Patch Quest is a game mostly developed by one single developer but with inspirations taken from many other games, a lot of which I didn’t think would mesh all that well together… but boy, howdy, was I wrong.

Developer: Lychee Game Labs
Publisher: Curve Games
Genre: Indie, 2D, Roguelike, Monster-Taming, Danmaku/Bullet Hell, Adventure
Release Date: October 9th, 2019
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was purchased.

After finding the long-lost place known as Patchlantis, you set out as an explorer, trying to stitch it all back together. You wanna figure out this place’s mysteries while something in this place really doesn’t want you to. Ominous!

That said, Patch Quest is a wild mix of inspirations, as I previously mentioned: If you look at the genre list, you’ll see that it is sort of a metroidvania-bullethell-roguelike-adventure game with monster-taming and pokémon-like streaks. Oh jeez.

While the world itself is fixed with specific biomes, shortcuts and other important places to discover in the same places each run, the patches themselves are procedurally generated. You can find new monsters, traps and structures in these patches as you move from Point A to Point B. 

So, in a way, it takes the procedural generation aspect of roguelikes and combines it with the fun exploration aspect of Metroidvania games where you venture into a direction and see how far you can go before unlocking a shortcut, enabling you to skip the detour and directly move to the newly discovered area.

This is quite important for a game like Patch Quest as you don’t want to burn out on runs by having to explore the same areas time and time again, simply to make your way to your goal in question. The shortcuts are a much-welcomed feature.

As you explore the world, your scanner is recharged and you can scan plants and other things in the world to collect knowledge of the world. Flora scanned this way can also be added onto your base, giving you access to some ammunition before runs.

As you move around the world, you’ll encounter incredibly adorable but also incredibly feral beasts that will try to harm you using charges, bullets and clouds that you’ll need to skillfully dodge… or you die trying.

But Patch Quest is awfully forgivable for a roguelike.

When faced with enemies, you can shoot them with nutrients that will make them “go to sleep” and uh “go away” after eating their fill. Yeah… that’s pretty wholesome. These nutrients are acquired from plants that allow you to shoot homing, exploding, and other types of projectiles – and they can be combined into one big smoothie as well to create powerful combined effects.

So, apart from ranged attacks, you also can bring out your taming lasso to then circle around enemies, taming them and levelling them up. Some let you afflict status effects onto enemies or dash away. Some abilities deal damage and abilities that can even remove projectiles from the screen, which is pretty darn nice.

And well, there are stat points that can be put into skills like “riding”, “blasting”, “blocking”, “dodging” and “afflicting”… and with high enough dodge, you can evade so many bullets without a care in the world. It’s a ton of fun!

At times, I was wondering if the game was too easy but apparently, there are a lot of difficulty levels and pumping it up too much will make you die a lot. 

Legends say if you beat the game on the highest difficulty, you unlock a new one that makes you die in real life if you die in the game…

Jokes aside, the game may look cute but it does get very hard… and if you want to, you can always dial back the difficulty… or up for that matter. I’ve lost runs on easier difficulties due to carelessness or just not being good enough – but that’s fine, really. It’s part of the game.

Dying doesn’t feel too bad either, honestly. You get to redecorate your base, unlock new passive and active abilities, and you just make progress slowly but steadily which feels quite satisfying, in my opinion.

The early hours of Patch Quest can feel a bit slow but as you unlock more stuff, the game also throws in events, new enemies, enemy variants, and quests to make the game feel fresh and new.

The quests give you a sense of direction that is much-needed in games like this. At the same time, there’s something inside of me that wants to catalogue each and every creature, variant, and plant… and I wanna just explore the world of Patchlantis and piece it all together, figure out what is happening and what the cutest critter in this world is.

Currently, I’m leaning towards Zirrel, btw, as well as Hypnoth… but after getting spoiled in the Wiki, I made it my mission to find and befriend Gelatoise and Yangrowl. Oh my god, they’re precious!

And well, you may be able to tell but I love the game. 

It’s a ton of fun… I had this critter-spawning build that would make critters appear when I used abilities and they’d home in onto enemies, attacking them and then exploding. Paired with a Tadpog, this frog-like monster that spawns critters anyhow, this build was insanely fun.

With the move and everything, I’ve been quite busy offline and I really wanna get it to work on my laptop which sadly struggles with a bunch of games. 

Patch Quest appears to run quite well but I just need to find my controller in one of the boxes and I should be good to go, theoretically.

Finding the right box, though, is much like Patch Quest: It’s an adventure through and through. There’s a sense of mystery as you dive deeper into the pile of boxes and bags. 

You find surprises on your journey, get stronger as you figure out where to look next, and when you fail at the end of the day, you don’t feel disheartened but rather excited about the discoveries you made along the way and the cool things you found even when you weren’t searching for them at first.

Patch Quest is incredibly wholesome, I wanna say, but despite the cute art direction and the chill comfy atmosphere, it is a roguelike after all, with scaling difficulties, procedurally generated patches of land, difficult encounters and perma-“death”.

You don’t die, you just get evacuated… Just like how you don’t “kill” monsters but rather put them to sleep after shooting fruits at them. Very healthy fruits. Yup.

Patch Quest somewhat recently got a new update, too, allowing players to create their own temples and dungeons. It’s pretty nice!

More importantly, Patch Quest is also part of this month’s Humble Choice so if you’re interested in this game and others, go grab it while it’s up! You won’t regret it!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.