Enter the Gallowspire: The Non-Rogue Roguelite
Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors has you entering into the dungeons of Gallowspire to face the lich Tar-Baphon in the Pathfinder universe. Traverse the lower depths of the Gallowspire fighting as a Fighter, Rogue or Wizard. Along the way, you’ll face floods of enemies, and learn and equip new abilities and talents! You’ll have 4 main bosses to face along your journey across 5 levels of difficulty.
Gallowspire has a very tight and neat roguelite design that I feel so many other games in this genre deviate from. But Gallowspire really hits the perfect spot. All the spells and abilities have a nice sharp, crisp sound to them really amping up your fights. The bright colours of your characters are set in stark contrast to the dark and dreary dungeon floors. The variety of enemies is also pretty spot on, with not too much repetition as to feel boring. This is not to say that Gallowspire is exceptional in all these regards, but more that they hit all the necessary notes (design-wise) that any roguelite worth its salt should.
The Survivors
This transitions me into the gameplay of Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors. For anyone familiar with Vampire Survivors, you’ll feel right at home here. You are controlling a single character as one of the 3 classes mentioned above. You are also given a companion who is an NPC of any one of the other 2 classes not chosen for a particular run. Apart from the boss levels, you’ll find yourself in a large open-floor dungeon fighting off hoards of enemies coming at you.
Along the way, you can pick up health potions, XP potions and other types of potions. Every few seconds a chest will also spawn which you can unlock. In every chest are 4 random cards which can be abilities and/or talents. You also get this same screen upon levelling up. Every card grants you new abilities/talents or upgrades current ones. Herein lies the draw of replayability in Gallowspire. You can only choose so many cards per run, but you can re-roll the cards so long as you have a re-roll available. Each class has its own unique cards to choose from.
Rolling a natural 1
Now on the surface, this all sounds pretty great and par for the course for any rogue-lite. However, where Gallowspire lost me was in the actual playthrough. The abilities that you unlock fire off automatically. So the only real input by you is movement, collecting items, and an ultimate you can use once every 10 – 6 seconds or so. Outside of this, you feel a strong lack of control, and after a while, you feel as if you’re playing a running simulator in a dungeon. But even more frustrating is that this type of gameplay inevitably funnels you into a select few playstyles. You either focus on movement speed to quickly get out of trouble or focus on your stop time. Everything else doesn’t ultimately matter as you can passively kill enemies.
A Path to Find
I have seen some strange design choices in games, but the choice to remove a player’s ability to use, well abilities is baffling. The only way I can justify long playthroughs for this game is on handheld devices such as the Steam deck or the Nintendo Switch! Outside of that maybe give this a miss if you’re looking for a more engaging roguelite! But there may be hope on the horizon as BKOM Studios has another Pathfinder instalment in the works, which may, hopefully, redeem the Pathfinder games!
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