Loot Rascals

After a friend's recommendation, I decided to give Loot Rascals a try, and I am really glad I did.
Loot Rascals is in the genre of puzzle-roguelikes. And yes, you read that right - this is a like in the sense that it is true turn-based gameplay. Brilliantly done, I may add. You actually move in real-time, but whenever you cross into another hex, a turn passes. There are very short day/night cycles that determine if you get first hit on an enemy. You will instantly kill the enemy if your power is greater than his 'strength' or HP. All the math is transparent, and there are only like three numbers to keep track of which makes it quite elegant. This is where the puzzle portion comes in, and fits it nicely in the puzzle-roguelike genre along other titles such as HyperRogue, The Depths of Tolagol, and even Crypt of the Necrodancer, among others.
Yes, it is brutally hard - but more importantly - it is hella addicting. I have a hard time putting it down.
The other notable part is that there is a built in card game of sorts. The loot you collect from fallen foes is cards. The cards give you buffs depending on how you lay them out. It's all simple to learn, yet slowly reveals its depth as you figure it all out. The only other part that you may want to know is that there are no meta-game upgrades. There is a pseudo-multiplayer component, but so far I haven't found it potent enough to really matter one way or the other.
Pros:
+Awesome artwork and music and just such a zany universe
+Surprisingly addictive, and it is so easy to just fall into another run
+Keyboard and mouse support is great, and so is controller support
+Daily runs and leaderboards certainly keep things fresh
+Both the turn-based combat system and collectable card game are *really* well done
Cons:
-Yeah, it's brutal, but hey thats what we came for
-I do wish you could play with keyboard only, but no biggie
A must-own for anyone who enjoys turn-based roguelikes.

It's a crime that more people are not playing this.
Learning enemies, the ins-and-outs of the card system, and using all the tools made available to try and survive has been a blast so far. Very difficult, but playing well feels rewarding. It's more of a puzzle game than anything else. Take your time, use the day/night cycle to your advantage and get all the loots! You rascal you!
Also you can use giant bird..boulder...thingies to blow up enemies! What isn't to like?

When I'm looking to play a new game or engaging in almost any form of electronic entertainment, I'm looking to momentarily escape reality to explore new worlds. A lot of the time I'm trying to tap into the same strange and indescribable creative energy held as a child. Naturally, the colorful Saturday morning cartoon look and presentation of Loot Rascals drew my eyes in a way most games of today don't really. Not anymore, anyway.
And wouldn't you know it, my fascination with Loot Rascals' roots in childhood and animation proved appropriate upon discovering that the game enlists the skills of animators and artists who had worked with everything from the dreamlike Hohokum to the adventurous fantasy Road Not Taken, and even for channels including Cartoon Network and BBC Scotland. A humorous intergalactic story of survival and a daring rescue of the coveted 'Big Barry' from the clutches of a cosmic entity is brought to life by the talented hands of this impressive collaboration of artists, and I couldn't have been more intrigued by the prospect.
The random layouts of colorful alien worlds, the sci-fi setting and marooned spaceship survival plot, the colorful sense of humor and the psychedelic extraterrestrial residents of this dangerous planet brought me back to times of creative and imaginative animations and obscure videogames I grew up with. While all incredibly original in its designs I couldn't help but see the zany top-down style and think of the out-of-this-world hip-hop space adventures of Toe-Jam and Earl, and though some of the talent behind Loot Rascals did animation work for Cartoon Network and even Adventure Time the almost grotesque nature of some of the anomalies encountered made it feel more like Ren and Stimpy's chaotic Space Madness episodes, which of course is a very good thing.
Loot Rascals' action takes place on a hex-based grid map, but it isn't slow and plodding like you'd expect a turn-based tactical combat system to be. In fact it's actually quite fast paced as you dash around bumping into various enemies to get into brawls for their important equipment cards. Touching the same space as one of the many strange lifeforms of the planet will initiate an auto-battle, but the gimmick here is the day and night system which changes every few moves and alters their aggressive state. Aggressive enemies attack first, defensive enemies are attacked first and the determining factor of damage done is overall attack value against defense value, so planning and organizing your Loot Cards right is the difference between life and death.
And how could I forget the cards. Perhaps the more addictive, ingenious gameplay mechanic of Loot Rascals and what sets it apart from the droves of similarly composed roguelikes. Doing away with a typical dungeon-crawling equipment slots is a 2 by 5 grid of slots for 'Loot Cards' foraged from the corpses of alien foes. These cards add a base value to either your attack or defense but also come with unique bonuses that pertain to specific set-ups and locations on the card grid, rewarding strategic and thoughtful placements.
More importantly than attempting to explain these mechanics with needlessly complicated sentences, I'd like to stress that the gameplay in Loot Rascals is accessible and easy to jump into for even the most casual of roguelike and roguelite players. Despite its rich and original strategic card elements it is most certainly a game the player will feel their way through, as opposed to needing to painstakingly learn. Its mechanics become simple and clear through the sheer enjoyment of exploration and just a bit of trial-and-error, and the ultimate reward of discovery is always more than worth it.

Playing new roguelikes I generally stop and move on to the next whenever I get stuck or hit a roadblock, which is pretty dang often. With so many in the genre and so many that mostly feel the same, it's easy to get bored and want to see the next offering. This was not at all the case with Loot Rascals, its otherworldly designs had me hooked and the detailed Saturday morning cartoon style cutscenes between levels had me pressing to see more of the world and story. Everything is so humorously and wonderfully animated, the pacing of the game is perfectly fast and fluid, and the music is like some cosmic clash of Jean-Jacques Perrey retro electronics and Super Bomberman 5 Pop-y cartoon synth complete with spooky Moog and theremin.

After 6 solid hours of playtime I've still only just barely made it to the entrance of the the third floor. I keep piling more hours onto the game, however, and every run is still so radically different and wild that I never feel disappointed or like I'm restarting to make up for anything like in other roguelikes. I'm simply playing because it's fun, because it inspires my creativity and makes me feel good and that's a rare feeling with these games in recent years.
Loot Rascals is an incredible joy to play not because it's fun and the systems within are addictive, but because it's just so lighthearted and feel-good. It manages that perfect balance of weird and cute that could make even the most die-hard Nintendo fans blush while telling a story that is so awesomely surreal, so hilariously over-the-top in ways the most old school cartoon and sci-fi comic geek could appreciate.

Initial Impression:
Art style and music are fantastic!
Card system is pretty neat as well, fights are not random and you can plan ahead with the day/night cycle system they use, which works very well.
Has some kind of online function as other people can find loot you dropped and sent it back which is cool as well.
It pretty hard though only made it to level 2 in my first hour of gameplay.
Easy recommendation for fans of rouge-likes and people who are not annoyed by difficult gameplay.
Edit: After 3h of gameplay:
So after 3 h I made it to world 3 once. Maybe I'm just bad but it feels really hard to survive. Which I like.
The game is basicly about planning your turns (day/night cycle) right so that you take the least amount of damage from fights (as already said fights are pretty non-rng if you plan correctly and you can even calculate the cance of getting hit if you want) and managing the cards in your inventory right. The cards are pretty neat, some are just plan attack and defence modifier (add +1 or +2 etc.) others have special requirements like all pans get +1 or +1 if in an even row/column) which makes you think how to use them. Some of these cards are flippable meaning you can either use them for attack or defense. Other cards are sticky, so once equiped you can't just remove them. Plus there are special cards which give you abilities like teleportation heals or zaps and more (which have to be added to already equipped cards and then add the abbility for you to use). Those abbilities either recharge over turns or by spending tokens (which you get from recycling cards you don't use). Other special cards allow the fusing of for example all attack cards you have equipped. Tokes are also used to heal yourself at the base. Because teleporting back to base and then back to where you were takes 50 turns you can't abbuse the heals. They also increase in price every run.
On each level you are basicly on a turn limit shown in the upper right corner and if you exceed it bad things happen (think spelunky). You can stay longer but after a set amount of turn even worse things happen (again with a timer) so you might want to leave to the next level rather soon-ish. For that you have to find the exit.
After playing 3 h the first level seems rather beatable, however the 2nd one is still very, very challanging for me :P.
Other cool features of the game:
-At the base you get a quest every level to kill a baddy and return the loot he dropped. You are rewarded with extra space to hold (not equip) cards or a reveal map card for example.
-The semi-mp feature of the game is neat, returning cards to other players or getting card returns to you can help you set up a new run, as you can equip the cards returend when you start a new run. You also can find holograms of the players YOU returned the cards to, and they will fight for you!
-The cards and their effects are pretty neat, especially the special cards which can have effects like reincarnation or spend tokens to get extra turns withouth the baddies moving. You don't even need to equip those cards to use them in some cases, they work from your backpack.
-The baddies are pretty interesting as well. Some of them just charge you but others have unique mechanics to them: There are "horse brothers" which change their power value on each step so you must be careful not only to attack them at the preffered time of the day where you attack first, but also when their power value is low, there is a night witch and when you are close to her it won't change to day anymore, there are baddies which drop special cards like a spectral guy dropping the decoy or a rotting thing dropping the teleport modifier....just to name some.
-As already mentioned the art-style and music/sound are a 10/10 for me ;).
So I don't know much about the later content of the game, as the one time I reached lvl 3 i died early but still what i have seen is pretty neat and worth a recommendation as stated in my first impression after 1 h of gameplay.
One more thing: Some might not like that you can't save a run and continue it later.

This is a really enjoyable game. The style and sound is top notch. The interface is great with a controller, a bit iffy with mouse. The mechanics teach themselves fairly quickly. You decide your own stats with card placement. You choose what cards to put your power sleeves on. You get a lot of choice and when the game kills you for it you die with a smile. Interesting asymmetrical online mechanics where you're rewarded for kindness to other players, unless you want to straight up steal the cards you find from them and have them hunt you down later.
Cons: No save feature, high randomization, high learning curve. Could use audio sliders.

While the inability to save a session mid-game is pretty annoying, this game's keep or return recovered hot loot is totally original!

This game is a bit of an underrecognized gem. It very competently combines the two genres it seeks to combine - puzzle game and roguelite, with a sprinkle of turn-based strategy mixed in.
I can't find any big faults in it. A lot of the design is super clever, be it in the enemy variety, the immersive solutionfinding to combat puzzles the game randomly generates.
There are some small issues that could be easily fixed and don't prevent me from enjoying the game a lot; tall sprites can make it hard to sometimes see whether a tile is targeted by a temporary trap, sometimes it's also hard to see the distance from enemies. Both things could probably be prevented quite easily with a grid view and some other minor polish.
The game would also benefit from a loadout system where you can swap between two setups, one maximized for offense and one for defense, since swapping between those is something you want to do more often than you are actually willing to go through the progress of doing so.
But that's about it for criticism, and the actual gameplay loop is just really fun and the design is super clever at times. I especially enjoyed, as opposed to some negative reviewers, the way the Space Death subverts the whole ruleset that the game carefully crafted and established, which is just a brilliant design decision if you accept the premise that the game is just over when you pass that turn limit. You should also pretty much never need to see this happening if playing correctly.
Big recommendation for anyone that has any remote interest in the mentioned genres, since I have not encountered other games of this scope (except some even smaller scale indie games) that fill this niche so well.