About Adopt Me:
Very difficult game about helping an AI recover lost files. Half the game is about interacting with the AI. Simple things like talking, playing games and changing the outfit of the AI. But the real gameplay is doing mini-games to recover lost files. This part is difficult to the point of wanting to rage. But there’s no way around it. For that. it’s a hard pill to offer to others. To those out of the loop: before the Welcome Home update, the play loop of Adore was structured more traditionally ‘roguelike’ in terms of run progression, with a groundbreaking summoner/moba-like combat system, but relatively light on the ‘creature collecting’ part of the game, simply because that’ difficult to incorporate in any roguelike. There was a metagame hub where some creatures (not many) could be ‘stored’, essentially, and the only way to get new ones ‘stored’ was to start runs with empty party slots and capture new creatures, which you could then choose to bring with you or not when the run ended/failed. There was an element of ‘trading up’ through a run to a degree, starting with a few keeper creatures and some filler, and then capturing/releasing others as you went to keep pace with the difficulty curve (which, let me not forget to mention, is surprisingly steep and still is. not unfairly so, but definitely unforgivingly so). This resulted in some awkward tensions, such as situations where you could theoretically capture a new creature (that would then have full health) to replace your trained up creature that was at critical health to keep the run going, but would result in giving up the ‘keeper’ creature etc. It had phenomenal per-run gameplay and combat mehcanics, but had self-admitted struggles making the roguelike and creature collecting parts of the game – the blending thereof being what makes Adore so innovative – play nicely together. As a result, it was primarily a ‘roguelike with creature collecting elements’.
