A good crew of Gaming Nexus folks came together last night to play Vagante, the new roguelike platforming dungeon crawler from developer Nuke Nine and beloved publisher Blitworks. Joining Games M Moorer's Joseph Moorer were GN writer Elliot Hilderbrand, GN Editor-in-Chief Eric Hauter, and avid gamer Aidan Hauter. Together, we jumped into Vagante cold, and let the game smack us silly.
Vagante is tough, folks. There is no downplaying the fact that this is a game that will literally kill a player less than a second after loading into a level, if said player is not careful. In fact, this happens several times in the below video, and you can hear the screams of horror every time it does. There are falling rocks, wicked spikes, fall damage, places to drown, and plenty of monsters to eat your face if the environment doesn't get you first.
Vagante is one of those games that players need to commit to, throwing themselves at it over and over again while they learn the rope and slowly figure out how to survive. The closest analogy I can come up with is Spelunky, but Vagante feels even more difficult than that classic. However, gamers seem to love it - Vagante has a Very Positive rating on Steam, so there is definitely an audience out there for this sort of game. Take a look at how we manage our first few hours of playtime, and let us know if you give the game a shot and do better:
Vagante is available now on Steam, and releases on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch on January 27.
