Backpack Hero PS5 Review. Presenting a particularly unique spin on the ever-popular roguelike genre, Backpack Hero is a game that manages to stand out among the ever-growing selection of quality roguelikes on the market. By melding the inherently replayable nature of the genre with a layered inventory management system, Backpack Hero taps into two distinct genres and brings their strengths to the fore in a unique cocktail of gameplay.
Where the concept of Backpack Hero is novel and manages to innovate on a well-established genre, I found that confusing mechanics and overcomplication led to an experience that felt far more bloated than the concept needed.
Backpack Hero Review (PS5) – Dungeon-Crawling and Bag-Packing Confusion
Packing your Bags
As a roguelike, Backpack Hero is built primarily off of repetition. When you open the game for the first time, you’re granted the option of either jumping into a quick game or taking part in the extended story mode that the game offers. Both provide the same core experience, just one gives you an overarching narrative to stitch your runs together. If you fancy quickly seeing what the game has to offer, the option for a quick game means that all characters are unlocked.
Between all five current playable characters, the gameplay loop remains largely the same with particular attributes for each main character. This largely comes down to organising your inventory in the most effective way in order to defeat the variety of enemies you come across during your dungeon crawls.
Between each battle and throughout your run, items appear that must be slotted into an ever-growing inventory space that you can shuffle and organise as you wish. Taking notes from the lauded organisation of Resident Evil 4, items can be moved, rotated and replaced in order to help you optimise your build.
On a base level, this is an interesting new twist on a classic formula where your inventory becomes the focus over the powers that your characters have. Attempting to fit everything you can into a single inventory screen became satisfying as I had to weigh up the cost of leaving a healing item behind in favour of a piece of new equipment to bolster my defences.
This extends even further as some items interact with the ones in adjacent spaces, giving another layer of complexity to the inventory management aspect of your journey. Combat takes the form of turn-based battles where you can see your opponent’s intended next move and plan around this. If an enemy is planning an especially strong attack, you can invest in defence and ensure you aren’t knocked out. you have a certain amount of actions to spend per turn and these can be spent as you wish and depend largely on the items you make use of, with an impressive variety.
Clearing Space
Between each run in the main game, Backpack Hero offers a simplistic overarching narrative that encourages you to use the resources to help rebuild a small settlement. Haversack Hill is a welcome addition to the game that adds another layer to the dungeon crawling that helps to ease the repetition and give an overall sense of progression.
Full of charming characters and unique missions that offer specific rewards, there was a pleasure in taking a break from the inventory management of the main game to build a pleasant little hamlet in the mountains. The missions on offer throughout the village typically take the form of shorter runs that have unique rewards upon completion.
Haversack Hill also gives you the chance to create and build a unique village settlement that can be laid out to your taste, with some light base building and resource management coming from your spoils from the dungeon. While none of these manages to leave a particularly big impact on the overall experience – and can be safely ignored for people who simply aren’t interested – the inclusion of this extra dose character helps to create a distinct identity that is bursting with personality.
I mean – the parents of main character Purse are Louis and Prada. It’s great!
Confused Caving
Despite an exceptionally strong first impression, I soon found the experience muddied by a less-than-ideal tutorial system that emerged quickly as I started exploring the minutia of Backpack Hero. It’s commendable that each of the five playable characters have distinct approaches to gameplay, but these distinctions come at the cost of bloated mechanics and confused tutorials that hinder rather than help.
Purse as the default character is as easy as you can get – with standard mechanics that the other playable characters build upon. Where some are slight alterations of the formula, the vast majority of the playable characters have totally distinct approaches to the game and combat in general. Pochette makes use of pets that offer a unique spin on a puppet-type character. Where characters like this are easily understood and adaptable, others like CR-8 and Tote ended up leaving me genuinely lost on how to properly succeed.
Tote makes use of “runes” in order to attack and generally doesn’t use weapons in the same way as the others. CR-8 makes use of a unique system of organising your inventory in the order that you want to use it, instead of the normal energy system. While both of these do offer unique angles, I found that the in-game tutorials fell woefully short of explaining how to effectively use these new characters.
I found myself avoiding these new gameplay styles out of sheer frustration – with the only saving grace being the game’s dedicated online community that picked up the slack when I couldn’t even get past the tutorial of CR-8 because of a poor explanation (Make your jokes!).
Full of Charm – At What Cost?
Once you get over this initial frustration and start being able to properly dig into mechanics, there are some really charming details to enjoy throughout. Character dialogue is well written as you progress through the story mode, which gave me a reason to actually engage with the town-building elements.
The pixel art is expressive and the soundtrack is pleasant enough to bring everything together into a nice package. Once you get over a massively awkward barrier to entry, the game really does come into its own.
Buried underneath a frustratingly convoluted set of mechanics is a game that can absolutely click into place if you give it the time, I just don’t know if that initial frustration is worth the time investment required to truly get to grips with this adventurous fusion of genres.
The depth of the town-building and the sheer variety of things on offer here is noteworthy but if that content is stuck behind a cliff of bizarre learning experiences and bloat, part of me wonders if Backpack Hero could have done far more with slightly less – which saddens me to write.
Backpack Hero is now available for the PS5.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.