Game Pass First Impressions: Crown Trick

By Luke Albigés,

It's been a hot minute since I last played a Mystery Dungeon-style game, and I'd kinda forgotten how much I enjoy them. As much as I love the fairly similar Crypt of the Necrodancer, it's nice to be able to take your time with combat for a change rather than stressing about battling to the beat, and Crown Trick is a game with some really interesting features that help make a considered approach to its trickier encounters all the more rewarding. For the benefit of anyone who might not be familiar in the wonders of Mystery Dungeon, Crown Trick is a turn-based roguelike that plays out in gridded dungeons, with enemies and traps politely waiting to make their next move until after you do something each round. As you load up on new weapons, perks, and abilities, you start to work out new ways to control the battlefield, dancing around enemy attack zones as you kite enemies and fish for openings of your own. So far, so standard for this kind of game.

Crown Trick's first major twist on this typical dungeoneering fare is the introduction of Blink — a short-range teleport ability that doesn't count as your move for the turn. This is an absolute game-changer, with offensive, defensive, and utility usage cases all vying for the few charges you have at your disposal at any given time. These are refilled when a new combat encounter begins, as well at several fixed thresholds on a boss' health bar, but it's still a limited and crucial resource that you really need to learn to employ effectively. Do you use it to line up a powerful AoE ability that hits most of the enemies in a room at once, or sit on it in case you need to escape from a crossfire of incoming attack telegraphs? Or maybe you instead Blink through a wall to activate a pit trap, then bait your foes into chasing you over it before they fall to their doom? It's a really interesting balancing act, particularly in those longer boss battles where you can earn some uses back throughout the fight, encouraging you to make use of it without punishing any 'wasted' charges too heavily.

Another neat feature that works well in tandem with Blink is the 'break' mechanic. Every enemy has a shield icon on them, and the number inside is how many hits they can take before being staggered, which stuns them and leaves them vulnerable to extra damage for several rounds. You can even trigger further damage boosts by chaining multiple breaks in quick succession, introducing an almost puzzle-like feel to some of the bigger fights — whittle down the boss then break its minions one by one before finally staggering the big bad itself and you can rack up a pretty crazy amount of damage. It's also a system that you need to approach differently based on the weapon you're using. Ranged gear is great for chipping away at shields as enemies approach, while melee users might need to be a little more reliant on items and abilities to set up safe breaks once opponents work their way into melee range. There are even niche cases within archetypes, such as the dual blades. These trade a little power for the ability to strike twice per round, which is obviously very effective against stronger shields, and you'll find more cases like this as you unlock more weapons by progressing deeper into the dungeons. To offset a weapon type's weaknesses, you can even use the crown's power to recruit defeated bosses, with each adding a pair of unique abilities into the mix to let you do anything from opening up black holes to summoning elemental allies. Some of them are really fun, and it's definitely worth giving them all a go to work out where the best synergies are.

While some similar games can get a little tired in how they stick rigidly to the order in which levels appear, Crown Trick seems to instead pick and choose a new route each run based on the stages you have unlocked. It's not a perfect solution as some do feel a little tougher than others (bosses of those 'later' levels in particular put up much more of a fight) and while that can lead to runs that die sooner if you don't hit a decent build early, it also sets up downhill runs where you'll have a much easier time expanding and improving your setup on your way to the finale. Each area has a number of possible bosses (a la Enter The Gungeon) and since I couldn't determine any kind of logic to which might show up when, this seems like another factor that can affect the difficulty of a run as some are significantly easier than others. Crown Trick does seem to be fairly generous with its permanent upgrades, however, with all manner of useful folks to rescue and then throw gems at for passive boosts and bonuses that make just banging your head against the game a viable progression strategy. As with most games like this, the list makes it seem like a pretty time-hungry completion, but at least you always feel like you're getting that little bit stronger as you edge ever-closer to the finish line.

Well, in theory, anyway. I was barely an hour into the game when I got hit with an infinite loading bug, and this seems to corrupt the save file completely as that one will no longer load up at all. A quick search turned up similar reports from the PC and Switch releases of the game last year, so it seems like this is a known issue and I started over, hoping it was a one-off frustration. Alas, it was not. Granted, I managed to make a fair bit more progress on my second file, but after four hours or so and on my best run yet, I groaned as yet another loading screen failed to do its one job and, sure enough, another save file was lost. As with any bugs, there's no guarantee this will happen to you, of course. But to see it happen twice in the first few hours was just rough, and I can only imagine how galling it would have been if this issue had waited until 30+ hours into a file before blowing it up out of the blue. I'm not going to be starting again any time soon, and based on my horror story, I wouldn't suggest you do either. Not yet, at least.

Summary

As much as I enjoyed what I played of Crown Trick, I can't in good conscience recommend investing time in a fairly chunky game that can seemingly just corrupt save files and erase all progress on a whim. It's extremely frustrating too, as it was all starting to click around the time that my second save file bit the dust, and Crown Trick would have been cruising for a Free Pass were it not for this one glaring problem. I hope a fix is on the way as I do really want to delve deeper into the dungeons, but I won't be touching it again until I can be sure that another infinite loading bug isn't going to ruin my save again, as I quite enjoy making progress in games rather than just repeatedly playing the first couple of hours.

Luke spent around five hours dungeoneering in the weird and wonderful world of Crown Trick on Xbox Series X, only to have two different save files corrupt and void all progress. He did manage to grab 20 achievements in the process, though, and will be back for the rest if/when it gets patched.

More Crown Trick stories:

First Impressions

Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.