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
-
Roguebasin, a wiki dedicated to roguelikes (specifically traditional roguelikes)
-
List of all Weekly Discussion Topics(this is the first one, be patient!)
Before I get into curmudgeon mode, I want to plug my two favorite roguelikes:
- Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - Zombie/sci-fi apocalypse survival roguelike with a bonkers level of depth to it. It’s very actively developed, and the devs are constantly adding more stuff to it. They also have their own lemmy instance at cdda.social.
- Doom Roguelike - Perfectly encapsulates the early Doom games in roguelike form. This one is on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from CDDA. Much simpler gameplay, though still highly tactical and challenging when you crank the difficulty up. The same author has created a spiritual successor, Jupiter Hell. I haven’t logged enough hours for it to supplant DoomRL’s position yet, but I do have to say that the atmosphere of it is fucking amazing.
With that out of the way, let’s move on to “old man yells at Rogue Legacy”:
The term “roguelike” has been stretched to the point of uselessness, often for marketing purposes. This necessitated the introduction of the term “traditional roguelike” for those of us that still want to discuss actual roguelikes. Binding of Isaac, Dwarf Fortess (fortress mode), Dead Cells, and Slay the Spire are all excellent games, but they’re not roguelikes in any useful sense. If I’m looking for games that are “like Rogue”, none of those are good suggestions. Moria, Nethack, Pixel Dungeon, DCSS, and DoomRL are.
Cataclysm: DDA occupies a bit of a weird space here. It fits within the technical definition of a traditional roguelike, but the overall experience is more of a departure from Rogue than other traditional roguelikes are. It’s almost more akin to Minecraft or Terraria, in that you face dangers to gather resources to create items to face bigger dangers to gather more exotic resources to create more powerful items… and so on. I sometimes refer to this type of roguelike as “neotraditional”, in order to acknowledge this departure.
Before anyone accuses me of being prescriptivist, sometimes prescriptivism is important. I’m not for haranguing people over every terminological deviation, but some terms are unique and useful, and we should try not to muddy them. “Begs the question” and “reactionary” come to mind. “Roguelike” was one, but it’s pretty far gone at this point.
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.
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.
Hades is potentially my favourite game of all time. For me to absolutely nails this style of game by perfectly weaving in a compelling narrative to the rogue mechanic. It’s also gorgeous with the most ridiculously tight gameplay.
Honourable mention to Enter the Gungeon, haven’t seen that mentioned yet. Very fun game.
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.
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 !PixelDungeon@lemmy.world
Proper link structure for a Lemmy community is !PixelDungeon@lemmy.world - 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.
Sprouted PD is great! Lots of fun if you enioy grinding. The Wand of Amok is great in the lower levels.
deleted by creator
NetHack. With the ASCII graphics. And not because I’m hardcore, I’m actually really bad at it. And I hate the item identification mechanic. But there’s something magical about this game. It feels alive, and the ASCII graphics give it a mystery that can’t be matched by visual spectacles. Idk it’s hard to explain, it’s like a love hate relationship
I have been playing UnderMine. The game plays a lot like The Binding of Isaac, but has a few differences like the meta profession after every run where you can unlock new upgrades and you can rescue people inside the mine that are vendors and the like.
The game scratched an inch I had for a new roguelite since I haven’t played one in awhile.
My only contribution to this conversation is that not only does steam seem to have no fucking clue what a rogue like is, but that it certainly can’t tell the difference between the two. So many games are in both of those lists, and many more shouldn’t have the tag. Which sucks cuz I own most of the ACTUAL rogue-likes/lites on steam and am still looking for more
Steam doesn’t add the tags, I think? I remember they were user submitted.
Huh I had no idea, makes a lot more sense!
I think this is one of the big pitfalls of community prescribed tagging. Lord knows the Psychological Horror tag must be a mess.
Lol yeah I didn’t even realize they were user added!
Hades is probably one of my most played ones of recent time.
This has become one of my favourite genres and I own a good number of them.
I’d like to mention Dreamscaper and One Step from Eden as notable ones.
Monster Train as well because of how unique it is.
No Rogue Legacy love? I played the heck out of that one on both PC and PS4. The 2nd one is good as well, but it hasn’t grabbed me quite like the first.
I’ve been playing some Noita lately. Really interesting concept of mixing and matching spells to create some wonky combos. The reality falls a bit short, though, as a lot of early combos are useless or detrimental and you have no way of knowing unless you test them out. You also don’t unlock new stuff unless you test them out. That can lead to a lot of runs being wasted, you end up playing the early game too much, and it gets a bit repetitive. Fortunately, there are mods that make it a bit less obtuse and more approachable.
Oh man I wish I could get into Noita. It is by all merits a very good game, but I bounced right off it - it was too complex for my brain to get a good grasp of.
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
How come nobody mention The binding of Isaac???
It’s one of my favorite genres because they’re the perfect games to play in-between other things. I would play a long campaign game and take breaks by playing a roguelike. If I have to leave the house in 30 minutes or so I’d play a round of a roguelike since there’s no long-term attachment. It’s just great to fill in the gaps.
Despite being kind of an overdone genre I think there are pretty few games that really nailed it. A lot of them tend to feel repetitive or have issues like being too luck-based. While Hades is pretty close to a 10/10 I think we can agree it’s a bit repetitive going through the same rooms and fighting the same enemies every run.
My favorites are Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain 2, Enter the Gungeon, Monster Train. There’s a ton of other good ones but these are the S-tier ones for me.
My top picks are Synthetik, Dead Cells and Nova Drift
Synthetik is so much fun. I don’t know many people who play it though or know of it.
