Lotus Lantern: Rescue Mother is the name of a newly announced action roguelite by Unstable Games and publisher 663 Games. To mark the grand announcement, there’s a new demo that you can try for yourself, should the following tickle your fancy.
As you will likely have deduced from the title, this particular game is inspired by Chinese mythology. Playing as a dude called Chenxiang, you’re on the lookout for your mum after she was imprisoned for breaking some celestial laws – by having you, it seems.
Enter Sun Wukong, the Monkey King himself, who is on hand to help you progress and learn different techniques. He’s actually quite grumpy and sardonic, which I liked, even if the translation work wasn’t that good. In fact, the overall presentation was a bit bare.
Lotus Lantern: Rescue Mother release date and trailer
The Lotus Lantern: Rescue Mother trailer, which you can see below, calls the game an avant garde action-roguelite, but I’m not really sure what that means. However, I do understand the fine art of smacking baddies with mystical weapons and there’s plenty of that to be seen.
Starting in a hubworld, each run invites you to pick a combat style. Many of the techniques were closed off for the demo, which caused me some confusion at first, as I tried levelling up the wrong things between missions. It wasn’t brilliantly explained but I eventually got it.
The combat felt rather responsive, once I worked out how to use my different abilities. You have different attacks on timers, and once I was managing that properly, I started to do a bit more damage to my enemies. Having said that, there wasn’t a huge number on show in the demo, so the variety came from the different attack types.
I’m up for seeing more enemy variety and combat styles – the trailer mentions that there will be eight – and I’ll certainly take another look at the game once there’s more to see. However, it feels like there’s some way to go before this is finished, so don’t expect a quick turnaround on this one.
Lotus Lantern: Rescue Mother is coming to Early Access via PC Steam at some point in Q1 2024. I’ll update you right here once I know a more specific date, and you should check out the demo for yourself if action-roguelites are your flavour of rogue.
