[Review] Backpack Hero

Backpack Hero turns the familiar chore of managing your overstuffed RPG inventory into the core mechanic of a dungeon-delving, roguelike adventure, and it works surprisingly well.

Managing inventory space in games is usually about as fun as sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. It’s the hangover that follows the loot binge in most RPGs, where you try to cram as many items as possible into a limited carry space, all so you can sell most of it to the nearest vendor for a few measly coins.

In this case, rearranging the items in your pack is a fun, recurring minigame that yields more rewards than simply collecting as much vendor loot as possible. The rest of the game built around this mechanic is generally fun, although it’s let down by a story mode chock-full of repetitive quests that can slow progress down to a crawl.

The game makes a good first impression with chunky pixel graphics and some really catchy chip tunes. Judging purely by the presentation, if you told me this was a long-lost SNES game, I’d believe you. On the other hand, the gameplay owes a lot to the recent deluge of deck builders that have graced our PCs and consoles.

You make your way through dungeons, engaging in turn-based battles against groups of enemies who telegraph their moves in advance, using a limited pool of energy that refreshes each turn.

It’s all very familiar, yet strictly speaking this is not a deck builder, since there are no cards involved. Instead, you’ll spend energy to use the items in your backpack. This might sound like a small change to the formula, but it has big ramifications; without the randomness of card draw, you can use any of your items as often as your energy allows, with the caveat that some items have restrictions on when and how often they can be used.

At the end of each battle, you’re offered a selection of items, from which you can choose up to three to keep. There’s an impressive variety of items on offer: swords, shields, bows and arrows, magic wands, and armour, are joined by weirder stuff like bricks, sour milk, self-replicating shuriken, dynamite. Your backpack is arranged in a grid, to which you can add additional squares when levelling up, and each item takes up at least one square. Where things get interesting is that some items require certain positioning to function properly, while others grant bonuses or impose penalties on items adjacent to them or in the same row or column. For example, a bow only works if there are arrows placed directly to its right, and the power of the arrows is determined by the number of empty spaces on their right. There’s a squiffy sort of logic at work here—the arrows want to be fired into empty space, I suppose? Helmets work best when placed in the top row, while big armour pieces like breastplates typically add bonus block to other armour adjacent to them. There are whetstones that add bonus damage to all adjacent weapons, enticing you to place several weapons in a fan around them, if you can. On the other hand, nunchucks deal bonus damage for every adjacent empty space, but you’ll take damage if any of those spaces are occupied. Some items are heavy (they stick to the bottom) or light (they float to the top).

Although you’ll see the same common items showing up a lot, I was impressed by the quantity and variety of goodies you can stuff into your pack. My favourite moments in the game have all involved the simple but oh-so-satisfying act of slotting a new item perfectly into place, or rotating a sword to create the perfect space for a whetstone, or some other Tetris-like feat of reorganisation. It’s a puzzle that evolves as you constantly reevaluate which items to keep and which to toss or move around.

As you might expect, there are certain builds you can lean into, and it generally benefits you to pick one and choose items that support that build. A good example are the magic items. Wands and wizard’s staffs usually require mana, which comes in the form of manastones. Mana is conducted through all magical items (manastones, wands, wizards’ cloaks etc), so if you fancy playing as a spellcaster, you’ll need to create what the game calls a mana network made up of manastones and conductive items that both add mana to the network (staffs) and subtract it (wands).

The net result is that while there is often a very satisfying puzzle to be had arranging your pack in just the right way, you’ll often find yourself boxed in to preserving a precise arrangement of items which are crucial to support your chosen build. Other builds are more straightforward and forgiving than playing as a wizard, allowing for more flexibility to change your approach on the fly, but it can feel a bit deflating to repeatedly miss out on new items because you committed early to a finicky playstyle.

Another small issue for me was the lack of randomness within battles that would normally be present in this kind of game due to the luck of card draw. In a more standard deck builder, cards added to your deck are not guaranteed to come into your hand when you need them, leading to constant tension as you hope that your best cards and synergies appear at the right moment. By contrast, in Backpack Hero most of your items are available for use every turn, which can lead to battles feeling a bit static and predictable as you repeatedly use your strongest items over and over again. This cuts both ways, and I imagine some players will enjoy this system more than games where a run can be quickly derailed because the cards you needed didn’t appear at the right time.

There are two main modes on offer: a standard quick play mode, and story mode, which introduces some meta progression. The story involves a cute mouse called Purse searching the dungeons below her home for clues to the whereabouts of her missing mother. After you return from the dungeon, you can sell the contents of your backpack for resources, which can then be spent to build up the fledgling town of Haversack Hill. You can build houses to increase the town’s population, farms to generate resources while you’re away in the dungeon, and specialist buildings to purchase rare items that will then show up in future dungeon runs. You’ll also recruit NPCs who perform useful tasks for you, like a cat librarian who translates the game’s lore or a frog archer who upgrades your bows and arrows.

This sounds good, but in practice story mode is a chore. NPCs pepper you with quests which are often truncated runs through the dungeon that end after the first or second area, with different starting items and unique rewards for completion. You’re incentivised to play these quests, as they are an efficient way to gather resources and open up further progression. I found the early areas of the dungeon to be overly easy even in quick mode, so repeatedly replaying these zones without being allowed to progress further, and without access to many of the more interesting items, felt like a tedious exercise. Even after knuckling down and grinding out some of these quests, it took longer than I would have expected to accumulate the resources needed to expand the town. The animal residents of Haversack Hill look cute and have some decent dialogue, but their characterisation is merely functional and the story itself was simple to the point of feeling unnecessary.

I eventually got bored and frustrated with story mode and switched back to quick mode, which was much more fun. With a wide variety of items and viable builds instantly available, there’s always something new to discover. There are also five characters available from the start that significantly change the gameplay. I particularly enjoyed playing as Tote, a toad who begins every fight with an empty backpack into which he summons items each turn, meaning that you need to arrange items during a fight rather than between fights. I liked playing as Tote because he brought back some of the randomness that you’d find in a more traditional deck builder, since he can only access a small, random selection of summonable items each turn, rather than his whole inventory. There’s also a duck called Satchel who can expand his backpack by adding separate ‘pockets’, and a robot called CR-8 who has a core that shoots out a beam of energy that must be directed through items to activate them. It’s a pleasingly varied roster that adds a lot of replay value on top of messing around with different items and builds. Which made me wonder why the developers felt the need to pad out story mode so much.

The game felt easy throughout. I completed a run with Purse after just a handful of attempts, and while I was keen to jump back in with another character, I missed the lack of a stiffer challenge. I was able to brute force my way through most fights, even in the later stages, hacking away with my most powerful weapons and rarely feeling any pressure to change tactics. Bosses were particularly disappointing, and felt like regular enemies with boosted health and damage.

While I liked the SNES-style graphics at first, the lack of detail in the sprites and environments eventually meant everything blurred together. Battle animations are simple and never change: shooting a bow causes your character to swipe in exactly the same way as when they are swinging a sword or blasting enemies with a magic wand, and the same is true of enemies. I encountered a few bugs along the way, like items spawning in the wrong place in my backpack, but nothing too annoying or game breaking.

Backpack Hero has bags of potential, which it fails to fully unpack. Story mode is a bit of a let-down, which is a shame, as combining a roguelike dungeon crawler with a simple town builder is a neat idea, but shuffling around the contents of your backpack remains a fun and engaging puzzle even if the rest of the experience could do with some reorganisation. Roguelike veterans may be disappointed by the low difficulty, but the sheer variety of items, viable builds, and playable characters on offer means there’s plenty here to enjoy. Just be careful where you store your vampire axes.