Backpack Hero

Backpack Hero is a cute rogue-like game where you delve into a dungeon, fight monsters, and obtain various items like weapons, armour, consumables, etc. Most of the game involves sorting through your backpack and finding the best ways to combine items. You then use your items in fights. There's also a mini-game of building up your home town to unlock more item types in the dungeon.

I got this game for free on Epic and played it for about 24 hours. I could have kept going, but my partner was getting bored so I stopped.

THE GOOD:

• I really like how the large backpack allows you to come up with some cool combos! It emphasizes brains over luck.
• I like the special mission modes that NPCs give you. Special missions might force you to take a specific item, give you a different set of starting equipment, or add a modifier to the game (such as never finding melee weapons). The special missions add some variety to the game so it's not always the same old delve.
• You can unlock new playable characters over time, and they each give you a different way to play the game.

THE BAD:

• The game started to get a bit repetitive fairly quickly. I found my build tended to converge to the same or similar end result, delve after delve.
• Some combos, like summer items and magic, are too complicated to set up and the payoff is usually not even that great. Why take a chance on a complex build when a simple build wins every time?
• There isn't much potential for exploration or resource exhaustion in the dungeon itself. I feel like there is some lost potential to add more satisfaction, tension, or drama here.

THE UGLY:

• There were occasional non-game-breaking bugs in the interface for moving around the dungeon. For example: sometimes, corridor-blocking traps would fail to spring, the special item that was supposed to reveal secret rooms wouldn't work, etc.