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.

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

Hades and cult of the Lamb are great

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.

How come nobody mention The binding of Isaac???

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 like the more platformer style 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.

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 top three are FTL, Hades, Enter the Gungeon

IMO it's not really a genre, since gameplay can vary so widely. It's more like a template for a progression system that can be applied to many different genres.

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.

One of my least favorite genres.

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

Thanks for the explanation!

The roguelike I keep coming back to these days is Dome Keeper. Resource mining + fighting monsters + casual play duration is a combo I find hard to beat at the moment.

Unreal World is probably one of the more interesting roguelikes I've ever seen but never played. Also, a lot of people talk about Dwarf Fortress, but don't mention the adventure mode which is a more standard roguelike adventure, but still very interesting because of the stuff that can happen and how powerful you can get.

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.

Maybe it's just me (and there are many popular ones I haven't tried, because money), but I've always liked the idea but found actual implementations of it unsatisfying.

The average low viability of the systems (and that a good hand is unlikely) feels too much like real life, and even games with the most options (like Shattered) don't offer enough flexibility to deal with the annoying elements of the game that could be entirely removed while still remaining difficult. (commonly, anything related to: inventory management, hunger, currency/resources, equipment restrictions/pitfalls/unavailability. That's not including ineffective positive elements)

I have won Shattered at least 5 times and still feel that way, I lose many more times and it does seem that the biggest factor in winning is what the game gives me.

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.

Dungeon crawl stone soup. Vampire summoner or octopus berserker?

I really enjoyed Everspace. Space-shooter roguelite.

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.

My top three, in no particular order, are:

• Hades
• Dead Cells
• Skul: The Hero Slayer

I found myself really invested in Into the Breach because canonically every run you do is a different timeline so you have to fight just as hard each time and it un incentivises just restarting because you would be abandoning the humans to a grisly death. The mechanic where you can bring one pilot with you is great too.

Speaking of subset games, FTL and especially the mod FTL Multiverse have been very fun.

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.

Is Remnant 2 a roguelike? Pretty sure it is.

Fantastic game, played it a fair bit since launch so I know most of the encounters in the N'Erud place, so I join random players in the other areas hoping to learn those encounters and get some sweet, sweet plunder.

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.