I don't really have a ton to say about them because I am bad at video games. I just despise the mechanic of Permadeath+Randomization. Everything about the genre screams "get good" while punishing all the central premises of learning. It's just random difficulty while feeding you semi-similar levels on the supposed "beginner levels". Every so often you'll have some bullshit happen that wipes all of your progress, with not a single save point in sight.

Look I'm playing games to have fun, not to feel like some super badass that has mastered every possible mechanic a game can throw at you based solely on the beginner levels. It just feels like the genre exists to punish you, rather than to foster enjoyment.

  • TheBroodian [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, I sympathize but I also wonder if the problem isn't the design of most popular roguelikes today than the problem being the genre itself. I've played very few roguelikes where the randomization is truly random, and not just a weak shuffling of a few common possibilities, and most have a terrible difficulty curve. Additionally, it seems like most have little to no vision of what the lategame is intended to be, which I feel like only incentivizes the designer to slant the game in such a way that it'll just flippantly kill you in a way that you couldn't possibly defend against just so that nobody gets far enough in the game to discover this glaring flaw. But having said that, it seems to me that roguelikes could hold a very deep well of intrigue and replayability if the right balance of things could be struck.