While I have a deep love for roguelike action and shooting games, I’m well aware that for many people they’re simply a bit much. While you could argue that very successful games like Hades have continued to bring more people into the fold, perhaps something a little more friendly and approachable with a more artsy look could have some success as well? With the way it is set up and plays, it feels like that’s the approach that Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree was going for, but whether or not they were successful is arguable.

Loading this up, it opens with quite a lot of worldbuilding and storytelling, working to suck you in with a more traditional approach where most roguelikes have a tendency to get right down to the action. After this introduction that I’d argue runs a bit long, you’ll be brought up to speed with this world in peril, and the team of guardians you’ll be working with in hopes of saving the day. For each run you’ll get to choose your melee warrior, as well as your magic-wielding guardian. Considering the number of characters you have to work with, this does at least afford you with a variety of choices, and each combination will ultimately play somewhat differently. As you clear each area you’ll then get to choose where you’ll move to next in a way that’s very similar to Hades, picking up different Graces along the way that will give you a variety of boosts to help make you more formidable.

The problem is that it doesn’t take long to realize that despite your somewhat flashy attacks, mechanically you don’t have nearly as many options to fight with as you’d find in other titles in the space. Yes, switching between swords will give you different attacks with different effects, but honestly in the middle of battle I tended to find it difficult to quickly move between weapons, rubbing out the hopes of building more interesting chains of attacks that could have been possible if this were more fluid. Unfortunately, the majority of the perks you’ll have to choose from also feel more like stat boosts than ways to meaningfully alter or enhance your offensive prowess, also diminishing the game’s potential for more variety. While elements like the process of forging a new sword are at least novel, they aren’t enough to compensate for the core gameplay struggling to meet what feels like the genre standard at this point. Perhaps for newcomers this could be a good way to transition into the feel and style of roguelikes in a watered-down fashion, but for genre fans this will likely fail to be of much interest.