Rogue Legacy 2013

About

Rogue Legacy came out on June 27, 2013 for PC, then for Linux and Mac on October 16, 2013 and for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on July 29, 2014. The main story takes about 10 hours, doing everything about 24 hours.

You control a family of characters one at a time, and when your character dies, you choose who his or her successor is, whether it is a barbarian son of yours who has OCD, your daughter who became a ninja even though she can't see well, an assassin who is fighting for the gays, or a miner who wants to collect gold! Traits are randomized each time upon death, leading to multiple playthroughs with 35 traits, each character will be unique.

Story

A cursed and ever-shifting castle looms over the land, its halls rumored to hold untold treasure and terrible secrets. Generation after generation, a single family sends its bravest members through the gates in search of glory, fortune, and answers, only for each adventurer to fall to the dungeon's traps, monsters, and guardians. But death is never the end of the family's quest. When one hero perishes, a descendant takes up the fight, inheriting the gold, gear, and hard-won knowledge of those who came before, and adding their own quirks to the bloodline. Each heir is unique, shaped by peculiar traits passed down through the generations, and every journey into the castle looks different from the last. Building up their ancestral manor and growing stronger with each fallen relative, this endless lineage of knights, mages, and rogues presses ever deeper into the shifting halls, determined to conquer the castle at last.

What is happening now

Rogue Legacy is a 2D platformer-RPG that blends roguelike progression with genealogical persistence - each death sends you back as a descendant of your fallen character, inheriting some traits while starting fresh in a procedurally-generated castle. The game's accessible difficulty scaling and permanent character upgrades made it influential in the indie scene when it launched in 2013, and it remains available across numerous platforms including Switch and modern consoles. The game continues to inspire developers working in similar spaces. Nothing Lost, an upcoming action roguelike published by the team behind Dredge, has drawn conceptual influence from Rogue Legacy's framework, suggesting the original still resonates with creators building on the formula it helped popularize.