Rise of the Roguelikes

[Dog Pants]

Roguelikes are a bit of a holy grail to me. They promise infinite combinations of gameplay with great depth, but so far none have really delivered on something I could actually play long term. Dwarf Fortress came closest, but its belligerent refusal to use any kind of convenient UI always puts me off in the end. Dungeons of Dredmore and Desktop Dungeons are kind of fun, but lack anything like the depth of Dwarf Fortress (although to be fair so does every other game ever made) and even randomised feel like pretty much the same game every time. Recently I found Weird Worlds on the iPad, which is a sort of space version. That's been enjoyable, but I've found that having now encountered pretty much everything it has to offer it suddenly feels repetitive again. Possibly I could expand on this with some sort of combat-light 4X game, but I don't know of any. Also forthcoming is FTL, which has potential, but is in no playable state yet.

What's everyone else's experiences with these things?

[Joose]

I too love me a good roguelike. Unfortunately, all I can say about it would be a repitition of what you just said; ive played the same games and had much the same experience with them. I too am looking forward to FTL. They were talking about it on the PCGamer podcast the other day, it sounds potentially awesome.

Oh, there is one thing I can add, actually: 100 Rogues for the iPad. Its basically just like Dungeons of Dreadmore etc, and has similar problems of getting repetitive after a while, but its good whilst it lasts.

[shot2bits]

Dungeon crawl stone soup is worth a go if youve not tried it before, its one of the most polished roguelikes about with a fairly intuitive interface and full mouse support along with a slew of features. i frequantly go back to this when i want a roguelike to play

Caves of Qud is worth a look, its a post apocalyptic setting with a huge variety of character customisation, your first choice being wether to be a pure human or a mutant, the mutations are where it really shines for me with physical and mental mutations and defects ranging from extra body parts, photosynphetic skin, time and space manipulation, theres even a defect called evil twin that will make an evil version of yourself from a parallel universe appear to fight you. The game has a persistant overworld with quests and a story and randomly generated dungeons.

Adom is again set in a persistant overworld with static quests and a storyline, set in a fantasy world with a wide variety of options in character creation and a large fairly complex skill system. this is again a fairly polished game

Ivan is worth a mention simply because of how brutal it is, it has a combat system simpler than but akin to dwarf fortress with damage to different areas of your body and limb dismemberment but no direct controll over how your character attacks like in DF adventure mode. the actuall game is supposed to be very short but it punishes you for getting nice goodies, theres plenty to see in this but it gets fairly repetitive

These are all the roguelikes that keep me coming back and i play reguarly i try plenty of others but they dont hold my attention for as long, others that might be worth checking out are Rogue survivor, a zombie survival roguelike. Tome, another very polished and feature rich game it even has a chat system so you can talk to other players online at the time, this is updated fairly frequantly. And finally Incursion, with a rule set akin to the d20 system and a goal to have the same mechanical depth as tabletop games is quite good for a muck about.

[FatherJack]

I have to look up what 'roguelike' means every time someone mentions it, not because I don't know what Rogue was like, but because I always forget how unlike the original the new games are "allowed" to be within the "spec".

I've really only played console versions of obviously-roguelike games like Fatal Labyrinth and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but think that games like Terraria and Minecraft also fit some parts of the definition as well.

[mrbobbins]

I've played a few iOS Roguelikes:

Legends of Yore
Free to play on PC and iOS up to level 20, had a lot of fun with this one, definitely give it a try, it's free!

Rogue Touch
Crappy interface and movement, slow, frustrating enough to put me off almost immediately

Sword of Fargoal
Great iOS remake of a classic Rogue game, can be tough but I've played this one the most

Dungeoned
Meh, free lite iOSversion available so worth a try

[Dog Pants]

I have to look up what 'roguelike' means every time someone mentions it, not because I don't know what Rogue was like, but because I always forget how unlike the original the new games are "allowed" to be within the "spec".

I've really only played console versions of obviously-roguelike games like Fatal Labyrinth and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but think that games like Terraria and Minecraft also fit some parts of the definition as well.

The term does seem to be pretty nebulous. I don't think I ever played Rogue (or maybe I did later, but not a lot), so I don't pretend to be able to define it. In this instance it fits better than 'randomly generated world what has RPG elements and is fun to die in".