I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?
Update: Y’all convinced me. I bought Binding of Isaac and am excited to start. I also tried out Dead Cells via Netflix, but feel like I’d prefer it with a controller compared to mobile. Gonna start with Isaac, and wait for a sale on Dead Cells. Thank you for all the recommendations! I’m saving this thread for future reference.
I don’t have a lot of experience with roguelike games. Before I even knew about the genre I played quite a bit of Spelunkey. As someone who loves Super Mario Bros I thought that game was great. I recently found Vagante and am having a lot of fun with it. It gives off Spelunkey vibes, but is more traditional fantasy.
Seconding this. There’s so much to do and so many ways to customize how you wanna play while still unlocking new things to play with. Great, we’ll designed little game that I’ve been playing for years.
I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.
If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.
It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.
It’s very open to how you want to play.
Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.
I’ve been recently playing Kingsway which is a pretty unique roguelite RPG where the entire game takes place in a fake operating system inspired by the Windows 95 interface. Only on Steam though iirc.
Pretty fun, though I wish there were mods to increase the amount of content in the game.
You owe it to yourself to try some traditional Roguelikes:
Caves of Qud (Just released 1.0 a month ago. Amazing game. Unique science fiction world full of weird and wonderful characters, complex tinkering crafting system, crazy mutants and really cool cybernetics. Huge amounts of lore and a rich detailed world. I can’t stop playing it!)
Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Really awesome game with a friendly developer who posts on Lemmy. Extremely well balanced classes: 5 main classes with a 6th in development. Cool character customization and equipment upgrade system. Super deep alchemy system. Probably the best mobile roguelike but amazing on PC too, with a great UI for every platform)
NetHack (old school, developed since 1987 and still active, very tough game, might not want to try this one first. Incredibly rewarding once you learn it! Absolutely crazy amount of interactions between items, characters, and features in the dungeon. Takes its “verb-based action system” much farther than any other game, including text adventure games)
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (very complex but not as brutal and spoilery as NetHack. Extreme replay value due to the huge number of species, backgrounds, skills, and gods)
Tales of Maj’Eyal (not as many races as DCSS but still a huge variety of character builds. Great music as well)
If you can still download the legacy version of Dwarf Fortress from Bay12Games website, Adventure Mode is the best rouge like I’ve ever played. It’s not yet in the Steam version, though.
For a more action-oriented rogue like, I find Returnal to be fun as hell. Roguelike bullet hell 3rd person shooter, with a pretty intriguing story line if you manage to actually get all of it (finding story bits is as random as everything else).
Edit: Er… They’re on PC, though. DF could run on pretty much anything; returnal might need a decent gaming rig (or a PlayStation).
If you enjoyed Hades, you might like the new Ninja Turtles game, Splintered Fate. It’s definitely a bit more than “inspired by” Hades. Doesn’t quite hit the same, but it’s still a good time.
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoiler
I was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoiler
Learn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done.
All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation! I’ve wishlisted it and will pick it up when it goes on sale. The art is absolutely beautiful, I can see how it could get haunting and lonely.
Just as a bit of a counter to all the Isaac love (and, don’t get me wrong, I love Isaac):
BoI is probably the best roguelite… from the early 2010s. The gameplay is ridiculously solid but the upgrade design and drop system has too much in common with the roguelikes of old where you would often lose a run because the purple potion was instant death on this run.
There are just so many upgrades and synergies that you might become completely unkillable on floor 2 of one run and then have your entire build ruined on floor 5 of a different run. I STRONGLY encourage playing with the wiki or https://tboi.com/ open on a second device/display to avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.
On PC there are mods that integrate this into the game (and I think you can use it with achievements after your first matricide?). And I think Edmund has said he wants to add that to the base game sooner than later?
But contrast that with games like Hades where basically every single upgrade is a pure upgrade and you have good item descriptions before you pick anything up (so it is mostly a case of deciding what damage types you want to spec for). Or Dead Cells where you can easily swap out a weapon if you decide you didn’t like it. But in Isaac? You are basically chugging mystery potions on every floor.
avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.
The stupid behavior of X item sucks is part of the fun of the game and why it’s so great, though. You pretty much forget all those broken runs you got, but I’ll never forget the times I found Plan C or used the Bible on Satan. I also think you’re missing that repentance modernized all this and there’s even fewer bad items than before. At this point there are only a handful of truly bad items.
Hades is great and holds your hand, but the fact that every upgrade is more-or-less the same type of skill addition to your build is also boring.
Came here to suggest The Binding of Isaac, but it looks like people already convinced you. Hope you love it! I’ve achieved 100% completion at around 870 hours, and one of my acquaintances is currently at 4.1k hours played of that. It’s an incredible amount of fun
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I don’t have a lot of experience with roguelike games. Before I even knew about the genre I played quite a bit of Spelunkey. As someone who loves Super Mario Bros I thought that game was great. I recently found Vagante and am having a lot of fun with it. It gives off Spelunkey vibes, but is more traditional fantasy.
Slice & Dice is really good. If I play something on phone it is either that or Slay the Spire.
Seconding this. There’s so much to do and so many ways to customize how you wanna play while still unlocking new things to play with. Great, we’ll designed little game that I’ve been playing for years.
I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.
If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.
It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.
It’s very open to how you want to play.
Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.
I’ve been recently playing Kingsway which is a pretty unique roguelite RPG where the entire game takes place in a fake operating system inspired by the Windows 95 interface. Only on Steam though iirc.
Pretty fun, though I wish there were mods to increase the amount of content in the game.
You owe it to yourself to try some traditional Roguelikes:
I’ll try to name some unusual ones I enjoy
Pokerogue - a Pokémon one that’s surprisingly well made but grindy
Rogue tower - tower defense
Peglin - pachinko roguelite
Backpack battles - a weird inventory game where you auto battle other peoples builds but it’s not really pvp so don’t worry if you’re not into that
If you can still download the legacy version of Dwarf Fortress from Bay12Games website, Adventure Mode is the best rouge like I’ve ever played. It’s not yet in the Steam version, though.
For a more action-oriented rogue like, I find Returnal to be fun as hell. Roguelike bullet hell 3rd person shooter, with a pretty intriguing story line if you manage to actually get all of it (finding story bits is as random as everything else).
Edit: Er… They’re on PC, though. DF could run on pretty much anything; returnal might need a decent gaming rig (or a PlayStation).
I was never able to get into Dwarf Fortress, but that’s awesome that there’s a rogue like mode coming out!
I actually own Returnal on PS5 but never gave it much of a thought. It sounds like it’s worth trying though!
They are releasing adventure mode in the steam version on the 23rd.
Ants Took My Eyeball - Pixel graphics, awesome soundtrack, ridiculous premise. One my favorite roguelites ever. Similar to Dead Cells and Noita.
Dead Cells is 50% off on GOG right now.
If you enjoyed Hades, you might like the new Ninja Turtles game, Splintered Fate. It’s definitely a bit more than “inspired by” Hades. Doesn’t quite hit the same, but it’s still a good time.
My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoiler
I was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
Alright, this has convinced me to give Noita a shot.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoiler
Learn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done.
All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation! I’ve wishlisted it and will pick it up when it goes on sale. The art is absolutely beautiful, I can see how it could get haunting and lonely.
Just as a bit of a counter to all the Isaac love (and, don’t get me wrong, I love Isaac):
BoI is probably the best roguelite… from the early 2010s. The gameplay is ridiculously solid but the upgrade design and drop system has too much in common with the roguelikes of old where you would often lose a run because the purple potion was instant death on this run.
There are just so many upgrades and synergies that you might become completely unkillable on floor 2 of one run and then have your entire build ruined on floor 5 of a different run. I STRONGLY encourage playing with the wiki or https://tboi.com/ open on a second device/display to avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.
On PC there are mods that integrate this into the game (and I think you can use it with achievements after your first matricide?). And I think Edmund has said he wants to add that to the base game sooner than later?
But contrast that with games like Hades where basically every single upgrade is a pure upgrade and you have good item descriptions before you pick anything up (so it is mostly a case of deciding what damage types you want to spec for). Or Dead Cells where you can easily swap out a weapon if you decide you didn’t like it. But in Isaac? You are basically chugging mystery potions on every floor.
The stupid behavior of X item sucks is part of the fun of the game and why it’s so great, though. You pretty much forget all those broken runs you got, but I’ll never forget the times I found Plan C or used the Bible on Satan. I also think you’re missing that repentance modernized all this and there’s even fewer bad items than before. At this point there are only a handful of truly bad items.
Hades is great and holds your hand, but the fact that every upgrade is more-or-less the same type of skill addition to your build is also boring.
Came here to suggest The Binding of Isaac, but it looks like people already convinced you. Hope you love it! I’ve achieved 100% completion at around 870 hours, and one of my acquaintances is currently at 4.1k hours played of that. It’s an incredible amount of fun
Star traders frontiers if you want a more management spacy concept
I don’t know if you are into Mystery Dungeon games, but I loved both of Void Terrarium games. Both on switch.
Roboquest.
And Crab Champions.
This game is a fucking blast
true. best thing I played in 2024