It’s easy to forget that roguelikes are meant to be turn-based. Most of the ones we get these days are some variety of real-time, often with an action spin, but that’s not how it used to be. It used to be that the world moved when you did, that’s just how it all worked. It meant that you could stop and think, which is a fascinating way to play an action game. Well, Demon Lord: Just A Block is turn-based (sort of), and it’s also a joy.
In this game, you just take control of the head of a Demon Lord, who’s become a head because of reasons you’ll uncover as you play. It’s not an ideal situation, but hey, you’re a Demon Lord, you can still throw down as needed, and you’re going to. You just move into enemies to hurt them, and they have to line up attacks or throw bombs and stuff. It all starts as one-to-one moves, but you get to break the rules a little bit. If you time it right, you can move twice to parry enemies or dodge attacks, and some enemies eventually play by those rules too.
Heck, as you unlock different weapons, they all change things too. You get a lightning chidori which lets you zap through enemies, you get a bow to fire from afar, and a fist which lets you punch twice per attack. You even get slower ones, like a giant hunk of ham, which takes two turns to hit with, but hits in a massive area. As you go through each run, you can augment your weapon with special effects, but you also get to flesh out your passives to make a build.
You get different trees as you go, like summoning lightning bolts, yeeting shuriken, having lots of friends, or one which just makes you invincible. As it stands, that last one seems like the strongest by a very large margin, and is likely the one to go for if you want to have a very good run. You can choose which ones you want by going after specific room icons, and that’s nice for getting those truly broken builds.
That does feel like what the game wants too. There’s one which generate shurikens when you attack a certain number of times, you can just keep attacking a wall to make new ones, then hop into the next boss fight with 300 shurikens and just win. There’s a lot of cool stuff to do here, and the different builds and weapons help make each run feel meaningfully different, alongside having to try and track down all of the secret bosses and more, to make proper progression. Fundamentally, it’s just great fun!
