Roguelike Report Card: Jotunslayer: Hordes of Hell

I fear that I may never finish this Roguelike Report Card project because I find new roguelikes to play faster than I can grade the ones that I already have. This past month alone, two new roguelikes have found their way into my life, and I’ve been enjoying both of them immensely. Today, I’d like to talk about the more obscure of the two, Jotunslayer: Hordes of Hell.

If I were to be my most reductive, I’d say that Jotunslayer: Hordes of Hell is a blending of Vampire Survivors and Hades. Jotunslayer takes the roguelike bullet heaven template that was created by Vampire Survivors and uses the Hades upgrade system to create something that is both very much its own game while still owing a debt of inspiration to those two games. But if I’m being less reductive, Jotunslayer manages to improve on the roguelike bullet heaven genre (the Steam page refers to it as a horde-survivor game) by adding a few new mechanics, particularly a dash and a special weapon ability, both of which are activated by the user. The game is quite a bit more legible than Vampire Survivors, which can be at least partially attributed to its gorgeous graphics, character design, and a mini-map that communicates various unique features within each level.

Jotunnslayer looking its most Vampire Survivor

Jotunslayer: Hordes of Hell is still in pre-release and is being developed by a Slovakian developer called Games Farm. According to their website, they are a team of over 50 developers, and it seems like they specialize in top-down games that incorporate Vikings and monsters into their games, and Jotunslayer incorporates both these concepts. The general conceit of the game is that you’re a (un?)dead Viking warrior who must fight through waves of enemies and complete feats to earn the blessings of the gods. You slay monsters to collect XP gems, and every time you collect enough to level up, you choose an upgrade from two different pools (usually two different gods). Once you’ve completed enough feats, you can perform a ritual (stand in a trigger area for about 3 seconds) to summon a Jotunn (which in this game takes the form of a giant, often grotesque, monster) to slay. If you manage to complete the level and slay the Jotun at the end of it, you unlock new difficulties, challenges, and levels to complete.

Failure is Inevitable: A– (8)

This game commits one of the cardinal sins of the roguelike genre: you can beat it on your first playthrough. I know in my original article about roguelikes I said I would dock a game points if that happens, and when I beat Jotunslayer on my first playthrough I was pretty disappointed, but the game redeems itself by ratcheting up the difficulty pretty quickly. I was able to beat the first stage on the first two difficulty levels that are made available to you at the start of the game, but then I was stuck for quite a while on the next one. Ultimately, I think the easy wins to start the game serve as a way to suck in newer players that may have picked up the game for its visual or thematic elements without knowing what they were getting into in terms of a horde-survivor roguelike. This also gives you a safe playground to experiment with the various upgrades that you will receive throughout the game and provides time to understand the leveling up, healing, and upgrade mechanics.

At those low difficulties, it felt as though my character could slay any monster so long as I continued to level up and upgrade his abilities, regardless of which upgrades I chose, and that gave me an early impression that this would hold true for the entire game. That assumption was incorrect. On the higher difficulties, you are required to find better synergies between the powers you choose to upgrade, and failing to do so will result in your character getting overwhelmed by increasingly packed swarms of monsters. So while I initially felt a sense of skepticism about the game’s early difficulty (or lack thereof), I can’t fault the game for wanting to give players who haven’t cut their teeth on hours and hours of Vampire Survivors a steady on-ramp before hitting them with the more challenging gameplay.

Rewards Experimentation: B+ (7)

Jotunslayer utilizes an upgrade system similar to Hades, where players are given one of two gods to choose from and then three different upgrade choices from their chosen god to select from. In this game, the upgrades usually take one of three forms: a skill that automatically triggers after a set cooldown, a new effect that can occur when completing a gameplay action (add an attack to your dash, heal when you pick up gold, trigger a stun when you take damage, etc.), or a numerical upgrade to your stats (more health, damage, speed, etc.).

Some of Odin's abilities in action.

Where Jotunslayer succeeds in rewarding experimentation is in how satisfying it is to find a rock-solid combination of upgrades that can turn you into an unstoppable killing machine. I managed to pull together a group of upgrades that enabled me to deal insane amounts of damage to any enemy that got within just a few inches of my character, making the normal monster swarms an absolute cakewalk. This game, much like Hades, will give you the same gods more frequently once you select from their pool, so if you can find two or three gods that complement each other well and you’re able to find the upgrades you want from them, you can start to put together designs for a successful run.

Where it fails, however, is that it doesn’t feel like some upgrade paths are viable, discouraging experimentation beyond what you find is effective. I spent several runs convinced that upgrading my character’s attack strength and speed would allow me to more effectively dispatch enemies because you have more control over your character’s attacks’ autotargeting than you do the god skill’s autotargeting. However, no matter what variety of skills I surrounded this basic concept with, I always found myself struggling to deal with the thicker swarms of enemies that come late in a run. Ultimately, I found that the only way to make it past this stage was by leaning into the god skills instead of the character’s attack, and my takeaway was that experimenting with builds centered around upgrading the character’s attack was just not feasible.

Requires Variation in Playstyle: D+ (1)

Jotunslayer’s weakest aspect is that it seems like you can get away with samey builds over and over again, which is only exacerbated by the upgrade system that the game uses outside of runs. Players earn currency during a run that they can then spend to upgrade specific characters, gods, skills, or attributes. This means that you can pour all of your upgrades into one character, your favorite gods, and the skills that best complement your playstyle, and just aim for the same build every new run. The game generously gives you the ability to re-roll your level-up rewards 3 times at the start of each run, and more re-rolls can be earned during the run. This means that it’s pretty easy to get most of the bonuses you want to recreate the same runs over and over again.

I can just tell from this picture that this isn't going to go well for this player.

Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to me that the different levels require different builds to optimize winning. Whereas a game like Balatro may force you to build around the upcoming boss blind’s ability, Jotunslayer’s bosses don’t really do anything to counter specific builds—a build that would beat the game’s first boss could beat the game’s second boss could beat the game’s third boss, etc. While it’s still fun to experiment with new abilities and builds, the relatively slow unlock rate for the highest upgrades actually incentivizes players to continue doing the same builds each game to earn the currency needed to unlock newer abilities.

Nails the Difficulty Curve: A+ (10)

I alluded to this in the Failure is Inevitable section, but Jotunslayer does a fantastic job with its difficulty curve. It lures you in with a couple of nice, easy runs that will keep you on your toes but still welcome you into the game, and then it starts cranking up the challenge level. This is true in both a micro and macro sense of the game.

On the micro level, each run starts very easily with a smattering of enemies trickling towards their inevitable death at your hand, but the game gradually increases the difficulty until you’re dealing with non-stop hordes of powerful enemies and multiple elite monsters, all while trying to complete the objectives you need to summon the Jotunn.

In a macro sense, the game starts you off on the easiest level at a low difficulty but unlocks higher difficulties and harder levels as you successfully slay Jotunns. The first stage allows you to get the hang of the game’s basic mechanics, but each subsequent stage throws in additional challenges like kamikaze monsters, enemies with better ranged attacks, and more difficult objectives to complete before being able to summon the Jotunn. The Jotunns themselves increase in difficulty too, going from a monster that mostly just follows you around, throwing a few easily dodged attacks at you, to multiple stages with different patterns you need to recognize and memorize how to react to.

All of this results in a very enjoyable difficulty curve that may see you relaxing in your seat at the start of a run before finding yourself white-knuckling your mouse and pounding your keyboard by the end of it.

Stickiness: A- (8)

I think the main thing that makes Jotunslayer so sticky is how easy it is to start a new run and how pleasurable the game is aesthetically. I’ll touch more on the latter in the Art Design section, but suffice to say, I found myself very eager to get back into a game where I knew nice, squishy enemies were waiting to fall to my bow. The game’s curve feels so natural that I feel no dread about being screwed by bad RNG whenever I consider whether or not I want to start a new game. In fact, most of the time, the only thing that has gotten me to stop playing Jotunslayer after I’ve started is time constraints—I will keep playing until I simply run out of the time needed to play. And with shorter runs that range from 10-20 minutes a pop, it’s easy to squeeze in one (or two… or three) more runs.

Art Design: (3)

This game’s art design is fantastic. One of my first thoughts about the game was that it looks like what someone who doesn’t play video games but knows they’re high-tech thinks they look like. Your player character moves so smoothly around the map, and I love the attack animations. My favorite character is the archer, who zips around the field rapidly firing his bow at enemies, and it makes me feel like Hawkeye or Green Arrow or Legolas. The monster designs are also phenomenal, especially the titular Jotunns, who are highly imaginative.

One of the grosser-looking Jotunns

Narrative: (0)

There’s not much narrative to speak of in this game. I think that the idea is that you’re an undead warrior travelling to the realms of Norse lore to slay the Jotunn in an effort to impress the gods, but even that I’m fuzzy on.

Unique Twist: (0)

As I said at the beginning, this game cribs off of Hades and especially Vampire Survivors. It’s a cool idea to blend the two, but no points for creativity when it comes to the concept.

Total: 37 (B-Tier)

I think that Jotunslayer: Hordes of Hell manages to improve on Vampire Survivors by creating better balance, more interesting opportunities to experiment, and making each run immensely pleasurable. I wouldn’t say this game is a must-play for fans of the roguelike genre, but fans of the bullet heaven/horde survivor subgenres would do well to get in early on this exciting new game.