Two Left Thumbs has a knack for finding indie games that do something a little differently and Gorgon Shield fits that description perfectly. It is a real time battling RPG roguelike where your party of four heroes ascend giant towers to kill Medusa. You do it riding a giant shield and you’ll need to spin your heroes around on the shield to make things work. It is a frantic and strategic game of meta progression and quickfire decision making.
At the start of Gorgon Shield you’ll have one hero from one hero class who’ll attempt to ascend the tower. They’ll have strength (health and melee damage), agility (speed and dodge chance), intellect (critical hit and ranged damage) and charisma (healing and treasure actions) stats. These can be upgraded as your hero levels up and augmented by carrying some armour, weapon or shield. XP to level up your hero comes solely from killing enemies as a group and so you’ll need to be aggressive to pick off enemies as quickly as possible. It isn’t long before you unlock your second, third and fourth slots for heroes and its here where the magic of Gorgon Shield truly begins.
Each tower has 10 floors with a boss at the end and when you arrive at each floor, you’ll have four corridors matching the compass directions… and four heroes. Each corridor will have a symbol on which will mean either enemies will be piling through the door, or you can trigger ranged attacks, collect treasure, or heal a hero or the shield itself. Its game over if all heroes die or the shield is destroyed. The only way the shield can be damaged is if its exposed and so you’ll be rotating your heroes to where you need them to be. If one is hurt, spin it to the healing spot. If your ranger or mage has a ranged attack spot, spin them there for maximum effect. You can’t rearrange your heroes once you start a run so you’ll never get the perfect arrangement for each floor and that means you’ll need to react dynamically for each floor and with what enemies are arriving to kill you.
Each hero has the ability to unlock two special abilities which are tied to their class and the shield itself can trigger some special effects such as healing your team, damaging all enemies or speeding up attacks. There is a lot to digest and choose from and that’s part of Gorgon Shield’s charm. Bosses are powerhouses and fast too and can often wipe you out. Before you get there though – the game throws another curveball.
The penultimate floor of every tower takes you to a totally different game – a time trial top down dungeon crawler! Here the game asks you to collect treasure, attack and kill enemies where you can, heal and make it to the exit before the timer hits zero. Enemies attack in packs and are stronger than the standard vertical tower portion of the game but there are plenty of places to heal. You must be quick though because when the clock hits zero, the grim reaper pops out and chases you. He can pass through walls and if he touches you, your whole party dies instantly. Due to the RNG nature of these dungeons, sometimes they are incredibly easy to clear and on rare occasions the dungeon feels too long to make it. It needs a little bit of balancing to feel fair every time.
Your team will wipe out early and often. This introduces you to the meta progression of the game. Using the gold you collect in a run, you can open up town buildings and each one does something different. The shop purchases upgrades to health, damage, speed and all kinds of stats to your heroes. It also reduces the prices for buying upgrades elsewhere. The pub is where you’ll unlock new classes. There are 10 classes of hero and whilst they have randomly generated stats for each time you use them, they’ll have unique traits and unlockable skills for their class. More classes means more options and that’s the fun of Gorgon Shield. Alongside that you’ll also be able to find runes in your runs but completing challenges. These runs can bolster your shield in a new building where you can purchase shield upgrades and global effects. The shield really acts as a 5th hero when you invest in it. Lastly, you can upgrade the starting level of each class of hero. This means their upgraded stats carry over from run to run and you can slowly beef your team to take on multiple towers in a single run.
To win the game you’ve got to complete 6 towers but that is extremely tricky to do. If you are able to, you can then take on the online leaderboards for having the best and cleanest runs. There is plenty of replayability here if it scratches your itch and it certainly did for me. That made it all the more annoying that on release, Gorgon Shield was almost unplayable. For the first week of release the game crashed to desktop constantly. I’m delighted to say from week 2 onwards, the game has been patched to become much more stable. Almost every crash I was having is now fixed and the random framerate slowdowns are few and far between. It does feel like the longer you play, the game starts to stutter a bit still but the developer is clearly working on it and each patch is a marked improvement. If you don’t mind the odd hiccup, you should dive in now. If you do, give it a few more weeks for patches to make it silky smooth.
Gorgon Shield is without doubt one of my favourite discoveries of 2024. It is a unique and engrossing roguelike with lots of personality, charm, tactics and reactive planning. Every run mixes things up and once you’ve unlocked all the classes, you can really explore tons of formations to see what works for you. This is a cult classic in the making. Keep an eye on it if you aren’t picking it up straight away.
Review copy provided by publisher. Out now on Steam.
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