#what is a roguelike

[m1dori-fangirling]

My dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “Blue Prince” 🟦🤴📕 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 📜📰🗞️📊💹

Me: yeah whatever it's just another strategy roguelike.

5 minutes later: Dude I swear I just saw an eighth red letter in Herbert's safe.

My buddy Simon pacing: I think that the Red Guard's investigation into our mother's disappearance was a political manhunt organized by a militaristic ethnostate.

[splash-o-matica]

“Side order was short” babe youre not done until you unlock all of THESE

[payasita]

I have a request: The Lamb with a double barrel shotgun and a cheerful demeanor saying that they have had enough.

had to crowdsource the second half of this joke but hey

[clumsypuppy]

beep beep im a sheep

speeddraw below the cut (audio warning)

song: "Cult of Dionysis" by The Orion Experience

[correct-hermitcraft-quotes]

Welknight: I am a very squishy boy, at the moment

[johnybones56]

The girl from the spider isekai anime is kind of a Taylor.

"ewww I have to eat bugs and run from monsters"

~some time later~

*casually cutting off own leg in combat* "hey split consciousness, what if I send you guys to eat my giant spider mom's mind?"

It also feels vaguely like someone narrativizing an OSR playthrough in a game where you can start as a monster.

[time-traveling-fetus]

I'm kinda disappointed by the direction that roguelikes are taking nowadays. A few years ago developers realized the genre would be more fun if you could decide where to take your character rather than just hoping that good items fall into your lap. This was overall a good development in game design. Interesting choices are a fundamental element in all games, but now it seems it's leaning too much into that. When you're given too much freedom of choice, the choices cease to become interesting.

Slay the Spire gives you a limited choice of three cards, but you also get to make that choice dozens of times in a single run. You're allowed to make that choice so many times, that there's not a whole lot stopping you from going for the same deck every single time. Do you like poison decks? You're probably going to get 30 opportunities to add poison cards to your deck every single run. Never play anything except poison. Plus you can simply forego adding cards to your deck (something you need to do in a deckbuilding game anyway), so you can just put off the choice to add something until the enemies get too hard.

Later games such as Vampire Survivors and Hades also give you regular sets of three choices, but they also eventually give you rerolls. Those rerolls make the RNG element of the game rather meaningless. Before I might think "i only have three options and a limited number of upgrades until I reach the next area. I should pick whatever i can work with best and adapt my playstyle accordingly." Now my thought process is more akin to "I have access to literally everything in the game, it's just a matter of how many times I want to pull the lever on this slot machine." Granted, it's not as bad with Hades since you're always rerolling a limited pool, but I can usually just do other stuff until the specific god that i want shows up. Unlike Slay the Spire, these games do not allow you to forego any potential upgrades, but you can still put off the choice of modifying your build by continually upgrading what you already have. This is strategically optimal; you don't want to commit your limited slots until the slot machine gives you exactly what you want, so you need to keep pulling that lever until you get it.

You see this again in Balatro. When you hit the lategame there's very little stopping you from buying Baron/Mime. You just need to hit the shop's reroll button enough times with your accumulated fuckton of money. And every experienced player is going to do that because that's one of the few ways to progress at a certain point.

These are still highly fun games regardless, but it seems like every roguelike since is increasingly plagued by the same issue. I want my roguelikes to force me to adapt to difficult constraints and to experience the full range of build variety. This just makes me feel like i'm playing a sandbox with more steps

[the-rogues-abyss]

Roguelike mods

it's so funny how roguelike/roguelite mods will have names ranging from "gate of the eternals" to "jeff's random shit" and both of those mods could be really well crafted with perfectly ballanced content

[cultofthepigeon]

i think its sad that boss fights in dd1 were very much "multiple characters have multiple moves that could deal ith this, there is a variety of ways/team comps you can use to beat this boss"

but dd2 is really "you need these characters with these skills and these items and this lair boss defeated if you want to reliably beat the boss"

dd2 continues to be the sequel that just took out a lot of player agency and choice

[xbuster]

Saw another “autism is when you like video game” post but this was even worse because it was about Isaac and there are few games I can think of that would be better at making an autistic upset

[echthr0s]

your guess is as good as mine as to why it took me -- me! -- so infernally long to play Cult of the Lamb, but while I expected to enjoy it for obvious reasons, what I didn't expect is how much divine euphoria I would get from micromanaging my cultists' little lives

[airshipvalentine]

started trying to play hollow knight again from a fresh save, played for like two hours, got to the Exact place where i rage quit last time and remembered why i have never played more than three hours of this game in a save

[sonny-my-woman]

i saw your tags asking what Balatro is about. Assuming you were serious:

it is a single player roguelike poker game. You start with a standard playing deck. Over the course of your run you have options to modify your deck by removing cards, upgrading cards, turning cards in to other cards, ect. You could also make certain poker hands more valuable, by using planet cards or having jokers that reward certain hand types.

It is a really satisfying game to watch, and I imagine to play.

stank you. 62 of clubs

[blushedfemmes]

if you’re accepting gamer butches i’ve been really into this deckbuilder roguelike called slay the spire and been playing through baldurs gate once more and need to talk a femmes ear off about my character so bad and i’ve been playing this visual novel style artistic hand-drawn game called slay the princess which is a bit of a horror introspective game it’s really fun :)) also hollow knight & little nightmares are back in my rotations i need to yap to femme about meaningless things so bad im afraid

plEASE i need a yapper butch, need to sit pretty and listen to them tell me about all the games they play…

visual novel games sound so intriguing to me, i will def put that on my list to check out!

[krakenshaped]

This game fucking rocks

[bobthedragon2]

okay ???