This will be a short one, but I wanted to give my impressions on The Legend of Bum-bo, having beaten the game with every character but the last (which only unlocks after beating the game another gazillion times).

To help you decide if the game is for you, just answer the following:

  1. Do you like puzzle games?

  2. Do you like poop jokes?

  3. Can you handle some crust in your video games?

If you answered yes to all 3, you might like The Legend of Bum-bo. It’s technically a roguelike, but the roguelike element only comes into play during the beginning, when you’re learning all the mechanics that the game refuses to explain. Like how enemy movement works. Or how the bosses work. Or how a lot of really basic things work.

Bum-bo

It’s a pretty crusty and flawed game, but underneath all that is a reeeeally well thought-out spell-casting system that the whole games works on:

  1. Use your limited moves to line up tiles on a board. When they line up, you gain that kind of mana, plus a unique effect based on what you lined up (throwing a bone, putting down a poop “sandbag” against enemy attacks)

  2. Use that mana to cast spells.

That’s basically it, but the spells you get can often affect the board itself, meaning that even when out of “moves”, you can still do stuff. And if you line up the piss droplet tiles, you get more moves. Which you can use to line up more tiles, to get more mana, to use more moves…

So, basically, if you’ve picked the right spells and use your brainmeat well enough, you can often complete a whole room of enemies in 1 or 2 turns.

I think part of the reason I like this game is because it gives me the same kind of feeling Dark Souls gave when I was “learning” that. The feeling of coming back to a room full of enemies that would have wiped the floor with you at the beginning, and pulverizing them within the space of one turn (and with moves to spare) is AMAZING.

It’s 15 bucks and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s on board so far, but there is some crust. Some UI elements straight up don’t work, which is quite the oversight. For instance, when entering a treasure room (where you pick up a new spell between enemy rooms), the “cancel” button doesn’t work, which means you HAVE to take a spell, potentially forcing you to replace one you like. The volume control options are also unavailable outside of the title menu, and on the character select screen you can’t even ESC -> quit. You have to force the application to quit, which is pretty gross.

None of those are total showstoppers though. If the other stuff interests you, check it out.