Topic: Ranking of Roguelikes #2: Crown Trick

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This is the second entry in my overly ambitious series to play and rank rogue-likes and -lites and all their variants. You can find a link the previous one here

This one is considerably more Rogue than the previous one. It's turn-based, with a top-down grid map and plenty of punishing encounters.

I wish I liked it more than I did.

Time Spent: 7 hours
Cleared main campaign? No, but I completed two realms

Crown trick is an interesting game, a unique take on the top-down, turn based roguelikes of old. It takes a kitchen sink approach to its design: does it work well in another genre? Let's throw it in! Random color-coded loot? Put it in! Permanent upgrades you can purchase with special currency? Put it in! A system for breaking enemy defenses and leaving them vulnerable to extra damage? Put it in! Elemental enemies strengths and weaknesses, and different element effects? Put it in!

A sarcastic and borderline hostile ally that accompanies you on your quest? Put it in! (I wish that developers would retire this tired trope. It's never been clever or fun.)

Crown Trick tells the story of Elle, trapped in a world of nightmares and forced to clear the different realms in order to escape. She's aided by the aforementioned sarcastic ally, the titular Crown. It grants her the powers she needs to survive, and guides her through the various nightmare realms. It's all beautifully drawn and animated, a visual feast of color and personality.

How does it play?

At the beginning of every run, you choose a weapon and a familiar. Every weapon has a unique range, damage, and special effect. For example, guns have a long range and are powerful, but must be reloaded manually once they run out of ammunition. Lances hit two tiles ahead of you, axes hit every tile around you. There's enough variety to accomodate almost any playstyle you prefer.

The familiars are spells that use your limited pool of MP and usually have a cooldown timer. I don't think this is a terribly well balanced aspect of the game. Your MP pool is small and only regenerates when you start a new battle. Adding a cooldown on top of that seems unnecessarily punitive. I would have preferred them to remove MP entirely and keep the cooldown timers. That would have givin you more flexibility and more fun.

You need to defeat a familiar in the dungeon before it shows up as a choice, so you're limited in what you can use until you've had quite a few runs.

Crown Trick also gives you a Blink, a short range teleport that doesn't count as a turn. This lets you position yourself for attacks or escape from danger. Managing its charges is crucial to surviving the many battles you'll face. Healing items are limited and rare, so avoiding damage is vital.

In order to get through each room, you have to defeat the enemies. To defeat them, you have to "break" their defenses. This stuns them and makes them take more damage for a shor time. Each enemy has a "break guage" that goes down by one every time you damage them. You can damage enemies with weapons, familiars, items, or environmental hazards. Breaking enemies is the only way you can regenerate MP or your Blink charges during combat, so it's a crucial part of the experience.

I hate it. There's no design problem that it solves and it only adds time and tedium to battles.

Good rogue-likes encourage experimenting with the tools you're given, leading to unexpected results from using different kinds of items in different ways on different enemies. You're able to solve problems without brute force by being creative with your inventory. Crown Trick doesn't to this. It's all very straightforward and transparent. Fire burns things, electricity shocks, barrels explode, and potions heal. Item descriptions tell you exactly what they'll do. You do have plenty of weapons and spells to choose from, and there are some interesting combinations that make for more or less powerful builds, but it mostly boils down to damage types and attack ranges. I was never surprised by what I tried.

Finally, there is just too much randomness. It's true that this is a staple of the genre, but Crown Trick goes overboard with it: the weapons and items you get are random, and each one of them has a random set of bonuses. The boons and abilities you find are random, and might not synergize well with the weapons you find, or with each other. You can only have one weapon and two familiars at any one time, so there's no way to adjust your tactics if they're not working for an encounter. The vast majority of my runs ended in failure not because I played badly, or didn't understand the enemies' abilities, but because I didn't find a useful combination of things to work with. It's a huge mark against it and ultimately led to me not wanting to continue.

Where does it rank?

This is a mid-tier roguelike with fantastic visual flair and an interesting hook, but it's ultimately not much more than that. I'd have a hard time recommending it over other similar games. There's too many variables to consider, and the excessive randomness makes it difficult to learn from and enjoy multiple runs. It's not the worst, but it's far from the best.

It's number 2 on the current list, which stands as follows:

1. Has-Been Heroes
2. Crown Trick