Ready to run your own dungeon? Hire monsters, build traps, defeat heroes, and most importantly, protect your treasure! Legend of Keepers: Prologue is a free introduction to this unique strategy RPG. Recruit from a variety of monster types to defeat a variety of hero classes. Use unfair spells, plunder nearby towns, make shady deals with bloodsucking tax collectors, whatever it takes to protect your treasure!

Format: PC via Steam
First playthrough time: 1 hour

Released October 10th, 2019 by Goblinz Studio

Quick Overview

Bad random events can cost monsters or gold

In-depth Review

Legend of Keepers: Prologue is an RPG strategy game. Players take on the role of a boss in a dungeon and work to improve their henchmen and traps in order to defeat adventurers. There are two modes to the game. First is setting up the dungeon for incoming adventures, which involves looking at adventurer stats and abilities, and selecting monsters and traps suitable for defeating them. Second is the in-between adventurer attacks where each week players choose between different events such as training minions, purchasing new traps, or random events.

Choosing a schedule

In this free prologue, players have the option to choose only one of the different bosses. However, stats are available for perusing for the other bosses, which specialize in traps and spells. Slaveholders, the only boss available, specializes in monsters and has a secondary in morale damage. Playing with the same character multiple times unlocks talents. The goal of Legend of Keepers: Prologue is to make it one year (aka 52 weeks) without your boss dying.

The three final bosses

The schedule comprises 52 weeks in which the player will choose their activity each week. When adventures or champions attack, those would be the only options for that week, although there may be different difficulties to choose from. There are a wide variety of monster types and classes as well as unique classes for champion heroes. Setting up a dungeon consists of setting up two monster rooms and two trap rooms. There’ll also be a spell room which is activated at the time the heroes enter it. The player does not get to choose the order in which these happen, but they get to choose what comprises each room.

Player participate in combat by using monster abilities

Monsters and heroes have a variety of stats covering speed, five different types of damage resistance, health, overall strength, and passive abilities. Trapped can have different effects such as dealing health or morale damage, or applying debuffs. Debuffs can include everything from weaknesses to bleeds or poisons or buffing later monsters.

Gold is used to upgrade monsters and traps

Adventures can be defeated by reducing them to zero health or by reducing them to zero morale. Heroes that reached zero health will be killed while heroes that reach zero morale will flee, killing the hero grants blood while scaring a hero grants tears. These are used to acquire buffs later in the game.

Reward options after defeating heroes

The player can also gain artifacts. These are randomly found throughout the game and can be leveled up to level three. It can have a wide variety of effects from randomly buffing monsters, making skeletons from monsters that die, or increasing gold gain. Minions can be leveled up to level four, gaining new abilities, increasing stats and adding passives. Traps can be leveled up to level three, similarly increasing stats.

A morale build victory kills few heroes

Recommendation

Overall, I greatly enjoyed Legend of Keepers: Prologue. I’ve played through it a couple of times and the fire orientated monsters are probably my favorite. I liked the variety of monsters and heroes and how that lead to different strategies on what traps to lay and what monsters to group together. Although combat toward the end of the year can get somewhat repetitive once players are set into their build, I’m eager to see what the full game is like. I recommend Legend of Keepers: Prologue to all players interested in strategy games, especially if they can appreciate its tidbits of pro-monster humor.

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