One Way Heroics Review

When I’m looking through Steam for another indie fix I’m primarily looking for two things: novelty and stress. This is why the roguelike genre holds my attention the best: they all typically feature procedurally generated content to keep things novel and that special brand of permadeath stress. When I saw self-proclaimed “procedurally generated RPG-roguelike” One Way Heroics by Smoking WOLF on Steam for the same price as a pint I couldn’t help but buy it.

The storefront showed off a cutesy RPG Maker aesthetic and told of a crazy concept: a turn based RPG with forced map-scrolling. Every action you take inches you towards the left side of the screen as the map scrolls to the right with or without you. The left side of the screen is, of course, an all-consuming wall of existential doom that you’re outrunning. Sounds novel! Sounds stressful! But is it fun?

A Roguelike Brain…

One Way Heroics puts you in control of a fragile hero tasked with saving the world from the ever-advancing wall of eastward moving black oblivion. Defeating the Demon Lord will stop the wall’s advance, provided you can gather enough strength on your journey before meeting him. Every action you take, from equipping gear, casting spells, and trading with merchants causes the map to scroll half square, creating a sense of gravity for every task.

You’ll hit all of the roguelike high points: enchanted equipment to identify, levels to gain, random environments filled with deadly monsters. The character generation is robust enough to call out specifically: your class defines how you’ll interact with the game and there are plenty of them. Playing an indestructible knight that battering-rams his way through all dangers (and walls!) will provide an experience 100% different than choosing the fragile adventurer that must sneak into dungeons, opens all of the chests through his special lockpicking skill, and dash out before anyone can catch him. Each replay won’t fail to be unique.

…With a jRPG Heart

One Way Heroics is very adorable and very indie. Smoking WOLF is a single-man outfit that hand crafted most of what you see in the game. It’s as loving and genuine as a hand-drawn graph paper map of a Dragon Warrior dungeon.

The game also has a form of permanent advancement that blunts the loss of a dead hero. (And they will die, many many times.) You will generate Heroic Points as you play that can unlock new classes and perks. You can also stock a cross-character Dimensional Stash full of items for your next level 0 character to take advantage of.

In a very un-roguelike move, you can save your game provided that you find a save point. The saves function just like any jRPG, If you die you can restart at that save point with all of your resources intact. I believe this feature was a necessary evil considering the game’s downfalls: specifically the lack of tactical choice. Which brings us to…

The Dreaded Grey Area

What does One Way Heroics try to do? Is it trying to be a casual jRPG with cute graphics? Is it a roguelike that forces you to master the game lest you perish? Instead of picking one and running with it, One Way Heroics settles into the grey area in between the two and succeeds at being a failure at both.

The game can’t be a cerebral roguelike because it prevents you from gathering information about your environment. Distant objects and enemies are a complete mystery, there just isn’t a button for asking “what is that?”. If you happen to see an enemy you’ve never seen before the only way to gather intel on it is to pick a fight with it. Many times I found myself tangling with a new enemy that executed me in a single-turn multi-hit attack. Since enemies that use the same graphic can vary in power wildly, you end up simply exchanging ten minutes of your life for information on enemies, reloading from the aforementioned save points. The bottom line: tactical decisions in One Way Heroics are largely impossible; every game is an easy snooze-fest until you get randomly one-shotted by a monster you didn’t know was something you should have run away from.

The save structure attempts to save the game for casual jRPG fans, but the resource management is just brutal. Each piece of equipment that you use has a durability score that is probably hidden from you. (Unless you’re a class skilled in item identification.) When your armor breaks, you’d better have a back up. Your energy level (much like a hunger stat from other roguelikes) needs to be refilled or else your stats tank, creating a vicious downward spiral. If I picked this up wanting a pick-up-and-play jRPG I’d most likely be terribly frustrated.

A One Way Hot Mess

The UI is clunky and poorly thought out, which I think represents the rest of the game well. The screen is filled with messy blocks of text. Some unlabeled meters are still a mystery to me even after I’ve beaten the game with my first character. The janky minimap is located right in the middle of the screen.The menu system, in an effort to feel more like a jRPG, was designed as if it was 1990 again. Slow, plodding, obfuscating.

The controls are also headache inducingly obtuse. This is a game developed only for the PC but it was designed only for use with a gamepad. While supporting a gamepad is admirable, forcing a player with a keyboard and mouse to only use arrow keys and four more buttons is criminal. Simple and necessary things like rotating your character or moving in a diagonal direction requires you to hold down a button. The game’s Wolf RPG engine (made by the same developer) places the simulation of console jRPGs over usability, a fatal flaw.

Is One Way Heroics Worth It?

I said that I look for novelty and stress in my games. One Way Heroics meets both of these criteria with flying colors: it’s an original game with tons of unlockables and it certainly doesn’t pull its punches. But what the game fails to be is fun. Its dogmatic adherence to jRPG conventions prevents it from being a true challenging roguelike, and the game refuses to give the tools to the player to really let the possible roguelike elements shine.

One Way Heroics is just more interesting than it is good. After playing the game for hours the unlockable classes can’t convince me to come back, I can’t swallow the game’s poor design choices any more. While the game isn’t a complete failure, I’m sure some wouldn’t find its failures so distasteful, its poorly thought out UI and frustrating mechanics prevent me from recommending it to anyone. You would be better served going for nearly any other roguelike game or jRPG.