Here's a look at Loot Rascals from Hollow Pond. Some of the team hail from Honeyslug, best known for its 2014 PlayStation game Hohokum, which charmed players with an endearing sense of humor and a likeable art style.
Loot Rascals is a roguelike turn-based strategy game, but as you can see from the action, the turns move quickly and smoothly. The player-character is stranded on an alien planet and must explore hexes, coming into contact with alien baddies and mean robots. But there's a twist. Other human players can help or hinder the player's efforts.
Combat is based on cards that the player collects along the way, building up into a deck of ten. The strategy comes through deciding which aliens to battle, and when, as well as placing the cards in the most useful combinations. Their placing in the deck yields important buffs and boosts.
Lesser cards can be decommissioned in order to create tokens that can be used to heal or to buy buff cards with special abilities.
This is a single-player game, but other human players are a part of its world. When you die, your best cards are looted by the aliens. When those aliens are then killed, some of your cards fall into the hands of other human players. They can decide whether to keep those juicy cards for themselves or to hand them back to you.
This decision has consequences. Each human player creates a holographic avatar that will either help players who've been nice to them, or will jump into games and offer up a tough fight by way of revenge.
Loot Rascals is scheduled to come out on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC in early 2017.
