Skip to main content

The tables have turned: Enemies can loot you in ‘Loot Rascals’

Classic game mechanics have been getting flipped on their heads in the last year. Mediocre Monster, which received funding last summer via Kickstarter, casts players as average RPG enemies who must “die” to entertain adventurers. Loot Rascals, from Hohokum developer Hollow Ponds, is a loot-fest with a twist: the enemies can loot you.

Loot Rascals begins with you crashing on an alien planet. It then tasks you with escaping back to space, but you’ll have to explore and gather resources to do it. The game’s world is presented as a series of hexagonal tiles, not unlike some board games, but you can only see a few tiles in front of your character; this should create a nice sense of tension as there’s no way to know when you’re walking into a crowd of enemies. Loot is acquired, naturally, by killing the enemies you find, and the “Loot Chips” you receive are used to customize your abilities. But there’s a catch.

Recommended Videos

“When you die in Loot Rascals, you will be looted by the enemies! And when that happens, the cards they steal are beamed up and will drop into someone else’s game,” Hollow Ponds says. “Defeating strong enemies will get you a card belonging to someone else — which was looted from them earlier by that baddie.”

Hollow Ponds has always been known for its bright, colorful visuals, and Loot Rascals is no exception. The team has also brought on board David Ferguson and Brent Kobayashi, from Adventure Time and Road Not Taken, respectively, to lead the art team. Monsters made out of hair, evil robots, and giant, one-eyed, bipedal fish all sound like something those people would create.

Expect to see Loot Rascals in a playable form next month at E3. It’s planned for a PlayStation 4 and PC release in early 2017.

Gabe Gurwin
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…
Researchers have simulated a virtual universe, and you can download it for free
The Uchuu simulation, the most detailed simulation of the universe to date.

If you've ever wanted to explore the entire universe from the comfort of your computer, now's your chance. An international team has created the largest and most realistic virtual universe to date called Uchuu (which means "outer space" in Japanese), simulating 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube which is a mind-bending 9.63 billion light-years wide on each side.

世界最大規模の”模擬宇宙”を公開 ~ 宇宙の大規模構造と銀河形成の解明に向けて ~

Read more
Safari’s new update can tell which websites have tracked you in the past
Apple MacOS Big Sur Safari

Apple didn’t publicly release MacOS’s next big update alongside the launch of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. But you won’t have to wait for that to experience one of the MacOS Big Sur’s best features: Safari 14. Apple is now rolling out Safari 14 as a standalone update for existing MacOS Catalina and Mojave users.

Unlike other app updates, you can’t download Safari 14 from the App Store on your Mac. Instead, the update will be available under System Preferences > Software Update.

Read more
The best PlayStation launch games, ranked
best ps1 games sony ps1

The most important time in a console's life is its launch. This is when a new piece of hardware needs to prove that it is worth investing in, which always comes down to games. Launch titles are rarely the best games on the system, although some of Nintendo's launch games buck that trend, but at least need to show off what the system can do. PlayStation always had a secondary selling point with its consoles, such as doubling as a CD player or DVD player, so it is interesting to speculate how successful those early consoles would've been judged solely on their games. We now have launch titles from the PS1 all the way up to the PS5 (and soon to be PS6) to look back on with fresh eyes to see just how good those first games were.

Air Combat - PlayStation 1

Read more