Running Robot Man 4

Running Robot Man 4 is a roguelike dungeon crawler and exploration game. You play as a robot training at the Establishment for an explorer license, using a parasol, laser and acrobatic abilities to explore a dozen dungeons alone or in co-op. Completing dungeons raises your rank and unlocks abilities, weapons, dungeons and areas of the overworld hub.

Story

The Establishment manufactures robots and gives them human consciousness so they can explore dangerous environments and dungeons. These dungeons exist in indeterminate quantum states until Establishment technology stabilizes them, producing different configurations each time. Robots that pass the lower dungeons move up in rank and gain access to more of the facility, including secret areas and information.

The story follows a robot working toward the Establishment’s Recruit Exam, a difficult confrontation with an engineered machine. Passing the exam earns a license to explore beyond the walls of headquarters and into the indeterminate void.

Explore the dungeons

You enter Establishment-approved dungeon branches, finding treasure and upgrading your gear as you navigate procedurally generated layouts. The Tutorial teaches abilities including Launch, Ruby Rider, Laser, Dash and Parasol. The Training Branch introduces dungeon navigation and Splitting Jelly enemies, while Lava Chasms calls for aerial abilities to cross lava while avoiding Laser Eyes. In Soul Spirit Hallways, invulnerable Soul Spirit Statues break into ghosts that can be destroyed by leading them into the light.

The Main Branch is the first permadeath dungeon and the start of the main game. It has eight procedurally generated levels and enemies including Soul Spirits, Laser Eyes, Electro Piggos that chase you and bump you toward lasers, and Death Dots, flying drones that dodge and fire lasers. Completing it unlocks the other branches.

Dungeon branches

• B-Side Branch: Double the Main Branch’s number of floors, with the lights out, tougher enemy scaling and faster time dilation that speeds up both players and enemies.
• Gauntlet: A 30-floor branch featuring all Main Branch enemies, with time dilation faster than in B-Side.
• Soirée: Brings back all Main Branch enemies as Tier Two versions, with boosted stats, new appearances and often abilities or behaviors absent from Tier One.
• 100 Trials: A 100-floor permadeath challenge with time dilation at its maximum.
• Jelly Rave: Claustrophobic hallways filled with Splitting Jelly enemies from tiers 1–7; a place to farm money, with a heavy impact on GPU load.
• Death Dot Dirty Dancing: An extended Lava Chasms layout with large numbers of floating Death Dot drones from Tiers 1–3.
• Victory Chamber: Teaches battery-overclocking: shooting enemies down while airborne overclocks your battery, letting you use multiple launches, dashes or other abilities before landing. This lets you cross otherwise impossible lava chasms.
• Recruit Exam: The final permadeath dungeon, which costs 100 rubies per attempt and tests the mechanics you have learned, including battery-overclocking. At its end, you face a boss machine built by an Establishment engineer to test your fortitude; completing the exam ends the main game.

Explore the Establishment

As your robot gains ranks by completing dungeons, it earns clearance to explore more of the overworld hub. The facility contains secret rooms, tunnels and hidden areas, including the Establishment Antechamber and Zen Temple. Some secrets include paintings that lead to dungeons still in development, and exploring the hub can reveal secret worlds and previews of new dungeons, including Covella, the entrance to an underwater ocean dungeon. From Zen Temple, you can take a boat across the void to Fog Fields, which provides access to Silver Abyss, an experimental area still in development.

Optional abilities are available in-game from the Establishment Engineer: bubble shield, companion drone, personal rally point and ruby collector field. You can also spend rubies on cloaks and robot models.

Journals and collectibles

Journals written by a robot named Illia are collected in the Library as you explore. They tell her story of joining the Establishment and taking the Recruit Exam, as well as the truth about the Establishment’s history and what lies in the void beyond its walls.

Each dungeon has a rare painting at the end. Completing all 13 dungeons fills the Gallery, which you can show to friends in co-op. Rare Iceberg Pieces are hidden in parts of maps you are not meant to reach, and the game also has an achievement board listing achievements for gallery paintings, skins, journals, Iceberg Pieces and hidden areas.