izigame.me

I’ve beaten the game all the way up to floor 10, and feel satisfied with this accomplishment up to now. Luck be a Landlord is casual fun, and for a casual price I think that’s pretty awesome. But it’s missing the X factor that makes me think it’s really special.
This will probably be short since the game itself is very condensed. The premise is… completely nonsensical, but whatever. It took me until my 5th run or so before I even bothered to read the text. It’s irrelevant.
The gameplay is simply two loops, one very miniature, and another bite-sized. You spin the slot machine, earn some amount of money, and you choose to add a symbol to it (or not). After a certain number of spins, you have to pay rent, get an item (different from a symbol), and then the next rent payment is even higher.
Once you reach a high enough “floor”, you begin receiving essences after some of the rent payments, too. These are, at the risk of being overly simple, like temporary forms of the items, with usually greater (but time-limited) payoffs.
This is everything you do in the game.
The symbols themselves are not the most pleasing things to look at, but the thematic synergies are cute. Dwarves drink beer. With an item they can also smash ore. Billionaires synergize with wine and cheese. Divers collect aquatic type items and give permanently higher payouts after collecting them. It’s cutesy like this.
It also does a very good job at showing you with a little animation and sound effect when the effect happens. I appreciate that as it’s a relatively common complaint of mine in other roguelike/lite games that these games are opaque.
What prevents me from really loving this one is the stark contrast between a run feeling completely blessed by the gods, and a complete car wreck. And the best way to go about beating the game consistently, is the least satisfying way of doing so.
The best way to go about beating the game is just simply to take whatever symbol and item best synergizes with what you have going on in your slot machine already. What this means is that playing best often means two things:
1) You finish with a hodge-podge of different good symbols and items, without a unifying theme and identity.
2) There’s not much looking forward to anything or building toward something.
Some runs you will pick every club, spade, heart, and diamond, and you will be blessed by like 2 jokers to perfectly tie it together. But nothing you did before that moment you received the jokers helped you get them. Sometimes you’ll take every aquatic item there is, and then snag a diver who after a few rolls is already giving you 12 per spin. But again, nothing you did before that moment helped you snag the diver.
More often than not, building toward a specific synergy will result in a loss because you never get the payoff. And why would you take the payoff before you built up the base?
My personal recommendation for the game would be to have a system similar to the boons in Hades. In Hades you need certain boons before you can earn others. They don’t increase your odds at getting the boon, but there is a level of satisfaction to knowing you’re building toward your goal, so to speak. And I think Luck Be a Landlord would benefit from this, even if it meant the game’s difficulty had to be increased in conjunction.
It’s not about difficulty as much as it is about satisfaction.
The other limiters are things like a collection log, a list of run modifiers to toggle, among other things. There is a Steam Workshop, which I will readily admit I’ve yet to explore, but I will later. And maybe these things can be found there. In all likelihood they do exist there. And without developer effort, the workshop wouldn’t be there, and easy to use, so despite the fact the developer didn’t make the mods, they provided the framework. That deserves credit.
Ultimately though, Luck be a Landlord is limited by its core build philosophy. It’s a fine game, and has a good feel of low stakes. The price point is low, and the gameplay is simple and cute. But it’s not one I’ll really remember or recommend above many other games, although the very affordable price on sales is noteworthy!
6.5/10