Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree is Hades but Japanese

During Summer Game Fest, Bandai Namco revealed a new roguelike game called Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree. While it was a bit difficult to tell what it was just by the gameplay trailer, it looked like Supergiant's massive hit roguelike game Hades, but with an Eastern aesthetic.

Turns out that was right. I got a chance to check out a 15 minute playable demo of Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree. I came away excited yet cautiously optimistic about the game.

While the game seems like it's drawing a bit too many inspirations from Hades, there are some gameplay features that make it stand out. For starters, you actually get to play as two characters at a time, called the Tsurugi and Kagura, which mean sword and staff, respectively, in Japanese.

You have about eight or nine characters to choose from. During my time with the game, I chose to take a fish guy named Nishiki and one of the female characters, Origami, because of her cool origami-shaped hat. I didn't really have a chance to examine what exactly they did, so I just went off vibes and I liked their character designs the best.

In Towa, you can unleash attacks from both characters, and for every attack you do, your characters' blades get duller. That's why it's important to continually switch between the characters so that the blades have time to charge themselves up. It's a mechanic called Quick Draw and it's an interesting dynamic that keeps gameplay from becoming too stale.

As per a typical roguelike game, you have to go through rooms filled with monsters in order to reach a boss. After clearing a room, you're rewarded with a power-up, such as increasing your Tsurugi's critical hit rate or perhaps increasing the invincibility window of your Kagura's guard. There's a massive variety of power-ups so that each run is always a little different, which adds a lot of replayability.

Bandai Namco also mentioned that the game will have online co-op so that you and a friend can each play the Tsurugi and Kagura separately. This'll definitely help Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree stand out, especially from Hades.

I'm also really digging the Eastern aesthetic. CAPCOM found success tapping into this art direction with the excellent Kunitsu Gami: Path of the Goddess, so it makes sense for another Japanese studio to go down the route.

I do think that, from what I played, the game is a bit too easy. I found that spamming Quick Draw let me ram through enemies, effectively landing behind them and avoiding most of their attacks. I wasn't entirely sure if it was because of the characters I picked, but I had no issues clearing each room.

Even the first two bosses weren't all that difficult when I used the same exact strategy. The last boss, a dragon named Ensa, I felt was a bit harder as it did quite a bit of damage that around the midpoint, I had to stop and slow down so I wasn't so reckless. After defeating the dragon, I congratulated myself as Bandai said I was only the 6th person overall to get through the entire demo without dying.

I'm curious to see how the rest of Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree fares. It has some promising signs that it'll stand amongst Hades and other Hades-likes, but time will tell if those differentiators are enough to carry through hours and hours of gameplay.

Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree launches on September 19 for PC, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X|S.