As anyone who has followed my channel for quite some time should be well aware, I’m generally a massive fan of making pretty well anything and everything more roguelike. I love the added unpredictability, challenges involving risk and reward, and how exciting it can be to break through and succeed despite the deck usually being stacked against you. What has been fascinating is to see how many different genres and flavors of play it has been applied to as well, with developers consistently coming up with new angles to be explored. 

In the case of Barda, once again it seems like we have something new and fresh going on. Calling it a backpack roguelike roughly gives you the gist of the idea as well, as you’ll be trying to climb as far into the mountains as possible, armed only with your humble backpack and all that you’ll be able to fit into it. It won’t take long to understand the challenge in front of you either, as you’ll typically run out of space and need to start pruning your inventory pretty early on. What will you want to keep? Given all of the different things that can go wrong on the mountain, and the needs for ways to satisfy your hunger, health, combat, or a number of status ailments, you’ll simply need to make tough decisions, and quite often.

In principle the way you’ll move through the game will be familiar to roguelike fans, plotting out your path and getting at least a rough idea of the benefits and risks of going a particular way. Where the game lost me quite a lot though is that while there are absolutely numerous hints and tips that will show up, some contextually, more often than not early runs were dominated by problems I wasn’t fully understanding. That’s both in terms of how they happened, and what I could do to remedy them. Yes, time and experimentation in these sorts of games can often lead to understanding, but given what I’d say is the more aggressive level of challenge than most early on, more care in properly onboarding gamers and helping them understand what they’re looking at would have made a big difference. Part of the issue is that I haven’t played just about anything like this before, so that sort of raises the bar for an expectation for added help, and this comes up pretty short in that regard. If your desire for something a bit different is sufficiently high, you may find this to your liking, but compared to its average competition, it’s asking for quite a lot of latitude from the player in terms of frustration with a lack of proper assistance.