Why Loop Hero Players Should Rethink Putting Mountains Close Together

The new recursive game Loop Hero contains some seemingly straightforward strategies for buffing the hero character, including clustering mountain tiles to increase the hero’s maximum hit points. But a secret combo of mountain cards might end up causing players more trouble than they’re ready for.

Loop Hero is a game with a simple concept: a hero walks a looped path, fighting monsters and collecting resources until he dies or retreats back to the safety of camp. What makes the game unusual is that players can’t control the combat aspect of the game. Instead, they place tiles on the board to build out the world the hero traverses. Some cards spawn monsters for the hero to fight, allowing him to level up and gain loot. Others provide buffs such as increased health or a forest that will destroy enemies early. Balancing challenges and helpful tiles is required to level up a hero enough to beat the boss at the end of each level of Loop Hero.

On the surface, placing mountain cards close together on the board of Loop Hero is an obvious smart move. Mountain cards add 5 HP to a hero’s maximum for every other mountain or rock card next to it. The more mountains and rocks a player has close together, the more the buff. But when a player lays out a 3×3 grid of mountains or rocks, all the cards in that grid transform into a new giant tile, a mountain peak. The mountain peak brings an additional perk in the form of an extra 120 HP for the player, but also a new danger: harpies. The mountain peak will spawn a harpy every two days, and that harpy will fly to a random tile on the board. In a game where players are trying to make the combat of Loop Hero challenging, but not too challenging, an extra harpy in a fight might end up overwhelming them.

Tips for Using Mountain Peaks in Loop Hero

Mountain peaks can still have their uses if manipulated in certain ways. When created, mountain peaks in Loop Hero not only add to the hero’s health, but also grant nine of the “noticeable change” resource, which eventually converts into a metamorphosis resource once the player has collected 20 of them. As only one mountain peak can exist on the board, it might seem like players can only collect this harvest of noticeable change once. By using the card Oblivion, however, players can remove one tile from the mountain peak and reset it back to a collection of eight mountain or rock tiles. Placing another mountain or rock tile in the newly created hole reforms the mountain peak, and grants the player the resource bonus once again. Players can perform this trick multiple times in a single run.

Loop Hero is an addictive game that provides fairly limited explanation about how stats and tiles interact with each other, encouraging players to experiment to discover new ways to unlock hidden bonuses. Players just have to be cautious that they don’t accidentally create more monsters than they can handle if they want their hero to survive through the next boss fight.

Loop Hero is now available on PC.

About The Author

Caitlin Grieve
(198 Articles Published)

Caitlin has been writing about video games and sci-fi/fantasy books since 2018. Her video game adventures began a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away as an Imperial pilot in Star Wars: TIE Fighter. When she’s not gaming, she’s reading, and when she’s not reading, she’s writing. But she is ALWAYS plotting her next D&D escapades.

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