Finding a unique twist in RPG’s in 2024 is a delightful discovery and I think I’ve found that with RP7: Spin Your Own Encounter. Part roguelike, part RPG, part slot machine – this game is all about the “spin until you win” mentality. You see in RP7, the road you’ll be taking will be spun entirely by you.
On its early access release RP7 has three of the seven character classes available, two of which require unlocking. Your goal is to travel across the five worlds (seven in the full game) defeating monsters, conquering bosses and saving the world at the end. To do this you’ll move automatically from space to space in the game and the speed of that movement is determined by your difficulty choice. Easy means slower movement, very hard is all about making quick decisions. This is because under each step you take there will be either monsters, items, chests or weird special features that will alter your journey, but its up to you to spin the spaces you don’t like until you either get something you do like or your character lands on the space and you are out of time.
Each step you take from left to right and back again will have consequences so spinning your slot spaces (and multiple of them together) repeatedly is key to success. If its a monster, you’ll see a number and symbol beneath is showing the damage it will give you to your shield or health. Each time you meet an enemy, you will kill it, but you’ll take on that damage unless you’ve got some special items that reduce damage down. Killing monsters generates cash though and that means when you reach shops, or unlock treasure chests on the way, you can buy new items or upgrade them to make your character stronger. You can’t spin enemies constantly – you’ll be dead in under a minute. Instead you’ll be balancing monsters and health potions or shield replenishments. RP7 is all about risk vs reward and the balance shifts very quickly.
As you travel, you’ll collect items that can improve your stats such as reduced damage or increasing maximum health. Powerful ones can include regaining some health automatically every 7 fights and upgrading it brings it down to 6 then 5 fights. Other items don’t buff you but instead increase the odds of money, health, treasure or shields spinning in certain slots. You’ll be braver spamming the spin button if you know there is a 15% chance of a potion in slot 1 for example. All these options feel quite valid but RP7 is a tough cookie to crack and that comes down the limited view of the path ahead of you.
As you’ll see in the screenshots, you can only see the 7 steps you are currently taking. In a great twist of gameplay, sometimes it rains and your hero moves faster as they want to get to an inn! This means you’ll only get a few seconds advanced warning of big dramas lying ahead. These include bombs that take away 5 health or cacti and lightning poles that sap damage from you. If you are caught on lower health but don’t spin a couple of potions quickly, suddenly its game over. As you progress through the game, enemies start to bond together and create bigger, meaner versions of themselves. In some ways its like playing a match 2 or 3 game. Spin two fire bombs next to each other and they no longer take 3 health each, it’ll be 4. They’ll also explode the slots either side of them too, meaning you might have a nasty surprise straight afterwards. They do pay good money though so its back to the good old risk vs reward balance I mentioned early. It is what makes RP7 so compelling to play and since games are quite brisk, you can be in and out in half hour easily.
Bosses are a great addition to RP7 too. There are more bosses than levels and so you are given them in random rotation. Each one has its own unique attacks which again you can try to spin those encounters out of your path. When you then hit a boss that will trigger a total reshuffle of the 7 steps and so you’ll be constantly on your toes working out what to spin and remove. This is where the initially weird but quite cool control system comes into its own. Playing keyboard, you’ll be able to assign a slot to the ZXCVBNM keys and in theory you can spin all seven! It’s chaotic to do so but I found myself spamming spin like a rhythm action game sometimes whilst trying to survive. It takes a while to get used to but it becomes intuitive. When using a controller, you don’t have the same dexterity available. Instead you move an analogue stick around and you are limited to just three slots to spin. This means controller users will be disadvantaged so I recommend keyboard for now.
Graphically, RP7 is cute as a button and the soundtrack is buoyant and jubilant. The more you play, the more items and effects become unlocked to added into the mix. When a run ends, you can take the money from a previous run and use it to buy some items for the start of the next run but there is no real meta progression. I’m on the fence with this decision because some runs really sucked and others felt like I was money farming to then have a “proper” run afterwards. I think this is where the early access release will help with balancing over time.
RP7: Spin Your Own Encounter is unique, engrossing, streamlined and enjoyable to play. There is a lot of luck involved but you can stack the odds in your favour and make your own luck with the slot spinning machine of life. It is a delight to play, full of replayability and new things to try and with balancing and even more content coming across early access, this should be an even greater title when it reaching V1.0.
Review code provided by publisher. Out now on Steam.
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