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Roguelikes have gotten so popular and refined that it's rare to go a month without a new banger, let alone a whole year. 2021 gave us some of the best roguelike games of the past decade, like Inscryption, Gunfire Reborn, and Loop Hero, plus personal favorites like Skul: The Hero Slayer.
One of the stranger releases of the year was Vivid Knight, a party-building strategy roguelike where you draft and upgrade a team of heroes and augment them in auto-battler combat with cooldown-based gems. It was a bit shallow and easily solved, but it has 90% positive Steam user reviews for a reason. Developer Asobism, which has a bunch of games on mobile but only Vivid Knight on Steam, is now gearing up to release a sequel called Vivid World in Q1 2025, and its Steam Next Fest demo reveals a follow-up so dramatically improved that it's quickly become one of the most exciting upcoming indie games.
Vivid World is a similar game to Vivid Knight under the hood, from the way you gather heroes to the way you use and combine gems. The biggest upgrade may be the art, which has gone from a plastic-looking retro anime vibe to a lush storybook feel overflowing with color and energy. The character designs are outstanding, almost Disgaea meets Skullgirls. The ambiance of the dungeons feels head-and-shoulders above the original, and even the UI, which does a good job of conveying a lot of information, looks sharper. I prefer the setup, too: a schoolgirl named Lemuria gets pulled into the underworld and has to deal with rogue demons.
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Mechanical improvements start to crop up when you get into combat. The basic flow of drafting will feel familiar to TFT or other auto-battler fans: triple a unit for a silver, triple silvers for a gold. You have limited team slots to choose from, so on top of keeping your strongest units in the party and putting your tankiest units up front, it's essential to condense your power wherever possible. You also probably don't want to get too caught up in one strategy or damage type, lest a magic-resistant boss pummel your crew of witches.
"With our new and improved battle system, the player can combine several gems together or unleash the power of individual gems," Asobism explains. This comes into play via gem merchants sometimes found when exploring dungeons. Use collected crystals to open gem boxes and draft random pieces, then sell or combine them to – once again – condense. Before the first demo boss, I stacked two attack gems together to make a much stronger version which came with the added cost of some of one unit's health, but since I had a healer in the party this wasn't a problem, and I have healing gems besides.
You use one gem each round (so far – I don't know if that'll change later on), and since some gems can go on cooldown for several turns, you need to time things right. The most obvious example would be the guard gems, which can shield you from boss attacks signaled by a charging energy meter. The same goes for your team's special attacks; you'll want to save an attack-buffing gem for a turn where your units are dishing out more than normal attacks.
As someone who tries not to think about how many hours he's spent on Hearthstone Battlegrounds, the auto-battler undertones here are frankly hazardous to my health, but the presentation is so charming and the progression seems so engrossing that I'm ready to sell my soul. Here's the kicker: it has multiplayer. Co-op multiplayer! At last, another auto-battler with no PvP to wear me down.
