Rogue Legacy is a quality hack 'n' slash game starring not one knight, but scores of them, attempting to unveil the secrets of a mysterious, rearranging castle. Each is a descendant of the previous character, and now you know the source of the game's name: from rogue-like for the procedural assembly of the castle, and from the legacy passed down from generation to generation. Picking your new knight when the old one dies is fun. You pick from three characters randomly-generated from a mix of characteristics including name, gender, class, and magic spell known, but also genetic traits. The traits range from goofy (excessive cussing) to useful (higher speed) to eclectic (replacing the castle tileset with a hacker-styled one).

The characters, and especially the traits, are a mixed bag. You never know what you might get, and some of them provide decided advantages for your run. My particular top pick was hypergonadism, the trait that gives your swings greater knockback on enemies. That kind of bonus provides a lot of breathing room when trying to dodge attacks left and right.

My greatest disappointment is that the system of genetic traits is not hereditary, at least not in any way I could divine. Since the continued lineage makes it obvious that your knights are having children, I hoped that I could breed my lineage through selective knighting. Sadly, I never found any evidence that it worked that way.

After picking your new knight, you spend any money your last knight picked up in the castle from killing monsters and destroying the bits and pieces of furniture. Furniture also drops potions that restore magic and turkey legs that restore health. The game itself calls this out as bizarre and theorizes that it's part of the castle's magical nature. It's also not worth asking how you can spend funds collected by someone who died in a castle you can never leave. Just don't.

You spend this money on permanent buffs, upgrades to classes, unlocking new classes, or unlocking new equipment discovered in the castle. (They are also mailed out to your descendants by magic.) The power curve and learning curve blend together. I died quickly the first several times, but after a while both my character's inherent power and my learned skill grew, and I began surviving long enough to discover more interesting things about the castle. There are multiple regions, each with a boss that you must beat to reach the final antagonist and solve the mystery of the castle. The enemies scale up in difficulty as you go, both in attack patterns and in raw damage and hit points.

After beating the game, you can continue with Game+, which introduces harder monsters. I beat it again and went to Game+2, but I think that's as far as I go. They're eating me alive out there, and I don't see the need to go back into the castle.

Rogue Legacy is a fun hack 'n' slash and is available on Steam for $15. I bought it on sale for under $5 and got almost 25 hours of play out of it. I call that a damn good investment.

Just a note: The game definitely plays better with a controller. As a primarily PC gamer, I didn't even consider this until I'd played for at least ten hours.