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.
I like them because the randomness drastically increases replayability and the permadeath makes it feel like your actions have real consequences.
I'm not even a massive git good challenge monkey either, i just like the emergent storytelling that comes from something like C:DDA
Never heard of C:DDA. I think I might be able to do turn based Roguelike if it's not too hard.
It can be configured to your liking, you can generate a world with every cataclysmic thing possible, or just slow zombies, or just wildlife and every point in between.
Plus you can make a very powerful starting character if you want to, with lots of skills and equipment, or a naked, hungover, sick character who was in the shower when the world ended.The difficulty can be all over the place, which to me makes it immersive and fun.
I had one game where I was barely scraping by, running from most enemies and desperately trying to find any actual weapon that wasn't made of twigs and hope, then just stumbled upon a dead SWAT team, complete with body armour (slightly used), more guns and ammunition than i could carry, and an armoured SWAT van with half a tank of petrol.
I love roguelikes because you can try out different strategies and if you screw up you can just start over and since you're starting over all the time you don't have the problem of coming back to a game and trying to remember where you left off. They also (usually) give you time to think about and plan your next move, and they don't require any kind of technical skill like more action-y games do, which makes me feel less pressured/overwhelmed. They're difficult but I've always seen them as a fun, engaging challenge that I don't really expect to win - to me, "get good" makes me think more of multiplayer games like FPS's and MOBAs and stuff like that.
It may also help that I'm a bit of a masochist, I also enjoyed(?) Getting Over It which is explicitly designed to punish you instead of fostering enjoyment. I guess part of why I play games is to get the sort of challenge that I don't get irl.
Different strokes for different folks.
Roguelikes aren't for everyone. I personally do enjoy the punishing experience because you do get better overtime.
I like roguelikes.
Which ones have you played?
Thanks to the big surge in roguelite popularity a couple years ago there are a ton of them now that just use randomization as an excuse to slack off on balance and level design, and permadeath as a cheap way to make people repeat things as a proxy for content.
But I'd still defend, say, Brogue, or Spelunky.
I've played Faster than Light, Downwell (if that counts), and Slay the Spire. All are fun at first, but incredibly punishing.
I don't know if Downwell counts either, I never got far into it. FTL and STS both have a problem where the way to play the game well is contrary to what the game pushes you to do. This is a flaw in the games, not a problem with you.
In FTL, the game implies you're the Federation from Star Trek, and pushes you towards buying cool ship upgrades from shops. The way to win is to pick as many fights as possible and spend most of your scrap on systems upgrades. Also the fanciest weapons are rarely good; the best weapons are the burst laser 2 and the flack cannons.
In STS, the game constantly offers to add stuff to your deck, but after the first few it becomes increasingly unlikely that a card will improve the average power of your draws, and it's better to pass on most of them. (I also think STS is a little overrated.)
FTL and STS are games where you progress through learning its mechanics, which isn't something that's intuitively obvious. I personally enjoy FTL even though only 10% of my normal-difficulty runs actually win. As a beginner to mid-level player, it also helps to think in terms of archetypes, which helps reduce the complexity of the games.
Wdym by deck thinning? Sure, removing cards is important, but you can absolutely win with a 30-40 card deck, and consistently too. The game is a lot about finding synergies and understanding all the game mechanics well imo.
Widely accepted? I'd disagree. A heart-killing deck needs a bunch of utility even just to get to that point. In ironclad alone, you want cards that remove strength, give AoE, benefit from exhaust, apply statuses, block, and run your own scaling. There's a reason corruption is a rare card, and why dead branch + corruption is basically a win. Sure, a 15 card deck may be able to out-scale the bosses, but chances are you'll be putting in a lot of cards.
In addition, 40 cards is not that big of an issue. You have many cards that give you draw, and in the late-game, you want draw/tutor to help pull out the right cards at the right time. What's more, some of your cards set-up/exhaust, so your deck will get trimmed down in the first 10 turns or so.
I can win at least 90% of games, probably more, in normal-mode FTL with the Kestrel A.
There are certainly more luck-heavy ships though.
Not to be the obligatory pedant... But those really aren't roguelikes. :stirner-cool:
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup remains one of my all time favourite games due to its simplicity and adherence to the old-school roguelike ruleset (Permadeath, Random world, Turn-based, Tile-based). You can play it online for free. Also watching a short tutorial run on YouTube helps a ton. It's deep, rewarding and the amount of unpreventable death is reasonably low. It's also open source, community developed and pretty charming.
The only Roguelike I ever enjoyed playing was Liberal Crime Squad. The gameplay can be extremely frustrating (it is a roguelike), but there are so many crazy things which are possible that it remains a fountain of amusement. Some examples from TVTropes:
While not everything is covered some highly unlikely law combinations are acknowledged. The game tracks base sex as well as chosen ones. If at Elite Liberal Gay Rights but at Conservative or lower Women's Rights the bouncers will allow a base female designated male in the Gentlemen's club without a disguise check. Implying that while women are second class citizens, LGBT rights are so ingrained that they accept transmen without any effort put into passing.
If the game goes on long enough, everything remains the same mechanically, but things get renamed - Nightsticks become Electro-Shock Sticks, Spraypaint becomes Holo-Paint, Pitchforks become Space Pitchforks, Gavels become Laser Gavels, etc.
The more you succeed in making gun control a reality, the harder it is to get weapons for your raids. Pawn shops will stop carrying certain weapons and jack up their prices on those that remain. Gang members will still sell you guns, but their prices go up exponentially as well.
Making police laws elite liberal will cause them to be accompanied by moderate Police Negotiators, which makes the game much harder (because now, if you fight them, you'll risk alienating public opinion by injuring a moderate.)
While most obsoleted professions from more conservative law levels disappear some may hang around, resulting in the occasional death squad member at the police station
They are waayyy oversaturated too. A lot of indie games use the format just because it's the style right now. I hope people are starting to get tired of them. It was some cool design space but yeah it's been thoroughly explored.
i can recommend Hades, its a roguelike but with ongoing progression so it doesnt feel as bad
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a good modern (with sci fi elements) roguelike that lets you tailor the difficulty quite a bit, obviously you still can get permadeath'd suddenly but it's less likely if you play cautiously.
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.
