Combat skills are all very well and good but a hero also needs strong equipment to survive in the unforgiving depths of a hostile dungeon. The more stuff they can bring the better prepared they may be, especially if they can come up with a balanced plan that covers any reasonable and several unreasonable contingencies. Inventory management is vital, and rarely moreso than in the demo for the turn-based roguelike adventure Backpack Hero.
The young adventurer-mouse Purse can’t resist the call of the dungeon, so heads off for adventure with a small backpack to manage as much loot as she can carry. At this point videogame logic takes over in full as everything from potions to food to weapons and armor goes in the backpack, which if you want to get all intellectual about it is an allegorical representation of the character’s total carrying capacity. There probably won’t be a test, though, so handwave it away with “videogames” and worry less about reason and more about proper item arranging. It matters where loot goes in the backpack’s storage grid because equipment can be influenced by where it’s placed and what it’s next to. A bow, for example, will fire when you use it as an action in a turn, but to actually fire anything it needs to be on the left and any arrows to the right. A helmet needs to be on the top row, and while it’s possible to carry two helmets around anything to the right of the first one will have all its effects negated.
Item-tetris really comes into its own in the early part of Backpack Hero with armor. Each turn Purse can perform up to three actions, and at the start one of those should be to use the shield. The shield provides 4 block, which is directly subtracted from the enemy’s attack, but it doesn’t take long to start finding equipment that has stacking bonuses auto-generating block when placed near each other. Weapons can also feed into each other, with bonuses to attack generated by proper placement, and I’ll admit here that I haven’t gotten quite far enough to start playing with magic and linking conductivity items together for their mana bonuses. And of course there are single-use items, healing potions, drinks that, when emptied, leave behind a mug that works nicely as a single-use throwing weapon, and all kinds of other goodies vying for your limited inventory space. Being able to stash more loot is so important, in fact, that leveling up doesn’t give a single stat bonus but instead allows you to grow out the backpack’s carrying capacity.
The Backpack Hero demolanded on Steam todayand, while there’s a web versionat itch.io, the Steam release is a more recent version. It’s definitely worth a play-through or two, or at least a quick watch of the trailer to see just how important it is to have a properly organized inventory for a successful dungeon crawl.
