When you're not fighting, you're exploring a procedural world that, like Spelunky, seems to have been put together with a stubborn sense of authorship. Loot chests give way to mimics, headless horses canter amidst wolves, and grumpy skulls float, just out of reach, ready to spam you with ungodly plasma. Travel further into the darkness and you'll find shuriken-flinging devils and giant chain-wielding armoured guards in Hulk-green armour. Inside the castle, the combat has a lovely chop and crunch to it, while the enemies are a varied delight, from zombies who emerge suddenly from the floor, to hovering wraiths that might unleash fireballs or ice or bring pillars of jagged rock out of the ground. Inside and outside: two different rhythms, both ticking along in close proximity You earn a little more loot each time as you defeat enemies and smash up furniture, and then you spend it on permanent stat improvements and new armour when you've finally keeled over and your new kin emerges back at the gates, ready for battle. Genetic variation keeps things fresh as you work your way through the game's scrambled castle again and again. The Hokage is my favourite class - huge attacks but no ability to crit. Endomorphs can't be knocked back by enemy attacks, while hypergonadism means your attacks knock enemies back further than normal. Short- or far-sighted offspring see the game through carefully arranged splodges of Vaseline. Each of these traits affects the game in a specific way, whether it's something cosmetic, like stereo-blindness meaning that the enemies you face behave like paper cut-outs when they turn, and baldness, which replaces the loading screen's 'Building.' text with 'Balding.', or something a little more significant. Beyond a change of class - you might be anything from a paladin, which is a great all-rounder, to one of those loot-hungry spelunkers, or even a lich king, who starts weak but earns a new HP upper limit with each kill - you'll also play the chromosomal lottery, picking between a trio of potential heirs who could have ailments ranging from OCD to dementia. This time things will turn out differently, they seem to be saying. Just look at the next generation waddling into battle, chestplate clanking and sword held innocently aloft. You get to re-enter the fray as one of your own offspring: you'll stay at the same level and you'll inherit all the armour and perks your parent died with, but you'll also have a few random genetic quirks thrown in to keep things interesting.

When your plucky knight meets his or her end in the game's sprawling castle, their stats and loot will live again, Infinity Blade style. Rogue Legacy takes the procedurally jumbled environments and fairly regular deaths of roguelikes, but it offers a vital twist. That said, it might be better to think of it this way: it's a game that's really thought about grind, and it often makes the grind magnificent. Nostalgic offspring tend to die fairly quickly. Nostalgic offspring see the world in sepia. It draws you in with cleverness and soothing repetition, and once you're into the mid-game, it can sometimes seem to offer little but grind in return. I have occasionally wondered whether I might hate it at the same time, though. I know I love it, because it feels like the weird medieval faire-attending cousin of Spelunky, offering a sequence of short 2D lives that are explored in a rich platforming ecology where even your 30th hour will reveal a fresh secret. I've spent the last week trying to work out whether I mostly love it or hate it, and I've finally made my mind up. Rogue Legacy is witty, elegant, and cruel. I knew that when Lady Chun-Li XVI came around, she would now be slightly less weak and slightly less feeble. I used the winnings to buy a health boost and an attack boost: I was investing in the future. All told, she brought in a haul of just under 4000 gold coins: not too shabby for a spelunker class, who are good with loot but otherwise pretty weak and feeble. She certainly fared better than Ladies Chun-Li XIV and XIII (thoughts to the family). Whatever shape they take, the McRib ended the career of Lady Chun-Li XV, a Spelunkette who had a surprisingly decent run of things despite colour-blindness and a bad case of dwarfism. I also know that they often lurk at the top of rooms, and they love to drop jaunty showers of human femurs down on their prey. I can't tell you what these guys look like, but I know they exist because I was finished off by one, and the game's epitaph screen tells you precisely what it was that eventually did you in. There's an enemy called a McRib in Rogue Legacy. The roguelike gets an inventive jolt of genetics in this gloriously witty dungeon crawler.

Rogue legacy lich