Loved the original, and the lack of a PS4/5 version personally made it perfect fodder for the Deck. It's spent a lot of time in early access, but had its 1.0 release a couple of months back.
If you've not played the first one, it's a roguelite platformer where you romp about in a castle with a series of different biomes. Despite procedural generation doing a lot of the heavy lifting, each has its own common layouts, sets of monsters, traps, puzzles, secrets, and crucially, a boss. The "lite" element means that you don't need to worry about clearing all of these in one run, and instead you can chip away at objectives and gather skills while there's also a mountain of permanent stat / equipment / runes / class etc upgrades to buy with the gold you take away. Each run has you pick from a randomly-generated set of new descendants to your lineage, and the most immediate differentiator between them is their class, which determines starting weapon and special ability, and generally defines how best you play. On top of that you still have other modifiers, with traits, and sometimes items if you're lucky. Whereas some of these can be a huge helping hand, others are a bit sillier and are designed to outright hinder you - the trade-off being that the more difficult these traits will make your life, the higher the gold multiplier is that you're given to counter-balance it all.
Truth be told I've forgotten a lot of the first game, and whereas it was very much a new style of game at the time, there's been a lot of things following in its footsteps since then. So while it's still very much Rogue Legacy, games that iterated on its ideas - like Hades, and Dead Cells - are now being borrowed back from to help bring this up to date. One of the areas in particular is *very* Dead Cells, in my opinion, and I think the added diversity of the areas is one of the biggest positive changes this time around, so no complaints here.
The visual overhaul moves it away from the pixels of the original but still retains the same feel while also looking a lot more modern, too. It's probably the most immediately obvious change and it is a nice one.
In terms of gameplay choices, I've particularly enjoyed the variance in classes. My favourite could well be chef, whose frying pan does good damage, applies burn, and also makes *the most satisfying sound* when you deflect projectiles. Plus he can make health-restoring stew! Boxer is another fun one - deliver a flurry of jabs to build combo, then deliver a knockout punch to send enemies flying into one another, whereas I've found myself avoiding mages entirely - their basic weapon skill is so tricky to aim effectively that I find them highly ineffective.
If you've not played the first one, it's a roguelite platformer where you romp about in a castle with a series of different biomes. Despite procedural generation doing a lot of the heavy lifting, each has its own common layouts, sets of monsters, traps, puzzles, secrets, and crucially, a boss. The "lite" element means that you don't need to worry about clearing all of these in one run, and instead you can chip away at objectives and gather skills while there's also a mountain of permanent stat / equipment / runes / class etc upgrades to buy with the gold you take away. Each run has you pick from a randomly-generated set of new descendants to your lineage, and the most immediate differentiator between them is their class, which determines starting weapon and special ability, and generally defines how best you play. On top of that you still have other modifiers, with traits, and sometimes items if you're lucky. Whereas some of these can be a huge helping hand, others are a bit sillier and are designed to outright hinder you - the trade-off being that the more difficult these traits will make your life, the higher the gold multiplier is that you're given to counter-balance it all.
Truth be told I've forgotten a lot of the first game, and whereas it was very much a new style of game at the time, there's been a lot of things following in its footsteps since then. So while it's still very much Rogue Legacy, games that iterated on its ideas - like Hades, and Dead Cells - are now being borrowed back from to help bring this up to date. One of the areas in particular is *very* Dead Cells, in my opinion, and I think the added diversity of the areas is one of the biggest positive changes this time around, so no complaints here.
The visual overhaul moves it away from the pixels of the original but still retains the same feel while also looking a lot more modern, too. It's probably the most immediately obvious change and it is a nice one.
In terms of gameplay choices, I've particularly enjoyed the variance in classes. My favourite could well be chef, whose frying pan does good damage, applies burn, and also makes *the most satisfying sound* when you deflect projectiles. Plus he can make health-restoring stew! Boxer is another fun one - deliver a flurry of jabs to build combo, then deliver a knockout punch to send enemies flying into one another, whereas I've found myself avoiding mages entirely - their basic weapon skill is so tricky to aim effectively that I find them highly ineffective.