Loop Hero sells half-a-million, promises new cards and classes

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You're making me dizzy.

A Loop Hero Steam card showing the Lich.
(Image credit: Four Quarters)

The excellent Loop Hero has been swallowing my evenings of late, an original game that's hard to pigeonhole: it's kind of like a passive roguelike map-builder. Whatever you call it, our review said this is "the sort of smart, focused resurrection of old games I want more of, something that feels old and new with every expedition step."

Clearly players agree, because alongside overwhelmingly positive reviews Loop Hero has now sold over 500,000 units in its first week on Steam. Publisher Devolver also says it has the fastest-selling soundtrack they've ever had, and an average playtime of 12 hours. It then indulges in some dodgy math: "by our calculations [this] means a total of 3 trillion hours and 18 billion loops, at least!" The total hours played would be more like 12 million: for Devolver's 18 billion calculation to be accurate, each player would have had to loop around 38,000 times which... doesn't seem realistic.  Maybe developer Four Quarters knows something we don't. Or maybe Devolver's poking a bit of fun at the industry's fascination with largely meaningless numbers.

As a minor celebration Four Quarters has commissioned some Steam trading cards from the artist BardtheZombie (the image above is one of them), and goes on to give a small glimpse into the future. "Right now we're working on patches with quality-of-life updates you all asked for," a Four Quarters' post says, "including a system for saving during expeditions, new speed settings, and a deck of traits gained from bosses!" 

As well as this, future content will include "new cards, classes and transformations" with more updates promised soon. Meantime if you want tips, a class breakdown, or just to make the game run 2X faster (yes please), we've got you covered.

Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."