Xbox and PC.