What Folk Hero is
Folk Hero is a top-down action slasher with rogue-lite runs, set in a Slavic fantasy world where stories about Leshy, Domovoy and Rusalka have come to life. Animals vanish from the forests, villagers spot mythical creatures, and a mysterious island appears on the horizon. You take the role of a hero who sails to the island of Buyan to find out what is going on.
Combat is Souls-like: fast and heavy attacks, special moves, dash, block and parry, with responsive controls so you can react in the middle of a fight. Each enemy and boss behaves differently, so you learn their patterns instead of mashing through them. Enemies can also hit each other, which lets you bait them into fighting among themselves and save your own health.
Runs are built from procedural level generation, so every attempt walks you through a different layout of the Mysterious forest, the Swamp, the Wasteland and the Castle of Koschei. Each biome hides its own secrets. Between runs you assemble builds by combining character classes, weapons, artifacts and elemental runes, and stacking runes on a weapon gives it new properties.
Playing it together
Folk Hero supports Remote Play Together, so one person who owns the game can invite friends along through Steam. The game also carries Local Co-Op and Multiplayer tags, so a group sitting on one couch or connected remotely can share the run. Everyone explores the same ever-changing island, splits the loot they find, and coordinates who blocks, who parries and who spends health on the tougher enemies.
Because enemies turn on each other, a group can set up fights where the monsters do the work for you. Builds also stack well across a party: one hero leans into a class and weapon combination while another covers a different element with runes, and the group covers more of what the bosses throw at it.
Before you start
The run structure is permanent death. One life, one try: if your hero dies on the island, that hero stays there. Points you earn on the island do survive, and they go into upgrading new heroes and abilities, so a failed run still moves you forward.
Deaths are also how you unlock story options. The game has variability in its endings, and experimenting across runs is how you reach all of them and learn the real reason behind the island's appearance.
Expect a challenge. The developers name Hades, Curse of the Dead Gods, Binding of Isaac, Dead Cells and Risk of Rain as inspirations, and they built it to work for both newcomers to the genre and veterans. The presentation is pixel art with retro graphics and animated characters, played from an isometric view with controller support.