I've been humbled by a surprisingly robust roguelite action RPG where you control two characters at once

A handful of hours with a preview build of Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree taught me a couple important things about myself: Something activates in my brain when I play anything that remotely resembles Hades, and, despite my experience with the genre, I'm really bad at controlling two characters at once.

Although that last part made playing Towa a real challenge, I had so much fun with everything else that I'm excited to see if I can boost my dual character comprehension skills when it drops next month.

Towa nails the basic parts of a roguelite where you're fighting through rooms full of enemies and picking up random upgrades. I found some that made my dashes whip up tornadoes and my sword set enemies on fire. Like Hades' boons, all of them fit into categories that you'll eventually be able to manipulate into showing up more often through other systems outside of the run.

But here's what makes Towa different: You have two characters to manage, each with their own abilities and life bars. Your main character is the Tsurugi, the sword fighter, and your secondary character is the Kagura, the magic caster. Controlling one of them is easy enough, but the other one is always trailing behind you.

This can lead to some tricky situations where enemy attacks—often telegraphed through red shapes on the ground—can wipe your buddy out, effectively gutting your damage output by halving your available skills. It's even worse if you've invested some of your upgrades into their spells. The added risk makes encounters last longer than a typical fight in Hades as you dodge in and out of attacks trying to keep both of your characters alive.

You can always swap to your Kagura and control them directly, but I found it was much easier to position myself in spots where neither character would get hit. Alternatively, you can play through the game in co-op and blame your friend for sloppily playing as the Kagura.

I can't say I fully adjusted to managing a duo by myself. I was relieved any time I found a campsite during a run to rest at and replenish my Kagura's health. I did, however, find ways to work around the double trouble.

The Tsurugi's twin swords are powerful enough on their own to clear packs of normal enemies without your Kagura's spells. Each blade has a limited amount of uses before it breaks, forcing you to flip between them as you fight (the damaged sword will be as good as new as soon as you swap back). Even in my unluckiest runs, timing my light and heavy attacks was rewarding enough to keep fights from becoming a grind fest. It only ever felt like I had really screwed up when I lost my Kagura during a boss fight. Bosses are relentless and it was hard to win the battle of attrition without both of my characters alive.

Building the blade

There are thankfully ways to build around this problem in between runs. You can craft your own swords through a series of timing-based minigames that determine the strength of various attributes. The first sword I made was a brittle blade capable of dealing one big chunk of damage before breaking.

Because I had to swap between my swords so often, I picked upgrades that increased my durability and enhanced the projectile that you fling out when you switch weapons. To complement it, I made my other sword sturdier but with only a moderate amount of damage output. By the end of my time with Towa I was deleting big enemies with my super sword and clearing out smaller ones with the balanced one, giving combat a dramatically different pace than how it started.

I wasn't able to gather enough materials during the preview to really put the crafting system to the test, but I suspect there will be a lot of room to customize how you want your swords to fit into the rhythm of combat.

In fact, I'm sure of it after getting a taste of how differently each character plays. The Tsurugi and Kagura are roles, not defined characters, and there are multiple to choose from for each job. I stuck with Origami, a lady who sends a massive projectile forward when she slams her sword down, as my Tsurugi. But the other characters can pull out attacks that pierce through enemies or carve through everything around them in a circle.

There were definitely times in the later areas where I wish I had been playing a character more suited for clearing out packs of weaker enemies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a good idea to choose your Tsurugi based on what kind of monsters you're struggling with on a particular run you can't quite beat.

Bittersweet victories

I defeated my first boss with Rekka as my Kagura. Her fireballs and damage reduction aura came in clutch while fighting a dragon boss who spent most of the fight ping-ponging around the room. I thought I had a great combo going with Origami, but then Towa reminded me why we were even doing all this in the first place.

All the characters are scattered throughout time in the game's opening and need to be brought together again to defend the world from a demon. A successful run ends with a ritual that sends your Kagura back to the right timeline and removes them as an option in your following runs. Rekka and her fireballs were gone. My unstoppable duo was shattered and I was forced to figure out how to work with someone else.

As devastating as that was, I kind of love the idea of a fleeting roster of sidekicks who you need to build around to get through each run. As long as it's not too punishing to craft new swords and move around your skill tree upgrades, the temporary nature of your builds seems to be the thing that makes Towa not just an anime Hades.

And honestly, even if it was just that, I think I'd still want to see more of it. My three hours with the preview was nowhere near enough time to explore the upgrades you can stack on top of each other in a run. I found a few little combos, but nothing that felt ridiculously overpowered. I spotted new spells available in the skill tree that can conjure a pillar of water that almost covers the entire room or pull down a boulder that scorches enemies in its explosion, so I expect to have a lot of options deeper into the game.

All the creative buildcrafting is impressive for a game that is only going to run you $30 on Steam when it's out on September 18. Anyone who hasn't been sucked into a Hades 2 hole, or hasn't been bitten by the roguelite bug yet, shouldn't let a game as fun as this slip under your radar.