What Ampersat is
Ampersat is an action RPG built around shooting and melee, with a handcrafted campaign of more than 50 levels plus an optional endless procedural area. You play the warrior mage Ampersat in a world where Lord Z has invaded the village of Gentlheim, surrounded it with five extraplanar towers and the dungeons beneath, and stolen language itself from the townspeople. Your job is to fight down into the dungeons and up into the towers, free captured letters, and return language to the village. The main character and the enemies are ASCII letters, an intentional throwback to the original Rogue games, set against colorful 3D top-down environments. Sound mixes Commodore 64 SID chip effects with real-world music.
Progression is flexible, with an extensive skill tree and hundreds of unique pieces of loot that you can find, buy, sell and augment. There are 50 creature types with individual AI and 10 bosses. Stages can be tackled in the order you choose, so you can move between the towers, dungeons and other areas as you like, and revisit levels you have already beaten.
Playing together
Ampersat has drop-in local async co-op that works at any time, and can be played online through Steam Remote Play Together. The second player controls a fairy that hovers around Ampersat and launches its own attacks. The fairy's shots are less powerful than the main character's and they contribute to overheating, but the fairy is invulnerable, which makes it a safe partner in heavy fights. The fairy can also take your best spell whether you hand it over or not, so decide how much you trust each other before a big encounter. The setup suits a parent playing alongside a younger player, since the second seat can stay alive while still helping with damage.
Before you start
Gentlheim is your hub. It has shops for buying and selling, an Inn where you can heal, level up and stash gold to retrieve after death, and a Well that leads to randomly generated procedural levels once you repair it. Various structures in the village can be paid to upgrade, and as language returns, townsfolk who needed something may show up. The Well is where the roguelike side is pushed hardest: short, sharp, loot-heavy dives, with a rumor that something very special is buried at the bottom that nobody has reached. Expect a mix of handcrafted levels with exploration and light puzzles alongside those procedural runs, and a lot of monster killing and loot collecting in between.