For a while, meta progression felt like a clever way to keep games fresh. You’d unlock new gear, perks, or passive bonuses between runs, and that sense of forward motion made failure feel productive. I still remember how ground-breaking this felt the first time I played Rogue Legacy. The game nearly made me look forward to losing, limiting any frustrations I would get from losing. Over time, however, the novelty has worn off. More and more I feel like instead of removing the frustration, meta progression is removing the sense of improvement.
Having meta progression means that you come back stronger after every run, this completely blurs self-evaluation. You lost but you feel like you played well. Do you just need to unlock more stuff or are you not understanding something? It’s really hard to say. How do you improve if you don’t know how well you are doing? Losing is the usual way for a game to tell you you are doing badly, but this is thrown out the window in games with a strong meta progression. I personally often end up assuming I just have to grind more, which isn’t a great feeling. And then, when I succeed, it doesn’t feel rewarding because I know I only succeeded because of the meta progression.
Having this meta progression as a crutch also stops you from engaging deeply with a game’s mechanics. Not only can you continue playing badly and win eventually, it is also hard to build fundamentals on what is essentially moving ground. Is 100 damage good? Now maybe, but that might not be true soon enough. I’ve recently had this problem with Ball x Pit, for example. I didn’t engage with any of the stats because they all changed so fast that I didn’t see the point.
I’m mostly referring to progression that makes you more powerful. I still very much like sideways unlocks which can serve to ease players into the game or to bring more variety in as the game goes on. I think Megabonk handled this pretty well recently, for example. Does meta progression still feel rewarding to you?
In addition to your points I would add a frustration of mine is having to fight the same bosses over and over again. Take Hades 2 as an example: you can choose one of two paths at the start of a run but will always have to fight the same boss fights. That sort of repetition in a roguelike is expected, I guess, but I just stopped playing the game because I didn’t want to fight Scylla and Charybdis for the 1000th time just to get to the next boss for the 1000th time.
I suppose Dead Cells spoiled me a bit here: you had route choices and could skip boss fights if they weren’t necessary for you current goals.
You just made me appreciate Slay the Spire more with the boss choices for each act. I didn’t realize until this comment how refreshing that is. Even Hades 1 had some variety in the first two boss fights (which fury was showing up, what kind of heads Lernie had…)
Hades 2 lets you amp up the difficulty to vary the bosses. By the 1000th attempt, you would likely be playing with them on their hardest and most intersting mode.
But Scylla and the Sirens featuring Charybdis doesn’t feel as different to me as say the Collector vs the Champ. I like the randomness and didn’t realize until this comment- though you could argue the music for the Scylla fight is random at least!
I think the harder versions add a lot of variabilty to the fight. The “default” Scylla fight is almost an afterthought after your first dozen times, but the harder version is immensly more complicated. Same goes for prometheous + spoiler, etc.
I think with a hundred more runs, these would also get old hat, but thats true with hades 1 as well. If you run the bosses 112 times there, the occasional “surprise” boss isnt really that intersting, especially if you’ve seen them 35 times. Seeing ol’ “muurrder…” occasionally was novel, but only to a point.
The story beats and quips kept things fresh for me in hades 2, to be honestly. The sheer amount of dialogue and charector building kept pulling me along as much as the mechanics of the gameplay.
Metaprogression was always pretty unrewarding, dripping in upgrades and unlocks so you buy a game, but you don’t get the game you bought until 10-100 hours of time invested playing a worse and/or more limited game. It’s always been weird how so many people say they need progression to enjoy a game. Fun was always a better reason to play a game than progression. Fun is why better games have ways to rebalance to match the things progression adds along the way. It’s just a shame people will basically scorn most games that don’t offer some kind of cross-run progression nowadays, so devs are stuck doing something. Not just roguelites, either. Look at what’s happened to Diablo-style ARPGs, where the addiction mechanics have pushed things to where people want seasonal resets so they can meaninglessly re-grind, because the fun has shifted to grinding loot (and trading), and the game doesn’t matter once you have enough that loot isn’t changing things for you. People don’t even want significant gameplay, as it just slows the grind. Then the inevitable endpoint of unlock/progression based play is horde survivors, where the games have openly admitted the actual play isn’t even the point anymore. It’s just builds, unlocks, and grinds, watch it go.
But I never really got people acting like you can’t tell how you’re doing in a game as things shift, or they can’t engage with systems because things get added, or a win doesn’t feel like a win. It’s not usually that hard to tell how you’re playing or how stuff works. These things are rarely that unusual, and if winning on easy isn’t good enough for you, look for the higher difficulty. If there’s no option to adjust difficulty and give a good play experience, that’s the problem, not the progression. Difficulty always needs options, and people should play at the level where the game feels good to them, not get stuck trying to prove something by defeating the game. Just like devs should not take a lazy, one-size-fits-all path, especially if that path means more experienced players only get a less interesting game.
Finally, contrasting “sideways” unlocks to power progression is often a deception. Many games with sideways unlocks gain a great deal of power/easing from adding options, synergies, and opportunities. Then people try to act like the experience is more pure than some other game where things get easier just from stats. Yeah, stat upgrades are obvious, but you didn’t start in the same place as before when you’ve altered the game and drop pool to your advantage.
Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.
Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.
I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.
I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.
Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.
I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.
I feel like this is why I dropped playing many rogue-likes and am currently addicted to playing arc raiders, as you lose so many things if you die and have to self-evaluate every single time you don’t get home.
I have to get home and survive in order to actually grow my character positively, where dying punishes me for losing (almost) everything and gaining very little experience points to allocate to my characters permanent buffs.
I think a good evolution of roguelite meta-progression is actually extraction mechanics.
Like escape from duckov etc. is essentially a roguelite where you have to survive and extract with your meta items, which I think is better for keeping you on your toes and feels less “grindy” than traditional roguelite meta-currency.
Most of the roguelikes that I really enjoy had unlocks that made the game harder, not easier. At best, the unlocks offer new builds, making the game easier in one respect but harder in others, giving you a new angle on things.
But then again, most of the ones I play are puzzle/strategy/deckbuilder type games. Kind of a genre of its own these days. (FTL, Slay the Spire, Cultist Simulator, Balatro, etc)
Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.
I like Shiren 6 (Serpentcoil Island)'s take on it. Shiren the Wanderer tends to be more roguelike than lite, but there’s always been some meta progression.
In 6 instead of making you directly more powerful, it’s mostly about unlocking new mechanics and alternate routes to choose from in new runs.
There is another bit of meta progression I am not much a fan of, and that’s kind of inherited from older episodes, which is ways to save your items and retrieve them in next runs. But it was mostly the previous game Tower of Fortune which had this ultra easy and exploitable, kinda ruined the flow of the game for me.
I sincerely wish these kinds of grinding games would keep the good name of Rogue out of their mouths. No, it’s not -lite, it’s the exact opposite of Rogue!
For a while, meta progression felt like a clever way to keep games fresh. You’d unlock new gear, perks, or passive bonuses between runs, and that sense of forward motion made failure feel productive.
Sort of. Roguelike’s defining feature as a genre is the reset of all player progression between runs, and the random generation of the runs themselves. Basic progression is transitory, so a name for progression that goes outside the runs and doesn’t reset is useful
For me, intend to dislike pure roguelikes because of the lack of meta progression. I tend to get a limited amount of time to play, so I don’t like games that require a time sink to get enjoyment. And as I get older I’m getting less ‘gud’ at games too. This is the reason I avoid almost all multiplayer, most grindy single player (ubisoft) and pretty much all soulslikes.
I like the feedback loop of the game getting easier without me necessarily having to do the heavy lifting of getting better. And it doesn’t have to be straight upgrades. Hades with its weapons is mostly sidegrades, and those are fun too.
I agree. I couldn’t finish Hollow Knight because my reaction times just aren’t what they used to be. It sucked because otherwise I love that game. I haven’t even attempted Silksong.
I feel especially Roguelites are bad for limited playtime because they are often designed around having to do the same-ish thing multiple times to get enough meta progression to be able to finish the game. Like the game has content for 2 hours but stretches it to 15 because you need meta progression.
I’m a huge fan of rogue-lites. I don’t think I’ve come across any meta-progression mechanic that has bothered me as much as you say.
Hades was probably the most jarring example for me. Mirror upgrades made the game significantly easier and there was little chance of a beginner rogue-lite player managing to complete a run without these. Then by the time the mirror upgrades were unlocked then it felt like I needed to rapidly turn up the “heat” to keep the game challenging at all. I can see why they’ve made such a drastic difficulty curve because they’re appealing to a wider audience than normal rogue-lite audiences (Binding of Isaac audiences would never tolerate such hand holding). I’m still fine with that.
I’ve got a bigger problem with abilities/items being locked behind impossible difficulty. Some items I will never unlock in Dead Cells, because I will never be able to do 5BC (got to 4BC max). Same with Enter the Gungeon and beating the final final boss and extra bosses. In those cases I wonder why the devs have made aspects of the game that the majority of the population will never get to engage with. I just download a 100% completed save file when I’ve made all the progress I could have. I think we should be given the option to access all unlocks after 100 or 150 hours of gameplay or some such option.
Overall, I’ve got no problem with the inclusion of meta-progression (or not). If they implement it well and make a fun game, that’s all that matters to me.
The meta progression in Noita is so meta you don’t even notice it. The meta progression is knowledge, the more you know the easier the game becomes. For example if you don’t already know you don’t need to collect hearts at the holy mountain. If you have full or near full health it’s better to skip the heart, continue exploring and then come back to pick it up when you have low health, because it’s also a full heal. More often than not I completely skip the first two hearts to see what the snowy depths have and then circle back to the mines to heal up on a second comedown.
But the game is pretty unforgiving so I usually recommend new players pick up tinker with wands and health containers mods from the steam workshop. Honestly tinker with wands should be always active because that perk is downright the best perk in the game, not just because it makes early game easier but because it also reduces pointless backtracking to drag wands into the holy mountain (without triggering the collapse) just so you could make the wand you want. It’s not “how the developer intended” but I consider both mods something of a QoL thing, because if you know what you’re doing then from a certain point onward health becomes effectively irrelevant and eventually you’re going to get the tinker with wands spell. Lack of healing and lack of tinker with wands only makes early game harder, late game you’re going to have other problems.
I very much dislike roguelikes. It always feels patronizing: aww too bad, if you were good enough you actually could have beaten the game, but let’s make it just a little easier. Then it takes so many runs to make an appreciable difference in my abilities or skills that it feels worse than grinding in an RPG (especially because at least with grinding I know I’m going to make progress…I actually might not make any difference with several failed runs).
I also think it’s lazy programming. The game is actually only an hour long or less but you get more time out of it because you need to repeat. Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generated and it just feels like a cash grab.
The ONLY roguelike I’ve played any appreciable amount is Hades, and I keep putting it down after a few hours of playtime to pick it up months later. They at least have a lot of interesting dialogue and some element of story but it’s not enough to keep me hooked.
Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generate
If they’re not procedurally generated, they’re not roguelikes. It’s a defining feature. It’s also not lazy to define a set of rules that generate good, interesting levels every time you boot it up. I’m basically the only guy who didn’t enjoy Hades, and a large reason why is that their level generation is sorely lacking compared to so many others (though Hades is more lite than like) I’ve played.
aww, too bad, if you were good enough you could have beaten the game, but let’s make it a little easier
Yeah, that’s pretty awful game design. Most of the ones i’ve played didn’t feel like that, usually you’d unlock new classes or something (I.e. sidegrades) or unlock harder difficulties.
And of course my favorite ones don’t have any meta progression whatsoever, the only progression comes from you learning about the game.
One of my all time favorite games is Cultist Simulator, but I’ll admit it’s not for everyone. If you like puzzle type games and don’t mind learning about the world by reading lots of little snippets of flavor text, it’ll be right up your alley.
Also definitely check out Rogue (the og) and the first wave of games inspired by it. The meta-progression stuff is kind of a new wave thing.
As for newer games, Balatro is really popular right now if you’re into more ‘puzzle roguelikes’. Most of the things you unlock make the game harder rather than easier, or give you a different angle from which to play the game. There are a handful of things you have to unlock via meta-progression, but so far they seem pretty unintrusive.
Crypt of the necrodancer is a good roguelike for this, there is meta-progression if you play the game floor by floor but if you go into the all zones mode everything is unlocked by default. It is possible to defeat every enemy hitless, but you’ll need to learn the pattern of movements to do so by yourself.
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Great post.
In addition to your points I would add a frustration of mine is having to fight the same bosses over and over again. Take Hades 2 as an example: you can choose one of two paths at the start of a run but will always have to fight the same boss fights. That sort of repetition in a roguelike is expected, I guess, but I just stopped playing the game because I didn’t want to fight Scylla and Charybdis for the 1000th time just to get to the next boss for the 1000th time.
I suppose Dead Cells spoiled me a bit here: you had route choices and could skip boss fights if they weren’t necessary for you current goals.
You just made me appreciate Slay the Spire more with the boss choices for each act. I didn’t realize until this comment how refreshing that is. Even Hades 1 had some variety in the first two boss fights (which fury was showing up, what kind of heads Lernie had…)
Hades 2 lets you amp up the difficulty to vary the bosses. By the 1000th attempt, you would likely be playing with them on their hardest and most intersting mode.
But Scylla and the Sirens featuring Charybdis doesn’t feel as different to me as say the Collector vs the Champ. I like the randomness and didn’t realize until this comment- though you could argue the music for the Scylla fight is random at least!
I think the harder versions add a lot of variabilty to the fight. The “default” Scylla fight is almost an afterthought after your first dozen times, but the harder version is immensly more complicated. Same goes for prometheous + spoiler, etc.
I think with a hundred more runs, these would also get old hat, but thats true with hades 1 as well. If you run the bosses 112 times there, the occasional “surprise” boss isnt really that intersting, especially if you’ve seen them 35 times. Seeing ol’ “muurrder…” occasionally was novel, but only to a point.
The story beats and quips kept things fresh for me in hades 2, to be honestly. The sheer amount of dialogue and charector building kept pulling me along as much as the mechanics of the gameplay.
Metaprogression was always pretty unrewarding, dripping in upgrades and unlocks so you buy a game, but you don’t get the game you bought until 10-100 hours of time invested playing a worse and/or more limited game. It’s always been weird how so many people say they need progression to enjoy a game. Fun was always a better reason to play a game than progression. Fun is why better games have ways to rebalance to match the things progression adds along the way. It’s just a shame people will basically scorn most games that don’t offer some kind of cross-run progression nowadays, so devs are stuck doing something. Not just roguelites, either. Look at what’s happened to Diablo-style ARPGs, where the addiction mechanics have pushed things to where people want seasonal resets so they can meaninglessly re-grind, because the fun has shifted to grinding loot (and trading), and the game doesn’t matter once you have enough that loot isn’t changing things for you. People don’t even want significant gameplay, as it just slows the grind. Then the inevitable endpoint of unlock/progression based play is horde survivors, where the games have openly admitted the actual play isn’t even the point anymore. It’s just builds, unlocks, and grinds, watch it go.
But I never really got people acting like you can’t tell how you’re doing in a game as things shift, or they can’t engage with systems because things get added, or a win doesn’t feel like a win. It’s not usually that hard to tell how you’re playing or how stuff works. These things are rarely that unusual, and if winning on easy isn’t good enough for you, look for the higher difficulty. If there’s no option to adjust difficulty and give a good play experience, that’s the problem, not the progression. Difficulty always needs options, and people should play at the level where the game feels good to them, not get stuck trying to prove something by defeating the game. Just like devs should not take a lazy, one-size-fits-all path, especially if that path means more experienced players only get a less interesting game.
Finally, contrasting “sideways” unlocks to power progression is often a deception. Many games with sideways unlocks gain a great deal of power/easing from adding options, synergies, and opportunities. Then people try to act like the experience is more pure than some other game where things get easier just from stats. Yeah, stat upgrades are obvious, but you didn’t start in the same place as before when you’ve altered the game and drop pool to your advantage.
Yeah I don’t really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.
Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.
I didn’t like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would’ve won if I had grinded more, and that’s not what I want.
I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There’s really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren’t there.
Some rogue-lites feel like they’re trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn’t always work for me.
I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.
I feel like this is why I dropped playing many rogue-likes and am currently addicted to playing arc raiders, as you lose so many things if you die and have to self-evaluate every single time you don’t get home.
I have to get home and survive in order to actually grow my character positively, where dying punishes me for losing (almost) everything and gaining very little experience points to allocate to my characters permanent buffs.
You could vary the genres you play more. I love Ball x Pit, but I don’t play a lot of rouge-likes, so I’m not desensitized to the mechanics as much.
I think a good evolution of roguelite meta-progression is actually extraction mechanics.
Like escape from duckov etc. is essentially a roguelite where you have to survive and extract with your meta items, which I think is better for keeping you on your toes and feels less “grindy” than traditional roguelite meta-currency.
Most of the roguelikes that I really enjoy had unlocks that made the game harder, not easier. At best, the unlocks offer new builds, making the game easier in one respect but harder in others, giving you a new angle on things.
But then again, most of the ones I play are puzzle/strategy/deckbuilder type games. Kind of a genre of its own these days. (FTL, Slay the Spire, Cultist Simulator, Balatro, etc)
Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.
I like Shiren 6 (Serpentcoil Island)'s take on it. Shiren the Wanderer tends to be more roguelike than lite, but there’s always been some meta progression.
In 6 instead of making you directly more powerful, it’s mostly about unlocking new mechanics and alternate routes to choose from in new runs.
There is another bit of meta progression I am not much a fan of, and that’s kind of inherited from older episodes, which is ways to save your items and retrieve them in next runs. But it was mostly the previous game Tower of Fortune which had this ultra easy and exploitable, kinda ruined the flow of the game for me.
I sincerely wish these kinds of grinding games would keep the good name of Rogue out of their mouths. No, it’s not -lite, it’s the exact opposite of Rogue!
Sounds like regular progression?
Sort of. Roguelike’s defining feature as a genre is the reset of all player progression between runs, and the random generation of the runs themselves. Basic progression is transitory, so a name for progression that goes outside the runs and doesn’t reset is useful
For me, intend to dislike pure roguelikes because of the lack of meta progression. I tend to get a limited amount of time to play, so I don’t like games that require a time sink to get enjoyment. And as I get older I’m getting less ‘gud’ at games too. This is the reason I avoid almost all multiplayer, most grindy single player (ubisoft) and pretty much all soulslikes.
I like the feedback loop of the game getting easier without me necessarily having to do the heavy lifting of getting better. And it doesn’t have to be straight upgrades. Hades with its weapons is mostly sidegrades, and those are fun too.
I agree. I couldn’t finish Hollow Knight because my reaction times just aren’t what they used to be. It sucked because otherwise I love that game. I haven’t even attempted Silksong.
I feel especially Roguelites are bad for limited playtime because they are often designed around having to do the same-ish thing multiple times to get enough meta progression to be able to finish the game. Like the game has content for 2 hours but stretches it to 15 because you need meta progression.
I’m a huge fan of rogue-lites. I don’t think I’ve come across any meta-progression mechanic that has bothered me as much as you say.
Hades was probably the most jarring example for me. Mirror upgrades made the game significantly easier and there was little chance of a beginner rogue-lite player managing to complete a run without these. Then by the time the mirror upgrades were unlocked then it felt like I needed to rapidly turn up the “heat” to keep the game challenging at all. I can see why they’ve made such a drastic difficulty curve because they’re appealing to a wider audience than normal rogue-lite audiences (Binding of Isaac audiences would never tolerate such hand holding). I’m still fine with that.
I’ve got a bigger problem with abilities/items being locked behind impossible difficulty. Some items I will never unlock in Dead Cells, because I will never be able to do 5BC (got to 4BC max). Same with Enter the Gungeon and beating the final final boss and extra bosses. In those cases I wonder why the devs have made aspects of the game that the majority of the population will never get to engage with. I just download a 100% completed save file when I’ve made all the progress I could have. I think we should be given the option to access all unlocks after 100 or 150 hours of gameplay or some such option.
Overall, I’ve got no problem with the inclusion of meta-progression (or not). If they implement it well and make a fun game, that’s all that matters to me.
There’s a game where I could use some sort of meta progression (because I suck): Noita.
I’ve never made it deeper than the first three levels. I probably never will. So much cool shit down there that I’ll never see
The meta progression in Noita is so meta you don’t even notice it. The meta progression is knowledge, the more you know the easier the game becomes. For example if you don’t already know you don’t need to collect hearts at the holy mountain. If you have full or near full health it’s better to skip the heart, continue exploring and then come back to pick it up when you have low health, because it’s also a full heal. More often than not I completely skip the first two hearts to see what the snowy depths have and then circle back to the mines to heal up on a second comedown.
But the game is pretty unforgiving so I usually recommend new players pick up tinker with wands and health containers mods from the steam workshop. Honestly tinker with wands should be always active because that perk is downright the best perk in the game, not just because it makes early game easier but because it also reduces pointless backtracking to drag wands into the holy mountain (without triggering the collapse) just so you could make the wand you want. It’s not “how the developer intended” but I consider both mods something of a QoL thing, because if you know what you’re doing then from a certain point onward health becomes effectively irrelevant and eventually you’re going to get the tinker with wands spell. Lack of healing and lack of tinker with wands only makes early game harder, late game you’re going to have other problems.
I very much dislike roguelikes. It always feels patronizing: aww too bad, if you were good enough you actually could have beaten the game, but let’s make it just a little easier. Then it takes so many runs to make an appreciable difference in my abilities or skills that it feels worse than grinding in an RPG (especially because at least with grinding I know I’m going to make progress…I actually might not make any difference with several failed runs).
I also think it’s lazy programming. The game is actually only an hour long or less but you get more time out of it because you need to repeat. Add the fact that roguelikes are almost exclusively procedurally generated and it just feels like a cash grab.
The ONLY roguelike I’ve played any appreciable amount is Hades, and I keep putting it down after a few hours of playtime to pick it up months later. They at least have a lot of interesting dialogue and some element of story but it’s not enough to keep me hooked.
If they’re not procedurally generated, they’re not roguelikes. It’s a defining feature. It’s also not lazy to define a set of rules that generate good, interesting levels every time you boot it up. I’m basically the only guy who didn’t enjoy Hades, and a large reason why is that their level generation is sorely lacking compared to so many others (though Hades is more lite than like) I’ve played.
Yeah, that’s pretty awful game design. Most of the ones i’ve played didn’t feel like that, usually you’d unlock new classes or something (I.e. sidegrades) or unlock harder difficulties.
And of course my favorite ones don’t have any meta progression whatsoever, the only progression comes from you learning about the game.
Ok, I’m intrigued. Any recommendations? I’d love to play ones where progression comes from learning about the game.
You’re looking for actual Roguelikes then. That’s what the genre originally was before it got bastardized.
One of my all time favorite games is Cultist Simulator, but I’ll admit it’s not for everyone. If you like puzzle type games and don’t mind learning about the world by reading lots of little snippets of flavor text, it’ll be right up your alley.
Also definitely check out Rogue (the og) and the first wave of games inspired by it. The meta-progression stuff is kind of a new wave thing.
As for newer games, Balatro is really popular right now if you’re into more ‘puzzle roguelikes’. Most of the things you unlock make the game harder rather than easier, or give you a different angle from which to play the game. There are a handful of things you have to unlock via meta-progression, but so far they seem pretty unintrusive.
Crypt of the necrodancer is a good roguelike for this, there is meta-progression if you play the game floor by floor but if you go into the all zones mode everything is unlocked by default. It is possible to defeat every enemy hitless, but you’ll need to learn the pattern of movements to do so by yourself.
I loved the Necrodancer Zelda game so I picked up Crypt but haven’t played it yet. This is a good kick in the butt to actually try it out.
Anything will get less fun the more often you do it. This is more of an issue when a genre becomes popular and everyone tries to capitalize on this.