''Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption'' is an adventure

role-playing game A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...

by the creators of '' Quest for Glory'', Lori Cole and

Corey Cole The Coles is a colloquial term referring to Corey Cole and Lori Ann Cole, a husband and wife team (married 1982) who are both video game designers. While they are most well known working together designing the ''Quest for Glory'' series, both ar ...

, developed with a custom

Unity engine Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a varie ...

. It is based on the ''School for Heroes'', the defunct e-mail based web game the Coles had created previously. It was released for Windows, Mac, and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

on July 10, 2018.

Gameplay

The player character is Shawn, a rogue who is attending a school for heroes. He interacts and competes with his fellow students during the day, and can travel down into the catacombs at night to go on quests and solve puzzles. The player can learn new skills and explore new areas as the game unfolds. Dialog choices matter, as what is chosen to say will affect the relationship Shawn makes with the people he meets. Combat is turn-based and tactical. If Shawn chooses to sneak around combat situations, the combat is also avoidable.

Development

In 2012, The Coles financed ''Hero U: Rogue to Redemption'' through a successful

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

campaign. They are developing the game under their company, Transolar Games, Inc.
After a number of development challenges documented in Kickstarter project updates, Transolar Games rebooted development in January 2015 by adding several experienced Unity developers to the team. The Coles extended the game financing with a second successful Kickstarter campaign.
According to details from the Kickstarter updates, the total project budget as of April 2018 exceeded $1 million, consisting of $500,000 from the two Kickstarter campaigns along with personal savings, loans, and outside investment. Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption entered Alpha Testing in August 2017, with a commercial release on July 10, 2018.

Reception

''Hero-U'' garnered generally positive reviews, and holds an average of 80/100 on aggregate web site

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

References

External links

Official website
* {{Quest for Glory series 2018 video games Adventure games Crowdfunded video games Kickstarter-funded video games Linux games MacOS games Role-playing video games Video games developed in the United States Windows games