Loot River – Beta Demo

Loot River blends Tetris with dungeon crawling and a touch of Soulsian combat as you fight your way through labyrinthine dungeons that you can shift sections around like giant Tetris blocks!

Created by straka.studio and presented by the team behind SUPERHOT, Loot River is a dungeon crawling roguelike set in watery labyrinths filled with floating platforms that you can shift around. You can move your character with the left stick, but can move the block that they’re standing on with the right stick, allowing you to reshape the structure of the level to aid your progress.

The combat in Loot River is fairly Soulsian, with dodge-rolling, parrying and slow, deliberate attacks that require timing. Along the way you’ll collect useful equipment and weapons that you can equip and you can also upgrade your character’s stats.

The full version of Loot River will feature procedurally generated levels, but the current demo build features three predefined ones to battle through. There’s a nice amount of variety between the various levels and lots of secrets to discover if you stray from the main path. There’s even a Dark Souls-esque super hard boss at the end of the tutorial level who you’re not really expected to beat, but you can beat him with a little persistence.

The zoomed out view makes it hard to get the timing right on your attacks, parries and rolls at the moment so the slow paced Soulsian combat may not be the best choice (a faster paced arcadey combat system may be preferable). Combat aside, Loot River is shaping up to be a fantastic game though – the pixel art visuals are superb, there are lots of interesting characters to meet, there’s plenty of cool loot and the way you can shift around the floating level sections is genius. The Tetris inspired dungeon crawler you never knew you always wanted.

Check Out a Gameplay Video Here

Download The Loot River Beta Demo Here (Steam)