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!)
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.
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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.
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.
holy f.
what a buch of ner. . . i mean . . .rogues.
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!
Old school upvote and boost for the Angband and Hack links.
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.
Hades and cult of the Lamb are great
Both are 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 games for sure, so polished.
Loved Hades, and Cult of the Lamb was really fun at first, but it lacked replayability in my opinion.
yea, hades is just a better game, but i still love cult!
Definitely in my goat list. It nails every aspect of what video games can be. I can’t wait to start anew.
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
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
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.
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
Slay the Spire is a complete 10/10 for deck builder roguelike.
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
I like the more platforms restyle rogue-lites, a couple favorites that haven’t been mentioned yet are 20XX (rogue-lite tribute/spiritual successor to Mega Man X) and Rogue Legacy (first rogue-lite I ever played, perhaps not as hard as others). For top-down ones I had a bit of fun with Wizard of Legend as well. Never have beaten a roguelike/-lite, but I’ve gotten a decent way into each of the above.
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.
My top three are FTL, Hades, Enter the Gungeon
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!
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.
FTL: Faster than Light, and Into the Breach.
Both are fantastic and made by subset games. FTL the better of the two imo, but that’s personal preference.
CDDA, Dwarf Fortress, and FTL all had a huge impact on the genera of Rougelike or free-form games, and all 3 have slight variations in the degrees of free-form game play which is very welcome.
Most rougelikes I enjoy have a set ending, that being death, or rarely triumph, and playing after either isn’t possible or just not the point for me.
As for the most memorable moment? To set the stage, I was 13, playing FTL blind. I had made a few runs before it, but I had just reached sector 8, the federation base and the last stand for the federation against the rebels.
I had fought the flagship once before, so I knew it was a big-fuckoff flagship with multiple weapon systems, but I had died really quick.
I had my faithful burst lasers, Artemis missiles, and beam, and was charged and ready to take this ship down. And it was a slog of a fight, I lost a lot of ship HP, and was in the red from the flagship missile launcher.
But it died, as my final shot landed, I rejoiced as its left wing broke apart, until I realized the noise and flash of FTL. It escaped. It had multiple stages.
I resolved to chase it down and desteoy the ship once and for all, victory or death! I died to the supercharged drones in about 2 mins flat.
It was then I learned, you don’t win FTL, you just do a little better every run. It still kills me on the harder starts with Captains Edition on.
When he was alive, TotalBiscut made an excellent video on it which does it far more justice than I can in text here.
It escaped. It had multiple stages.
We all share that great WTF moment my fellow captain!
When he was alive, TotalBiscut made an excellent video on it which does it far more justice than I can in text here.
Ahh, the classic “Oh God, everything is on fire” video. Sold me on the game, too.
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.
The trouble with “gamelike” as a descriptor is really well illustrated here. People will always disagree on how alike the games have to be for it to fit or what particular things it needs to do the same to match, while others will argue that something they play feels like game so it is now gamelike.
Early roguelike games took something rogue did first (repeating often procedural gameplay that at least mostly resets on death) and often ignored other aspects. Arguing about what exact criteria necessary or sufficient to make a game roguelike is like arguing whether a song counts as “punk” or “pop” or “metal”. Different people will feel like it does or doesn’t fit into any particular category for one or another reason, but ultimately the categories exist because some people put things in them and that’s it.
I think most of the games I’ve liked lately are roguelites:
- Bullets Per Minute
- Crypt of the Necrodancer
- Plate-Up
- Unrailed
- Noita
- Risk of Rain 2
Except for BPM and Noita, I’d recommend all of these as excellent coop games too. Here are some summary descriptions:
Bullets Per Minute:
- first-person shooter dungeon crawler
- awesome rock soundtrack with a steady beat
- you have to shoot and reload to the beat
Crypt of the Necrodancer:
- top-down 2d dungeon crawler
- awesome electronic soundtrack with a steady beat
- you have to attack and move to the beat
Plate-Up:
- top-down 2d restaurant simulator
- episodic gameplay where you try to make it through each day by serving all the customers
- if any customer waits too long, you lose
- inevitably gets crazy and chaotic, perfect for a group looking for a hectic and fun coop game
- devs are based, epic mod support
Unrailed:
- top-down 2d rail-building game
- you start with a train on some rails, with the train always moving forwards
- the goal is to continuously place rails in front of the train, otherwise you lose
- similarly to Plate-Up, incredibly chaotic energy, very fun
Noita:
- sidescrolling dungeon crawler
- you mainly fight enemies using wands and spells
- wands on their own are effectively just a bunch of empty slots; you decide which spells go in them, and in which order
- this may or may not eventually result in game-breaking shenanigans (or suicidal shenanigans, or both)
- there are a lot of secrets. like the entire game is a meta-narrative about discovering secrets. question everything.
- you will die. a lot. half the time to your own wacky spells. this is the way.
Risk of Rain 2:
- 3rd-person shooter (some characters are primarily melee, but whatever lol)
- game consists of a series of stages, each of which has a bunch of enemies, a bunch of chests with items, and a boss you must defeat to progress further
- also has a decent few secrets. Not on the same scale as Noita, but still quite a few
Noita is a game I keep coming back to, it has mod support and SO much to discover by exploring. It’s a good palette cleanser and just a good bit of fun when I need something for a bit between other games.
