I’m switching back and forth between Hades 2 and Rotwood at the moment, which is probably why I’ve found myself tangled up in how the two games are similar and how they’re different.
RotwoodPublisher: Klei EntertainmentDeveloper: Klei EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC in early access.
On paper, you can make them sound really quite similar: Like Hades 2, Klei’s latest is an action-RPG in which you take your character and head out through a series of enemy-filled rooms, defeating all the monsters you see in each room to earn a choice of perk or upgrade of some kind. You slowly build your character for each run, then, by picking upgrades and then picking the next room based on the kind of upgrade it’s going to offer. Throw in bosses and permanent character upgrades and different weapon classes and, hey, isn’t that sort of Hades?
In reality, though, nobody would mistake these two games. It’s a bit like how I can instantly tell whether the LA-based luxury realtor reality show on television is Selling Sunset, Million Dollar Listing or Buying Beverly Hills: sometimes the similarities are superficial, while the differences go deep.
So from the off, Rotwood is a much slower game. You don’t dash, the enemies and environments are chunkier and more readable, and in the earlier levels at least, there’s a lot more time to react to stuff. A lot of this is because Rotwood’s a co-op game. I’ve been playing solo, but it really wants you to party up with friends and rattle through its rooms together, and you’ll all need time to make sense of what’s going on in that kind of scenario.
It’s knockabout stuff at first, which means the goofy cartoon aesthetic makes sense, and it also lends the game a particular character. Hades’ enemies explode like they’re made of Swarovski crystal; Rotwood’s explode like they’re water balloons. I’m generally hitting them with a big hammer, and there’s a lovely squishiness as they bounce back under the blows, and then they pop when they’re finally done-in. (It helps that they’re often mutant onions and cherries and things like that.)