1922: Please Proceed to the Right, Again: One Way Heroics Plus

I’m planning on doing another video on this, but since I’ve been playing it a bunch today I thought I’d talk a little about One Way Heroics Plus.

As the name suggests, this is an enhanced and expanded version of the Japanese roguelike One Way Heroics, which I talked about a few days ago. It’s positioned as an “expansion” but it’s actually a new standalone game based on the skeleton of the original. Mercifully, however, you can import your saved data from the original game — though the conversion process means that you can’t send it back to the original game once you’ve done this, but why on Earth would you want to?

One Way Heroics Plus follows the same fomula as its predecessor in that it involves you, the Hero, attempting to save the world from the ever-encroaching darkness, represented by the screen that scrolls every turn, regardless of whether you’re actually moving “forwards” or not. Get pushed off the left side of the screen and you lose. Die and you lose. Beat the Demon Lord, who shows up after 400km of travelling on the easiest difficulty and at regular intervals on the other levels, and you win. There are also some other means of winning, but I won’t spoil those for you now.

So what’s new? Well, a few things. Firstly, the interface has had an overhaul. The original game didn’t have a bad interface — although it was rather cluttered thanks to the game running in 640×480 — but doing things like repetitive actions was a little cumbersome. The addition of a customisable hotbar alleviates this issue by allowing you to set a series of items and abilities ready for quick access at any time. Other little tweaks have been done here and there, too; items now glow, tough enemies pulse red, there’s a clear indicator when an enemy spots you, there’s an XP bar that appears when you can XP, there’s an auto-move function (with a customisable filter for whether or not it should automatically stop when enemies are nearby) and generally, the whole thing is just a bit slicker.

There are some new character classes and Perks, too, including some “negative” perks (or disadvantages, I guess they are, really) for those who want to make things a bit more challenging. There’s also supposedly an expanded metagame involving collecting “Dimensional Coins” throughout your travels and using them to upgrade a castle, but I haven’t explored this aspect of the game at all yet. Supposedly this unlocks new characters, quests and mechanics — I’m quite interested to see what it offers, as this is, from the sound of things, the most major addition to the game.

It’s the same game at its core, though, and that’s no bad thing, as the original was really solid. What One Way Heroics Plus does, however, is take that solid foundation and build an even more interesting, challenging and replayable game out of it; I’m very much looking forward to exploring it a bit more in the coming weeks — and at some point in the next few days, I’ll post a video showing some of the new features in a bit more detail, too.

For now, though, I have to mourn my journey from earlier today, where I successfully travelled for over 850km and reached experience level 76 before making the ill-considered decision to swim across the ocean to a small island and rescue a little girl; sadly, my swimming skill was too low to allow me to outrun the creeping Darkness, and I, along with the little girl and Queen Frieda, who had been accompanying me for some distance (and gradually revealing her surprising backstory in the process), were swallowed up by oblivion, never to be seen again… at least until I hit the “New Game” button again.