Vagante review – a hidden gem, but watch out for the arrow traps
For a genre defined by unpredictability, roguelikes often sound staggeringly boring. These are games for initiates, cast in the image of celebrated forebears – you at least have to know what Rogue is, whereas a first-person shooter speaks for itself. They are also firmly systems-led to the point of dryness. As such, their marketing materials tend to read like anatomical checklists, the same vital organs passed from developer to developer.
Vagante review
- Publisher: Nuke Nine
- Developer: Nuke Nine, Blitworks
- Platform: Played on Switch
- Availability: Out 27th January on PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch. Originally launched 2018 on PC, Linux, Mac.
Vagante’s Steam feature sheet certainly didn’t set my world on fire: procedural generation, “choose how you play”, “tough but fair”, some unabashed debts to Spelunky plus a dollop of RPG-style levelling. I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s a pixelart affair. But then I played for 15 minutes, got sat on by a Baby Dragon and realised that Vagante is a game of quiet originality and verve. With apologies to developer Nuke Nine for being a cocky arsehole, here are a few bulletpoints of my own creation.
Vagante is gloomy, but the gloominess grows on you. I reviewed it on the Switch, which is in many ways the absolute worst platform to play it on, because Vagante loves darkness, and it also loves pressure plates a pixel wide, and spikes waiting below ladders like dogs below tree-bound cats, and arrow traps in far corners that must be anticipated rather than spotted.
The title screen gives you a brief glimpse of an astonishing forest – trunks like twists of silk, a moon solemnly rising from the last, fading band of daylight, a wagon trundling leftwards among sloping copper surfaces. It glows like an illuminated manuscript. Then the game whips it all away and chucks you into a cave system’s worth of damp stalactites and fog of war. You do make it back to the surface in the second area, which has the ambience of a sleepy pond pierced by sunbeams. But after that come the Catacombs, which – well, you can imagine.
