Getting into DCSS a lot recently. Still just running Minotaur Berserker with the furthest I’ve made it being the 10th floor aha.
Regardless, really enjoying it and wondering if others have any other recommendations. I tried ToME4 and just felt overwhelmed and wasn’t enjoying myself too much.
Have my eyes of Caves of Qud as well. Love the more “literary” aspect to it (even though I know it’s often nonsense), and the atmosphere/setting. Seems to be highly regarded overall though. Wondering if I should buy it and play alongside DCSS.
I highly recommend OneBit Adventure. It is available on mobile and Steam. The last time I checked it is still in active development, So you will see new features and improvements frequently.
Man I’m sad we don’t have an /r/roguelikes here. Discussion of the genre has been clobbered by the much more popular roguelites and it was nice to have a forum focused on traditional roguelikes. There’s a discord but it’s not the same.
Some lesser known ones that I think are quite cool:
Shadow of the Wyrm, open world fantasy with a nice vibe.
Dawn of the Mexica, quite brutal lethal combat with an uncommon setting.
Forays into Norrendrin, traditional dungeon crawler setting with distilled gameplay systems. Brogue-adjacent.
The Ground Gives Way, also a traditional dungeon crawler but with a really interesting fatigue-based equipment system and non lethal combat options. Cool item effects and stuff.
Lost Flame, if dark souls was a roguelike. Quite involved combat where attacks are telegraphed and you can dodge them, use abilities for movement etc. Great atmosphere.
Enter the Gungeon is fun if you like bullet hell And Spelunky 1 and 2 are nice if you want a roguelike as a jump’n’run Although if you want to play Spelunky, definitely start with the first game. The second game is more difficult and more complex.
I hate bullet hell games and I still absolutely adore Gungeon. I’ve got probably a few hundred hours in it and I still have never been able to beat it once, though.
I didn’t see anyone recommend in the comments, but I very much enjoyed Dreamscaper. It has a nice story revolving around the main character confronting hwr psychological issues in the world of her dreams. Combat is fun, slower paced and a little more tactical than most.
Also, fwiw, I’m not generally a roguelike fan, but I liked this one. Whether that makes you more or less likely to take my recommendation is up to you lol.
Caves of Qud is AMAZING! You should buy it OP
Dead Cells is brilliant
Everspace 1 and 2 are both solid games if you like space exploration and ahooting!
Just a note that in Everspace 2, they shed the whole procedurally generated aspect, but they’re both still phenomenal games!
My go-to is Shattered Pixel Dungeon.
Holy god, I never thought I’d see someone else mention DCSS in the wild!! I used to play that a bunch about a year or so ago. Truth be told, I kind of miss it once in a while. Devilishly hard, but I did manage to break into Hell once. Even killed one of the pandemonium lords.
Shit… I might start playing again.
It was updated recently!
I tend to play a lot of the old text-tile games that I cut my teeth on back starting with Angband. Any of those variants are enjoyable, but I pretty much stick to Zangband (Angband adding in the work of Zelazny) and frogcomposband (It’s a mouthfull, but FUN).
Ah, look at everyone recommending action roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is dead, long live the Berlin Interpretation! I’ll happily n’th Caves of Qud and Cogmind as amazing turn-based traditional roguelikes, and I’ll add to that pile the following lesser-known gems:
- Dungeonmans: Very much a no-frills traditional roguelike but also a very good one and probably the closest thing out there to “DCSS but better”.
- Tangledeep: Borrowing more from the Japanese side of the genre, with things like pets and item dungeons and sharply limited healing.
- DoomRL/Jupiter Hell: This is what it sounds like, a turn-based top-down version of Doom where cover and movement are everything. DoomRL is the original free version, while Jupiter Hell is the souped-up Steam version stripped of all trademarks.
- Rift Wizard: This one is weird but amazing - you can only attack via magic, you have a limited number of casts of all your spells, and you need to clear an entire level before advancing. But you have a mostly-free choice of new spells each level, and the goal is to put together something hilariously broken before the game outscales you.
Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:
- Angband: A truly ancient free game whose roots go back to the mainframe days. Still has living variants in addition to vanilla, of which IMO the best are Sil and FrogComPosBand.
- Nethack: Another truly ancient free game from the mainframe days, this one was really intended to be a puzzle an entire university would work together to solve. If you try it today, expect to need spoilers.
- ADOM: The last of the ancient free trifecta, this is less arcane and more story-focused than Nethack but has some truly awful dick moves. Spoilers are an absolute must. Sort of like a proto-Qud. The original is free, but there’s an enhanced tiles version on Steam as well.
- Golden Krone Hotel: A more modern game where you flip between human and vampire.
- Sproggiwood: A highly streamlined traditional roguelike where a given dungeon run will last less than an hour, but there’s metaprogression between dungeons.
- Brogue: A free fantasy roguelike that, like Cogmind, completely eschews experience points.
- Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: A free roguelike immersive sim set in the post-apocalypse, complete with zombie hordes.
- Hydra Slayer: A math roguelike. You can only kill a hydra by cutting off all its heads, and if you don’t cut off all of them then some number grow back. Your weapons do things like halving the number of heads, or cutting off exactly three heads (doing nothing if there are fewer than three).
- HyperRogue: The hyper stands for hyperbolic geometry.
The lack of Cogmind makes me mad.
Yeah nevermind, I just ignored it for some reason.
Where’s Zorbus?
It would make me mad too, which is why I already had it in the second line. 😋
Amazing, thanks very much for sharing this. Admittedly I was referring to the Berlin interpretation of a roguelike, so I very much appreciate such an extensive breakdown of some of your recommendations. Haven’t heard of a handful of these, will be checking them out with time!
This is a little bit of a deep cut, but the roguelike add-on to Remnant From the Ashes honestly slaps if you enjoy the core gameplay loop. (The pitch is “Dark Souls with guns,” which is like 70% accurate.) High quality 3rd person gunplay, awesome abilities, fun enemies, wacky builds, beautiful maps.
EDIT. Remnant is on sale for $13 on Steam! A very good deal, esp. with Remnant 2 coming out this year!
Darkest Dungeon is also great if you like oppressive horror vibes.
Hades 10outta10
I don’t think anyone should play anything other than Hades.
Until Hades 2 is released, that is.
I’m so in love with this game it’s not even funny. Hated it the first time I played it on Xbox, got it on my steam deck and can’t put it down.
I got very addicted to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead for a while… so much so that I ported it to Android so I could play on my commute to work.
Cataclysm is such a good game and FREE/open-source. The UI and artwork are a bit of an eyesore for new players, but once you learn the mechanics the game really opens up.
It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in that it weeds out all but the most hardcore gamers in the first few minutes of gameplay.
Definitely agree with you there! I’ve had a few friends who noped out 5 minutes into playing. I get it, it’s not for everyone!