Lost Castle is a cute roguelike that will kill you a lot

Hunter Studio's Lost Castle is an indie roguelike with a charming cartoon style and punishing difficulty and when we caught up with Iain Garner in Birmingham last month he explained it to us a little bit and talked about some of the inspirations behind it.

"So Lost Castle is an action RPG roguelike," he said. "It's inspired by games like Streets of Rage, Rogue Legacy and Dark Souls. It's developed in China and is actually China's number one indie game at the moment, we've been selling really well out there and from September 1 we left early access and went to a localised version and launched in the West."

Being a roguelike, we asked about the difficulty the game offers. "Yeah, it's hard," Garner said. "It's very, very cute as you can see, so a lot of people get a little bit belied by the fact that it's so sweet looking and then so hard, but the way that it works is you're going to die, you're going to die a lot, but every time you die, providing you've collected enough souls, you'll upgrade your character slightly. Every time you defeat a new you get access to that boss' equipment which will be randomly dropped throughout the castle or available at the beginning. You get to upgrade your starting area and so by the end of the game you'll have a whole choice of weapons at the beginning, you'll have chests full of awesome loot that'll get you going right at the start, so although it's really hard, there's a constant sense of progression. We really didn't want gamers to feel like they were just doing the same thing again and again."

Lost Castle is available now via Steam. Are roguelikes your cup of tea? What do you make of this cute one?