Novel Rogue review for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

It’s been a long time since I last played a game published by KEMCO. Even though I used to play tonnes of their games, that was more a function of the fact they ported seemingly every single one of their titles to my favourite handheld, the PS Vita, than because I was a fan of their interchangeable JRPGs. While RPGolf Legends seemed different enough from their usual fare to make me dip a toe back into their catalogue, there’s been nothing else from them in the years since the Vita’s demise that’s even remotely tempted me.

Until Novel Rogue, that is. While it may look similar to KEMCO’s usual generic JRPGs, it boasts that it features one key difference: it’s a roguelike deckbuilder, along the lines of Slay the Spire, rather than being the most generic JRPG you’ve ever imagined.

Whether it fully delivers on that promise is open to interpretation. While the battles are deck-based, they’re nowhere near as complex or as interesting as Slay the Spire or its many imitators. For the most part, it seemed like battles turned into huge slugfests, battles of attrition where it comes down to using your highest-value attacks as much as possible, rather than taking the sort of strategic approach required in the better games of the genre.

Even a watered-down version of Slay the Spire is still fun, though. Novel Rogue may not require much in the way of strategic thinking or planning, but there’s still something satisfying about just whaling away on your enemies with powerful attacks. It may not be the sort of thing that inspires the addictive, “one more go” feeling of Slay the Spire, but it’s still fun.

And good thing too, because the rest of Novel Rogue is basically exactly what you’d expect from a KEMCO JRPG. Pixel graphics, a story about students fighting evil, endless (and incredibly dull) dialogue – it’s about as by-the-numbers as you’d expect.

But a change in combat makes all the difference here. Adding deckbuilding mechanics to a JRPG may not be groundbreaking – or, at least, it’s not the way KEMCO does it – but it’s enough to transform a totally generic game like Novel Rogue into one that does something fun and interesting.

KEMCO provided us with a Novel Rogue PC code for review purposes.