Hello all, this is the first post in a series of posts I’ll be making weekly to drum up some diverse discussion relating to all different aspects of gaming. I figured I would start with what I know, and so the first topic is thus: roguelike games. (If you think any of the below description is wrong or misleading, let me know - that’s part of the discussion!)
The name of this genre is derived from the game Rogue, released in 1980. The exact definition of a roguelike has been a topic of discussion for a long time, but the core tenets are usually agreed upon to be random/procedural generation and permanent death (no saving and continuing a run, you have to start over). Many roguelikes have an additional increased focus on collecting items and assembling a “build” over the course of a run. A “pure” roguelike is often claimed to have no meta-progression (that is, no procedural unlocks) and focus more on the journey than the destination - seeing how far you can get, or how high a score you can achieve, rather than reaching a distinct victory condition (not that these games don’t have victory conditions, but that it isn’t the end-all-be-all). The secondary term “roguelite” is often brought out to describe games that deviate from this. Additionally, the term “traditional roguelike” is sometimes employed to indicate a more strict adherence to the older style of this genre, with grid-based dungeon crawling and high complexity. Ultimately, as with a lot of genres, pinning down a 100% ironclad definition is near impossible, but most people that like this type of game could tell you the general “vibe” at a glance.
Here are some questions and subtopics that I encourage people to discuss:
- What are some of your favorite examples of roguelike games?
- What roguelike games do you think stand out in terms of defying the conventions of the genre?
- Do you find there to be a meaningful difference between the usage of “roguelike” and “roguelite” nowadays? Which do you prefer? Where does the “traditional roguelike” fit into this?
- Do you continue to play roguelike games after reaching the “end” / reaching 100% completion? Why, or why not?
- What other genre do you most often enjoy seeing paired with roguelike?
- Is any game with procedural generation and a run-based structure a roguelike, or is there more to it? Where do you personally draw the line?
- What have been some of your best runs across all roguelike games? What’s been memorable?
- Are there any upcoming roguelike games you’re excited for?
Also feel free to bring up anything you like related to the topic! If you have suggestions for future discussion topics, leave them in the suggestion thread.
Additional Resources
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Roguebasin, a wiki dedicated to roguelikes (specifically traditional roguelikes)
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List of all Weekly Discussion Topics(this is the first one, be patient!)
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I haven’t really liked any Roguelikes, and that includes all-star Hades.
It mostly just feels like repeating the same thing. In some cases, eventually and with much skill you can gather a build that actually changes the dynamics of the game a bit - but until then, it usually just functions as a brutally hard version of some genre you’d normally enjoy, where every little mistake you’d shrug off now becomes a long-term debilitation you have to worry about.
Hades’ assist modes weren’t even giving progress fast enough - it requires you to die many times before giving you anything that might actually improve your odds at any of the boss fights.
So far, the only Roguelike I’ve enjoyed is Backpack Hero. It’s on the easier side, and plays very much in promotion of getting you your OP build options with relatively little time spent.
I have Backpack Hero, and while I do enjoy it I feel like runs can become too static (at least with the starting character) - you get your OP build, and getting to that point is pretty fun, but then you can just coast with that for a long time, maybe forever. The other characters and their gimmicks/playstyles help alleviate this problem at least.
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I started playing roguelikes with flash Binding of Isaac I bought for 99p in a steam sale, pre-Wrath of the Lamb. I’m still playing Rebirth and its expansions well over a decade later. I’d describe it as the perfect game. Why it shines as opposed where other great roguelites don’t is because of how the items interact with each other. The interaction is key. It’s still pure joy to walk into a room and absolutely melt everything in a second because of a synergy you’ve never seen. And now I think about it, what really makes the roguelike genre a favourite of mine is where every run is a challenge from the game: break me. I’d point at Noita as another game with this philosophy. Being given a random selection of tools and trying to cobble them together into something unstoppable.
Nobody here is talking about Risk Of Rain 2. This shit is really perfect if you have a “Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain ™”. Non-stop action and item combination is just wild.
I like RoR2, it is really good, just not in my top 10. Probably because I am not particularly good at it and only tried solo …
It’s also the most fun co-op roguelike out there. There’s an incredible modding community and it’s easy to drop in and play with others. It’s also not a super hard game to wrap your head around so there wouldn’t be a massive skill gap for new players vs veterans.
Me and my friends have had our fill over the last few years but there really hasn’t been another game to replace it.
I played Rogue a lot back in the day. Also Hack a bit.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a fantastic roguelike. I’ve been playing it for years. The developer is great about updating it and adding new content and adjusting the mechanics. There is a community for Pixel Dungeon over at [email protected]
Proper link structure for a Lemmy community is [email protected] - this should work!
And I also have played SPD quite a lot. Despite it being free, I tossed the developer a couple dollars - they’ve been doing great work with it, a whole new class was added not too long ago. I’m only now picking it up again after some time, and I’ve only beaten the game with 2/5 characters, so I got a lot to learn to get good at it again.
Thank you! Fixed my link.
It’s a tough game. I managed to beat it with all 5 characters, but that took a while. Now I’m working on beating it with all 9 challenges enabled. I’m dying so much 😭
I concur, too. So far, I have conquered said dungeon with at least 3 character types in 6 differing runs; the most fun I had fun so far was the Huntress herself, for in one of those winning run, I chose the Warden’s path, coupled with the Nature’s Wrath armor upgrade. It made most of the lower levels bloom in grass and all sorts of seeds that probably upped my farming time by a couple of turns.
Such a badass force-of-nature run that was.
Also, Sprouted PD has a sublevel every 5th or 6th where it’s all hidden forest and mobs.
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Sprouted PD is great! Lots of fun if you enioy grinding. The Wand of Amok is great in the lower levels.
I’ll go ahead and start off with responding to some of the points:
What are some of your favorite examples of roguelike games?
All-time favorites have to be Slay the Spire and Hades. StS was one of the cornerstones of deckbuilding roguelikes while still remaining one of the sleekest of all of them; mechanics fit together perfectly, with each loss leaving you working out how you screwed up rather than cursing the game for unfairness. Hades I like for entirely different reasons - it absolutely oozes style, with excellent presentation in terms of art direction, music, and copious dialogue. The rougelike nature of the game is woven directly into its narrative in a way I find very satisfying.
Enter the Gungeon should also be noted as one of the few games I’ve 100%ed. Although it has some flaws, the sheer amount of combinatory item synergies (both actual mechanical synergies noted by the UI and otherwise) gives it great replay value while not ballooning to absurd levels ala The Binding of Isaac (which, while still great, can be daunting in its scope).
Do you continue to play roguelike games after reaching the “end” / reaching 100% completion? Why, or why not?
Personally no, unless there is some sort of prestige mechanic that adds new challenges on successive runs (though one may consider beating all prestige levels part of 100%ing); I am still grinding out Ascension levels on both Slay the Spire and Monster Train. I find satisfaction in finishing a game that actually has a win state, and often lose interest after it’s been achieved. Enter the Gungeon was one of the few exceptions to this, although by the time I had truly finished the game I was already very close to the full 100%.
Are there any upcoming roguelike games you’re excited for?
Hades II, for obvious reasons of course. Other smaller titles on my radar include Wizard with a Gun, whose demo I played and (while rough around the edges) had an engaging and swift core gameplay loop with metaprogression (though one must question the fuzzy distinction between a roguelike and a run-based game in general, or if there is one at all) and Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, a tiny but funny little deckbuilding roguelike that smashes together a lot of different card games and concepts for a wacky time.
I have hundreds of hours in Slay the Spire of both IOS and Steam. Phenomenal game.
I struggled with getting past the first boss in Hades but I loved the art direction, story, and voice acting. I will probably give Hades II a try as I am sure there are a lot of improvements.
Steam tells me I’ve clocked 297 hours into StS. I’ve only barely reached I think A17 or 18 with Silent, ~A15 with Defect, and only 1-2 for the other two. Still got a ways to go!
If you really like StS, I can recommend Downfall, a fan expansion for the game on Steam. It is not as polished, and the mechanics aren’t quite as tightly wound, but it offers a whole lot of very novel new mechanics and characters as well as an entire new mode where you play as a Boss working your way downward instead of the reverse.
I tried Downfall and I like it. Sadly it does not really work on Steam Deck last time I tried.
Against the Storm is a pretty interesting roguelike I played recently. In each “run” you build a small town. It’s kinda like Banished or SimCity.
I’m not playing it anymore, but I thought the concept was cool.
I picked this up, played it for about twenty hours. I definitely enjoyed my time, but I could clearly feel how most of the game loop was just scraping by until you could fully pop off at the end - I liked that, but I grew a bit weary of the initial setup on each run.
Dungeon crawl stone soup. Vampire summoner or octopus berserker?
Hadn’t heard of this one! I’m gonna have to check it out.
Thanks for adding the link!
My favorite is Caves Of Qud. The amount of freedom in character build and progression options is just unlike anything else I’ve tried. Also the very distinguishable graphics make it more interesting to me, because “games don’t need to be pretty to be crazy fun”.
I discovered it thanks to Sseth. His other recommended roguelike games (Synthetik, NEO Scavenger, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead) are all great in their own way.
Qud
Have you ever “won” Qud? I’ve playing it intermittently for several years, and eventhough each time I get farther and farther I usually get bored and die. It doesn’t help that I only play in the ironman mode hahaha, the other modes seem too vanilla, but who knows.
“Sometimes it’s not about the destination, but about the journey itself”
- Aoygtetherox-No-Longer, Queen of the highly entropic beings
I don’t know if it’s my favourite, but Crypt of the Necrodancer is a roguelike/lite is one I still play at least once a week since I bought it in 2017, and it’s not one I see mentioned that often.
I never gravitate towards roguelikes tbh, but I ADORE rhythm games. Necrodancer really hooked me in with it’s variation on the rhythm gameplay loop, adding complexity that doesn’t seem arbitrary or frustratingly difficult (at least to me). Playing through the game with the different characters you unlock has yet to get boring after almost 6 years.
And of course, the absolute BANGER of a soundtrack helps a lot (thank you Danny Baranowsky and team). The remixed Zelda soundtrack they did for Cadence of Hyrule is also amazing, and I would sell every organ I have to be one of the 20 people with a vinyl press of it.
I’ve played the other roguelikes everyone likes (Slay the Spire, Gungeon, Isaac, Hades, etc) but nothing has really stuck to me as much as vanilla Necrodancer.
Rimworld is life.
Does it count? It has the hallmarks of procedural generation and technically has distinct “runs” (though a single run can last dozens of hours, I know from experience). It just seems too “grand scope” for me to consider it a roguelike, I suppose.
I think if Dwarf Fortress is considered roguelike then Rimworld is too.
That would be the DF Adventure mode, which is roguelike in the original sense.
DF colony sim is not roguelike.
My personal definition of ‘roguelike’ is a game that is turn based, with perma-death and procedural generation, and ideally is also grid-based. A ‘traditional roguelike,’ to me, is more a specific set of games (Angband, NetHack, etc.), rather than a genre, but if you did want to use ‘traditional roguelike’ as a genre, it’d have all of the above, plus be a fantasy dungeon-crawler RPG. I also do think roguelikes and rogue-lites are meaningfully distinct, or atleast should be, even if most people don’t consider them to be. Rogue-lites can be very fun games, but when I want a roguelike, I want a roguelike, not a fast-paced bullet hell whatever. The best roguelikes I’ve played thus far are Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (CDDA), and Cogmind. Plus I’ve been thinking of picking up Jupiter Hell and Dead Cells when I can, though AFAIK Dead Cells is more of a rogue-lite than a roguelike.
Old school upvote and boost for the Angband and Hack links.
One more thing I think is relevant to the discussion on the meaning of ‘roguelike’ is the Berlin Interpretation, though I personally think it’s a touch too narrow to be a usable, non-academic definition. Plus roguebasin (where that link is) could probably be placed in the Additional Resources section, being a wiki dedicated to roguelikes.
I think the Berlin Interpretation should be revisited. It should not be set in stone.
holy f.
what a buch of ner. . . i mean . . .rogues.
====ASCII display====
The traditional display for roguelikes is to represent the tiled world by ASCII characters.
… and this is why I will always prefer roguelites
Oh yes, I found this and debated including it in the post but personally felt that it was an overly narrow definition. I’ll add Roguebasin to the resources though!
Though I’ve played games of the roguelike/lite genre for a while, I actually had to do a bit more of a deep dive to make this post. People ascribe a lot of different meanings to roguelike, and I got entirely conflicting messages on why the term roguelite was created. I hope what I put down is accurate enough!
Yeah, opinions on roguelikes/-lites are definitely very divisive, a problem I think that mostly comes down to prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics. Given that, I think you’ve done a perfectly good job in the OP.
Do yourself a favor and pick up Dead Cells. It’s absolutely amazing.
They’ve added so much content to it over the years but the runs are still like 30-45 minutes. The randomized items and gear are masterfully done. It’s like mini-diablo gear builds in 30 minutes, but better than recent Diablos. You get item synergies going etc.
The platforming/combat is snappy and satisfying.
It also understands what makes roguelike games fun that a lot of roguelite games miss. Each run feels different and new so it’s always exciting to start a new run.
My top three are FTL, Hades, Enter the Gungeon
I like the more roguelite type of games. I like that each run is different whether that means procedural generation of the map or just the starting weapons and pickups change throughout a run. Some of my favorite are the following:
- Dead Cells
- Inscryption - card game meets roguelite
- Cult of the Lamb - city builder meets roguelite
- Peglin - Peggle meets roguelite
- Dicey Dungeons - Roguelite deck builder
- Vampire Survivors - Dead simple game. Only one control!
I could probably come up with more and these aren’t in any particular order, but these are some standouts to me.
Inscryption is somethin special. It’s both a solid deckbuilding roguelite, a deconstruction of a deckbuilding roguelite, and a classic “don’t look up anything about this game just play it” game.
I’m a sucker for “don’t look up anything about this game just play it” game, so they just earned a sale thanks to you
I agree with all points. I was hooked for several days. I look forward to playing Kaycee’s Mod soon.
Slay the Spire is a complete 10/10 for deck builder roguelike.
I don’t remember buying that, but it’s in my Steam Library and Steam Deck Verified. That’s going on the list.
I have dead cells and probably have about 45 hours in it and something about it just bugs me. I don’t like the gameplay and can’t really put my finger on why.
I absolutely love inscription and have been thinking about going back to play the mod version. That said phase 2 was my least favorite
I have just shy of 13 hours in Dead Cells. It’s not something I play extensively. It’s one that I pickup, play a run or two, and move on. When I don’t have much time to devote.
I haven’t tried the Kaycee’s Mod (I didn’t double-check my spelling) addon for Inscryption yet. I was trying to beat Cult of the Lamb first. Both are some of my favorite games in the last few years though.
Yeah Kaycee’s mod is it. It seems like it adds a lot to the game.
Is it just not a campaign? Like you just keep going until you die? I feel like that’s what I saw about it. I need to try it soon
