Roguelike and roguelite recommendation thread

[Corlindale]

The recent genre definition thread made me want to talk about the actual games in these genres. I included both roguelike and roguelite in the title in an attempt to pre-empt discussion of what is and isn't a roguelike - as mentioned, there is another thread for that.

So here I just want to hear about your favourite roguelikes or games with roguelike elements. I am a bit of a latecomer to the genre, but it's turned out to be one of my absolute favourites and I would love some new inspiration.

My current favourite is Tales of Maj'Eyal (or TOME). I adore this game. Graphics are fairly simplistic (but I guess pretty lavish by roguelike standards, actually), but gameplay is amazing. My favourite thing is the sheer amount of class diversity - there are a ton of different classes that genuinely play differently and have extremely creative design. I have talked about this before, but I especially love the Chronomancer classes, who are focused on time magic and temporal manipulation and get some really cool and thematic powers to go along with this.

Another favourite is Dungeons of Dredmor, which I think was my first serious encounter with the genre (although I did play Castle of the Winds when I was very young). My favourite thing about Dredmor is the modular class system, where you just pick 7 skills and design whatever character you want. It's also great fun to do runs with random skill sets and try to make it work, even though I tend to die fairly early when I do this.

A downside to Dredmor is that the game is really long and can get somewhat grindy, because you need to get through 15 dungeon floors and each floor is really big (unless you use the setting to reduce it). It can be a bit frustrating to spend hours and hours on a run only to die on floor 14, but I guess that's part of the roguelike experience. Also, you pick up so much junk in the dungeon that inventory management can become quite a hassle - especially if you have a crafting build and actually need a lot of the random junk for later constructions.

As for games with roguelike elements, I've enjoyed both FTL and Spelunky quite a lot.

[Knaight]

I was coming to this thread mostly to suggest ToME, but it looks like that's been covered. Onto a few others:
Roguelites
Faster Than Light, Spelunky, and Nuclear Throne are all solid, and all combine roguelike resource/information management with some degree of real time action. They're listed from least action based to most action based.
Roguelikes
Chess Rogue is a lot of fun - it's a simple, minimalist roguelike that uses chess pieces as antagonists. You start as something less than a king and accumulate powers by taking pieces, but you also have a super power - you can spend your turn not moving.
Bionic Dues is a roguelike where you play a mech pilot (with four mechs, but only one can be out simultaneously so it's more like one character with four power modes than four characters) dealing with a robotic menace to prevent the corporation that owns the city being menaced from just nuking it for safety. It has heavy customization, but where it really shines is in its tendency to give enemies pretty good stats and generally impressive capabilities as a baseline, and then saddle them with crippling and hilarious flaws that you ruthlessly exploit.

[cobaltstarfire]

Crypt of the Necrodancer

It's basically one of my favorite games, even if I still can't beat the end end end boss. But I really like how the movement/attacking in the game is tied to the beat while still being turn based. All the monsters have their own behaviors, such that you have to learn how to navigate around them to attack safely. The game has different weapons with different attack patterns and needs (ex if you're lucky enough to find a shot gun, it shoots a pretty devastating cone, but must be reloaded (to the beat) after each shot, or broad swords which attack the three squares infront of you, or whips which can attack hit squares that are diagonal from you). You have to be pretty smart with weapons (and certain boots/rings) because of how they change the way you move or attack can get you killed if you don't plan correctly.

Some things are simplified compared to other roguelikes, for example there's only one kind of potion in the game, and you're not going to ever find it if you don't know how to. Finding equipment is random, but what they do is a knowable quantity once you learn it. (An obsidian weapon will always do damage based on your multiplier, glass armor will always save you from one attack and then break, and so on).

I actually prefer not having to identify equipment and stuff though, it's a pretty tedious part of more traditional rogue likes to me.

[137beth]

Lately I've been enjoying Hyperrogue, a quite challenging rogue-like with a considerable amount of depth. You can buy it on Steam for Windows/Mac/Linux, or for iOS or Android from their respective app stores.

A much smaller and little-known rogue-like I enjoyed is Pitsweeper. It is a completely browser-based game powered by Adobe Flash player, and it combines rogue-like gameplay with Minesweeper. It's fairly simple and short compared to most modern rogue-likes, but that is to be expected from a Flash game (and a somewhat old Flash game at that). Supposedly, the designer was going to make a much bigger and more complete sequel, but I think that development of Pitsweeper 2 is probably dead (the developer hasn't posted anything online in a few years).

[KillianHawkeye]

Pixel Dungeon is a really good one from a couple of years ago. It's on mobile, and I vaguely recall there being a PC version of it (but I could be wrong). Aside from the cute, 8-bit style graphics, it actually held quite closely to the original Rogue formula, with the addition of character classes, Boss fights and shops every 5 floors, and the occasional quest NPC.

The best part is that it's fully open-source, which means that there are a bunch of variants floating around as well.

[Vitruviansquid]

Dungeon Crawl is the best designed roguelike I have ever played, and cleaves quite close to actual Rogue but is designed with a very modern attention to detail. The highest praise to recommend it is that a very skilled player could conceivably have a winrate of over 90%.

I enjoyed Sword of the Stars: The Pit a great deal, but it suffers greatly from being very luck based. You will have bad runs that you could not really have played differently, because you just didn't find the loot you need. The best part of the game is that it takes place in the rich Sots setting.

I will include a dissenting opinion about Dungeon of Dredmor and say it is one of the worst roguelikes I have played because it fundamentally fails to understand what a roguelike is. In Dredmor, you gain health by skipping turns rather than losing health or food. Food only replenishes your health. So you are not punished for staying on a floor and "grinding." So you really only lose by being impatient.

[Anteros]

I was thinking about this recently, and I'd like a roguelike where you build a typical dungeon crawling party rather than a single character. As far as I know, nothing like this exists.

[Alent]

It's a old at this point, but I always had a soft spot for Castle of the Winds. The author has released it to the public domain at this point, although his personal site went down a while back, it's still up on archive.org. They also host it in the Windows 3.1 dosbox emulation section, since it won't run on 64 bit windows, but it's pretty easy to get a Win 3.1 dosbox build going.

The best feature was that it used the Windows 16 bit shell extension to gain access to windows icons, and it used icons and bitmaps for everything instead of text characters. Many an hour of my childhood was spent using Microangelo to edit the icons into something that looked better.

[Anteros]

It's a old at this point, but I always had a soft spot for Castle of the Winds. The author has released it to the public domain at this point, although his personal site went down a while back, it's still up on archive.org. They also host it in the Windows 3.1 dosbox emulation section, since it won't run on 64 bit windows, but it's pretty easy to get a Win 3.1 dosbox build going.

The best feature was that it used the Windows 16 bit shell extension to gain access to windows icons, and it used icons and bitmaps for everything instead of text characters. Many an hour of my childhood was spent using Microangelo to edit the icons into something that looked better.

I put a lot of hours into this one as well. It was a fun game.

[Corlindale]

I will include a dissenting opinion about Dungeon of Dredmor and say it is one of the worst roguelikes I have played because it fundamentally fails to understand what a roguelike is. In Dredmor, you gain health by skipping turns rather than losing health or food. Food only replenishes your health. So you are not punished for staying on a floor and "grinding." So you really only lose by being impatient.

I guess I never really thought about this, but you are right that you could theoretically gain infinity levels by staying and grinding. I never really had the patience to do that, though, although I always try to explore every floor fully. The respawn rate is relatively slow, so I think one would need amazing amounts of patience to actually grind levels like this.

On the other hand, the Wizardlands also offer a potentially infinite supply of extra experience and loot, so all in all I guess Dredmor is more forgivining than many other roguelikes. It still felt amazing to finally beat it on Permedeath mode, but I guess I hadn't really tried any of the really hardcore ones back then.

I still haven't beaten ToME, only got to the second continent a couple of times despite having played for countless hours. I always get careless or happen upon a ridiculous rare -> usually both at the same time, which inevitably means death.

[Fri]

Renowned Explorer International Society

The Curious Expedition

One Way Heroics and the remake, Mystery Dungeons: One Way Heroics

Check those, those are good

REIS and One Way Heroics are in fact some of my favourite game of all time. Not (just) tooting my own horn, but I just managed to 100% REIS

[Knaight]

I still haven't beaten ToME, only got to the second continent a couple of times despite having played for countless hours. I always get careless or happen upon a ridiculous rare -> usually both at the same time, which inevitably means death.

I've beat it a few times, including a no armor mage run inspired by an achievement. The key is to have multiple techniques to run away - I favor teleportation and psychoportation at minimum, so that cutting your escape means needing to lock two different resources at once.

[Corlindale]

I've beat it a few times, including a no armor mage run inspired by an achievement. The key is to have multiple techniques to run away - I favor teleportation and psychoportation at minimum, so that cutting your escape means needing to lock two different resources at once.

I'm slowly learning this, I think. This is probably why my most succesful runs so far have been with Temporal Warden. Chronomancers get so many different panic buttons that they can usually get out of most things (if in trouble, there's nothing quite like stopping time itself). But sometimes I just get one-shot or stumble upon a too difficult place. On the first continent I know exactly which order I want to do things, but the other continent is still new and strange and I get outmatched more easily.

As a side note, I've toyed around with the 1.5 Beta for ToME and the new Possessor class, which is the craziest I've seen so far. You can clone monsters when you kill them and take their form - and this includes bosses, once your skill rank gets high enough! It's still beta so everything doesn't work properly yet, but I could see this class becoming a new favourite once it's polished.

[Winthur]

DoomRL, nowadays known as DRL due to a recent Zenimax order to stop using the Doom name.

It's one of the easier and more accessible roguelikes out there, with pretty much no non-combat options or very little in terms of riddles and whatnot. But it does offer a long, sprawling dungeon full of branching paths and special areas, and some cool gimmicks like blowing up walls with the Rocket Launcher or even a portable nuke you can arm and blow everything up. Including yourself, unless you play it smart.

Spoiler: only 90s kids will get this

Show

It feels good to play it, because there is a plethora of viable builds (melee Doomguys will enjoy constantly going under the effect of Berserk as they wreak havoc with their chainsaw, shotgun Doomguys offer an extremely fun hit'n'run playstyle with lots of mobility, chaingunners have a ton of burst damage and even pistol builds are viable for dual-wielding goodness), and the Doom framing does not exclude it from having a lot of cool options for artifact weapons and "magical" gear. It also feels good because getting a YAVP on the easiest difficulty is not a trivial task. It will take a few tries and learning, but with some smarts and a solid build you will be able to get your first victory; the game does not really give you sucker punches of any sort. And then you can branch out into the numerous challenge modes and higher difficulty levels. As a guy who killed off like 1500 ADOM characters and hasn't even reached the Tower of Eternal Flames, I did feel quite a bit of satisfaction after taking just a few days to get a DoomRL victory.

It's as fast-paced as a turn-based game gets. It's ideal for a quick roguelike romp, and it's a decent entry-level game if you'd like to later branch out into something more ambitious, like ADOM.

It also has a very good tileset. I prefer ASCII to tilesets in most roguelikes I played, but this one works very well. It helps that the game features the kickass Doom soundtrack.

And you will definitely poop yourself the moment you meet your first boss Arch-Vile.

[Fri]

DoomRL is good. I think it's a really good introduction to classic roguelikes genre in general, I used to play it a lot.

[N810]

Gotta start with some of the classics, like Nethack.
http://www.nethack.org/

[Sian]

I'd have to call out ADOM ... Sure its one of the more difficult one, but i really like the mass of classes and the way it handles by nudging you towards harder parts all the time ... got 3 wins as of yet, Orc Barbarian, Orc Paladin both regular gate-closers in 1.1.1, and a ULE Gnome Weaponsmith recently (... r64 i think) and still find it enjoyingly difficult, but given careful play, I feel like all characters that doesn't die to a trap before detect traps are winable.

I've also played quite a bit of ToME, but I can't get away from the feeling that you'd really have to know the one true build for your class to be viable there, which make not following a pre-determined chart a self-imposed challenge, and the sheer number of item drops there is (and the fact that you probably get at least 50% of the artifacts along the game), makes for a game where I feel like its more about knowing the order of doing things, than doing it with your available resources.

[KillianHawkeye]

I will include a dissenting opinion about Dungeon of Dredmor and say it is one of the worst roguelikes I have played because it fundamentally fails to understand what a roguelike is. In Dredmor, you gain health by skipping turns rather than losing health or food. Food only replenishes your health. So you are not punished for staying on a floor and "grinding." So you really only lose by being impatient.

FWIW, skipping turns is how you healed in the original Rogue as well, although you'd eventually run out of food if you did it forever. You could starve to death, but eating food didn't otherwise heal you.

[Cespenar]

-Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a pretty good one with crazy crafting shenanigans and a realistic encumbrance system. I don't know if it has reached v1.0 or if it will ever, though.

-Also, among roguelites Binding of Isaac is a classic, I guess. Also a okay-ish clone of that is Our Darker Purpose.

-Similar but inferior to Nuclear Throne is Enter the Gungeon.

-Rogue Legacy was pretty okay too, I guess, as a platformer-roguelite.

-Tried but couldn't really get into Dungeon of the Endless.

-Also couldn't get into Don't Starve, though the art style were interesting.

Besides those, almost all of the good ones have already been mentioned, so, good job.

[Starwulf]

I was thinking about this recently, and I'd like a roguelike where you build a typical dungeon crawling party rather than a single character. As far as I know, nothing like this exists.

I could be way off base here, but isn't Darkest Dungeon considered a roguelike/lite/somethingish of that caliber? And it's a "build your party" game.

[Rodin]

I could be way off base here, but isn't Darkest Dungeon considered a roguelike/lite/somethingish of that caliber? And it's a "build your party" game.

As we saw in the other thread, it depends on your definition. At best it barely skirts in under the "roguelite" moniker. I consider it to be more dungeon crawler meets town management game myself. Or possibly XCOM by way of a dungeon crawler? It doesn't have permadeath (in that you get killed, you start your game over - individual heroes can die), and the dungeons are short and separated rather than one long area you enter into and either win or die.

I do think that they appeal to the same type of gamer, mind. At least, I'm a big fan of Roguelikes and fell in love with Darkest Dungeon.

[Leecros]

I enjoyed Sword of the Stars: The Pit a great deal, but it suffers greatly from being very luck based. You will have bad runs that you could not really have played differently, because you just didn't find the loot you need. The best part of the game is that it takes place in the rich Sots setting.

I'll be honest, my favorite thing about Sword of the Stars: The Pit is that it's a futuristic Science Fiction setting. It's not your traditional fantasy setting that you typically see in Roguelikes.

[Vitruviansquid]

FWIW, skipping turns is how you healed in the original Rogue as well, although you'd eventually run out of food if you did it forever. You could starve to death, but eating food didn't otherwise heal you.

I may have put it poorly, but the point is that there is nothing in Dredmor to compel you to progress.

[Anteros]

I could be way off base here, but isn't Darkest Dungeon considered a roguelike/lite/somethingish of that caliber? And it's a "build your party" game.

Thanks for the suggestion, and it does kinda fit. I'm not a huge fan of the art and aesthetic or the gameplay though.

I may have put it poorly, but the point is that there is nothing in Dredmor to compel you to progress.

You're right, but the game already moves so frustratingly slow that I can't imagine actually doing this without killing myself from boredom.

[Silfir]

I started playing ADOM in 2002 or so, and I'll never love another. I lost count of how often I won, but two of the wins are available as Let's Plays on Youtube.

FTL is the best of the other games in the expanded genre that I've played. Many don't quite manage to make the game both playable and replayable, and make compromises in the latter to attain the former.

[Winthur]

I started playing ADOM in 2002 or so, and I'll never love another. I lost count of how often I won, but two of the wins are available as Let's Plays on Youtube.

I hate you so much. My best two characters were both Dwarven Priests, one was abandoned after he got teleportitis and a ton of stats sucked out because of how such a chore he became to play, and he got to level 27. My other, level 25, Dwarven Priest died to a system crash. Both of those happened back in 1.1.1. ._.

I have a sadomasochistic relationship with that game, but the amount of effort I pop into it from time to time won't let me reach Rehetep anymore, so...

[Cespenar]

My only ADOM victory was a Grey Elven Wizard after 200-300 characters dead in a gutter somewhere, but it still all feels like a lifetime of gameplay.

Pro tip: Read a blessed scroll of familiar summoning (a reward from Dwarftown) in the Dwarven Halls. That fellow (whoever that comes out) can solo a lot of stuff if then properly trained.

By the way, did anyone give the steam version a try? Are there any novelties that worth it?

[Sian]

Thinking steam version (currently r72) over 1.1.1 or over the latest free version (r60)?

Something that annoys me in ADOM, is that I've never managed to wrap my head around how to play spellcasters... I have few if any problems getting Mundane or semi-casters (mainly leaning on utility spells) working, but never spellcasters

[Cespenar]

Thinking steam version (currently r72) over 1.1.1 or over the latest free version (r60)?

Something that annoys me in ADOM, is that I've never managed to wrap my head around how to play spellcasters... I have few if any problems getting Mundane or semi-casters (mainly leaning on utility spells) working, but never spellcasters

Over 1.1.1, I guess, I haven't played for a long time.

I dunno, spellcasters have been easier for me. Spells give a lot of escape buttons, and line effect spells are tremendously helpful in the usual ADOM corridor. You just gotta remember to never "let go" like playing a melee character and just spam a direction. Kill the easier enemies with weapons, the powerful and/or groups with spells. Dual shields & coward mode help in some instances too.

After some time, via ogre/giant corpses and herbs, your physical stats go up as well, so the spellcaster may become a half-warrior.

But the main deal is always the line-damage spells.

[Bohandas]

Roguelike:
-Dwarf Fortress

Graphical Roguelike:
-Dungeons of Dredmor

Action Roguelike
-Diablo

Procedural Levels:
-Wasted
-Super House of Dead Ninjas
-Vertical Drop Heroes
-Desktop Dungeons