I’m usually fairly up to date on the various comings and goings of the roguelike genre. I can tell you that, for whatever reason, there is a surge of co-op driven roguelikes between Windblown, Camelot, Hyper Light Breaker, and 33 Immortals. I can tell you that in the wake of the uber successful poker roguelike Balatro we have seen a whole bunch of “what do you mean there’s a roguelike of that” between Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers (a Blackjack roguelike), Passant (A Chess roguelike), and Peglin (a Pachinko roguelike). What I could not have told is that predating all of these is Luck Be a Landlord, a slot machine roguelike that came out on PC in 2023.
As a connoisseur of the genre, when offered a chance to review the console port, well I couldn’t pass up the chance. I got my copy on the Switch and immediately spun my symbols to earn coins in order to pay my landlord with increasingly strict rent prices. And then, as is always the case, during initial playthroughs, I proceeded to be unable to meet the threshold and thus was thrown to the start of the loop with a clean-ish slate and slightly more knowledge and a better appreciation of the in-game hints.
Luck Be a Landlord is almost an auto-battler. For the most part, all of your agency is vested in which symbols are available to spin on the virtual slot machine and which items (relic analogs) you pick up. You do get a steady access to rerolls and removals, and at that the higher Floors (LBaL’s scaling difficulty system) you also get access to Essence which provide an extra dimension with items that are much more volatile in nature. But seemingly, all the symbols are unlocked from the get go, and it’s up to you to make sense of the different synergies and scaling that you’ll need in order to pay rent.
My first play through I made the rookie mistake of adding any and all symbols after each spin, eventually bloating my inventory preventing any valuable multipliers or symbol interactions. After about an hour of play time, I figured out enough of the system to actually make all 12 payments on time and ascend to floor 11 and eventually face my landlord to the death.
Oh yeah, at high enough floors you’re not paying rent, you’re actively fighting your oppressor. This leads into the game’s “Landlord” theme as you are backed by a tongue-in-cheek communist group sending a steady supply of trinkets and helpful in-game tips about how to best navigate the apparently aggressive real estate market. In lieu of an actual plot or narrative, you mostly get bits whether it’s the Guillotine item destroying Billionaires, Dwarves drinking beer until you get an anvil that lets them mine ore, or powering flowers with a combination of rain, sunlight, and bees. It’s cute and colorful and played extremely smoothly on the Switch given that it is has a 8bit/16bit-esque aesthetic.
The game symbol’s interact with each other in a plethora of ways. Some symbols consume other symbols. Some symbols multiply the value of another symbol. Some symbols create more symbols. Some care about positioning, and some care about numeric advantage. There’s a lot to process, but everything is mostly intuitive and well described and once you get a hang of it, you’ll manage to meet thresholds with a little bit of scaling and a little bit of luck.
After completing a run, you’re able to transition to an endless mode (some with the fear of ever increasing event, others with the curiosity of how big can you make your coffers), and there is a veritable laundry list of achievements to dig through and keep you occupied.
The ease at which you are able to pick up and play makes it appealing. While it’s not quite as genre-defining as its admitted inspiration of Slay the Spire, the game is entertaining. The soundtrack matches its frenetic energy, the jokes elicit chuckles, and it’s super easy to restart a run if you didn’t make it.
At $14.99, this game is accessible and amusing. It can err on the repetitive side given that you’re basically just pulling the same lever over and over and over again, and the core is fairly static. At the higher difficulties, there is a sense of challenge and reward from successfully pivoting and doing things like generating coins from King Midas only for a Pirate to loot them and become more powerful or superpowering a Dove with gatcha capsule or feeding cultists and hexes to an eldritch abomination. And ultimately that is what one looks in a successful roguelike, moments of glee at watching your machinations come to pass, and I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to get in the higher echelons of funds that need scientific notation to keep track of. And you maybe you will too.
Luck Be a Landlord is available now on PC, PSN, XBox, and Switch.
Thanks to TrampolineTales for the review copy and images.
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