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IndieGamesOfCohost
@IndieGamesOfCohost

New survey! So far we've talked about card games, visual novels and hidden gems. Folks have added great games in the shares and comments sections. Eventually, I'd love to start compiling some of these into some posts highlighting some lesser-known gems.

Here's a new informal survey for you all: what are some indie games you love that have roguelike (or roguelite) elements? Which ones use permadeath, procedural generation, or run-based structures in interesting ways?

There's a lot out there these days. Curious to see which ones people feel are cream of the crop, or just do something bizarrely interesting.

What counts as a "roguelike"? Great question! Whatever you think makes the cut on that, we can all be a little loose with it.


IndieGamesOfCohost
@IndieGamesOfCohost

Lots of great roguelikes/roguelites in the comments section! Here's a couple that people recommended...

Dream Quest
Slay the Spire
Enter the Gungeon
Into the Breach
Slice and Dice
Rogue Legacy
Noita
Desktop Dungeons
Monolith
Brogue
Dicey Dungeons
Path of Archra

Any others that you've found really interesting, or got their hooks in you?


kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

I think Griftlands is extremely good. It has more of a narrative and uses a dual combat and negotiation / intimidation system that is really neat


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in reply to @IndieGamesOfCohost's post:

certainly not unknown, but i really like rouge legacy 1 and 2, crypt of the necrodancer, and vampire survivors. the element i like about all of these is that they feel like they hit what i like about rouge-likes the most, which is that the player does actually get better at playing it when you do more runs. each of those games have mechanical unlocks that can ease the gameplay, rewarding you for playing more of it, but things like crypt of the necrodancer, you just have to keep getting better at the rhythm game aspect of the game in order to be competent at it. i think that rouge legacy does well with procedural generation, making core areas that are always in one specific cardinal direction, so you can approach each biome at your own pace, regardless of plot progression.
the rouge-like that got me into the genre were the pokemon mystery dungeon series of games and i haven't found any indie games yet that i feel satisfy the mechanical satisfaction i feel when playing the mystery dungeon games.

Not sure if this is your area but the fan ROM hack "Pokemon Emerald Rogue" is really really amazing.

In terms of indies its odd for me since I'm oddly picky (not sure how to describe)

"Noita" is quite some fun. Very brutal but some amazing systems. (87hrs still havnt beaten it)

Main thing close I have the most time with them was Pokemon mystery dungeon which varies a lot of when / where you could call it a roguelite or roguelike. Though that isn't indie persay.

Occasionally on my mind sometimes how older games had smaller teams & if those would fall under indie today to some extents.

Edit:
Just remembered the Major one of "Inscription" & it's extra content "Kaycee's mod" (part of the base game)

Ones that remind me of actual Rogue and i like them:

  • Desktop Dungeons (hard, kinda complex)
  • Dicey Dungeons (difficult, but with more manageable set of rules)

Liked Rogue Legacy, but it's a grind-fest if you're bad at platform games (i am).

Crypt of the Necrodancer is great, but i enjoyed Cadence of Hyrule way more <3 (and it has dungeon mode which plays closer to original CotN if that's what you like)

Project Zomboid works as roguelike and is pretty customizable.

And from action r-likes: Going Under by Aggro Crab. I liked the gameplay and presentation (and its setting, and its writing, oh yeah).

Oh, I love rogue{like,lite}s!

Here are my favourites:

  • Slay the Spire
  • Into the Breach
  • Monolith (!)
  • Enter the Gungeon

StS and ItB are just perfect1, EtG2 was my first game in the genre and it's awesome too.

Monolith is less known, so I'll talk a bit more about it. Monolith is something like Binding of Isaac (screen = single fixed room, secret rooms, bombs, etc) meets Enter the Gungeon (bullet hell-ish, finite ammo, room teleports, etc), but also completely unique3. One fun and easily noticeable feature of Monolith is that the rooms are all square; this means that you always have unused space on the sides, but adds a unique feeling to the game. And then there are bosses… Monolith is a very hard game, it just is, and the bosses are the main thing here, they are all just awesome and hard to beat,,, Idk! Monolith is a cool, complex, yet kind-of-minimalist game, I'd recommend it a lot, if you up for the challenge.

  • Noita
  • Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate
  • Iris and the giant
  • Wizard of Legend

Noita is hopefully known by everyone, a "world where every pixel is simulated", a completely chaotic rougelike (not my favorite only because I can't really play it on my current laptop ;-;). Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is an interesting twist, combining chess and rougelike, cool thing, although annoying in some aspects. Iris and the Giant is an interesting twist on the card-rougelikes where the cards are finite and you need to get new ones constantly, very interesting mechanic wise, has a touching story too! The only downsides are that it's a bit short and underpolished in some places. Finally Wizard of Legend is simply a rouglike where you have magic skills and beat up other mages.


  1. well, not really4

  2. why 3/4 of my favorites have "the" in the middle lol?

  3. describing it as similar to binding of isaac/etg seemed bad, but it's easier to compare to something you know...

  4. I should write down that critic of ItB's pilot mechanic...

Brogue and the Shiren The Wanderer series are my favorite roguelikes, although the latter isn't indie.

As for action games with roguelike elements, I tend to enjoy ones that force you to interact with the environment in interesting ways, like Spelunky or Noita, instead of just being a straightforward action game that doesn't let you select your weapon loadout or learn the level layouts.

Most of my faves have already been mentioned, but I need to give a shout out to Path of Archra. It's a wonderful character building roguelike based heavily on Rift Wizard, but much more streamlined.

Their Discord even had the dev of Rift Wizard pop in to ask for some advice on Path, at which point the dev of Path just geeked out completely. It was so neat to see. Sometimes these solo/small dev projects are just so great to see.

The roguelites of note I have played are "Have a Nice Death", "Roboquest", "Deadlink", "Dreamscaper", and this new "Liberté" game.

"Have a nice death" has such a charming art-style and sort of Adult Swim cartoon feel to I have to love it. "Roboquest" and "Deadlink" both have a great balance between player skill and powerful items which allow for interesting builds. "Dreamscaper" feels like really well polished and has a tight focused gameloop that's feels like a smaller version of Hades actually. "Liberté" is very interesting but flawed new release I just picked up. It just got out of early access and seems like it had some development woes but overall it's got a fun card based system and interesting setting I don't think I have seen before.

I know they are more "roguelites" rather than "roguelikes" but the only real roguelike I have played has been "Jupiter Hell". I want to give more traditional style roguelikes a try this year. I think have a lot of offer design-wise. I think roguelikes really make you think about systems, mechanics, and the interaction between the two.

in reply to @IndieGamesOfCohost's post:

A relatively unknown recommendation is Mushroom Musume. It's a highly replayable visual novel / princess sim, where you raise a magic mushroom up to be your daughter, and she goes off on adventures.

It's heavily dialogue-driven, but random events happen each day, and you are given a choice of how to respond. Your mush-daughter has several stats that change based on how you raise her, as well as a small collection of resources, and these are used to determine the outcome of events. Furthermore, events can expand on each other - for example, if you take an interest in hiking early on, later in the game you can try to climb the tall, magical mountain in the distance. Each run has the potential to be very different, and once you get into the flow of it, you can raise a daughter from dirt to dirt in 20 minutes or so. There's a huge amount of secrets, from secret types of mush-daughters to massive hidden dungeons. Plus, the art is really lovely and the vibes are incredibly cute / unsettling / mysterious.

It's a totally weird game that mixes VN and roguelike, but I was obsessed with it for like a full month and I can't recommend it more.

Dungeons of Dredmor. Good mix of challenging and approachable, and it's extremely silly. You eat food to regain health, drink frightening amounts of alcohol to regain mana, and it has just the right blend of jokes and quality gameplay to keep me replaying it. It's also been around for a long time so it's cheap if you haven't picked it up yet

Surprised to not see Caves of Qud on here yet. It has some especially good story telling and somehow feels like it pulls you into the world even with very old school graphics. Tis set in a complex Sci-Fi Fantasy (Espers and fire breathing creatures count as more fantasy, right?) where salt is so pervasive and clean drinking water is so precious that water is used both as currency and a ritual of friendship common to almost everyone. It also does a mix of fixed history that you can discover in the world, and procedural generated history of events you can learn as explore.

Other things that make it loads of fun,

  • You can be a True Kin, descendants of space faring people from long ago who alter themselves with cybernetics; or a Mutant with a variety of physical and mental abilities you choose at the start. Either way, over time your character grows by altering their body over the course of their journey.

  • Procedural Faction and reputation system that leads to some wild story telling. Like, why did the Warden reprogram that village's favorite robot? No idea but that village is still mad about it, and they'll be mad at you if you become water bonded with the warden.

  • Radical bodily autonomy. Want to drink that to see what happens? Go for it! Want to remove body parts and replace them with other parts? You can do that to! Embrace the consequences!

  • So many item and world interactions! Stuff like gases, temperature and fluids are simulated. So if say you use your fire tossing mutation to heat up water, it'll turn to steam and the steam will scalded things (I may have turned myself into a soup this way by accident at least once...). Or if you pour liquids together they'll at least become a new mixed liquid, assuming they don't have some sort of interesting, or maybe explosive reaction.

  • Cooking system with both proc gen and preset elements. When you cook a dish, you can choose from a number of effects based on ingredients. Forget the requirements but you can remember a favorite dish and just replicate the effect again. And several villages have local recipes with cultural significance.

  • Representation! There's queer characters! Disabled characters! A Deaf character who communicates to you in sign! Neurodivergent characters! Plural characters! Neo-pronoun using characters!

  • Play options! You can of course play the old school rogue like permadeath rules, but there's also a roleplay option that lets you go back to save points (my favorite) and even an option where most of the wildlife is set to non hostile at the start if you just want to explore the world and story.

  • Mod support in game! Some of the mods are even published by the developers of the game. Modding community has been really creative, and I've even seen some mods working on base building concepts.

... there's a lot. A lot a lot. More than this. Caves of Qud is a game with a very old school vibe and admittedly a bit of a learning curve; that gives players A Lot of freedom to explore a compelling and imaginative world in whatever manner they choose.

I've finally gotten into Wildermyth and it very much fits in this category. A cross between a tactical RPG and a visual novel, with randomly-generated characters who grow up, change, and eventually die or retire.

Plus the monster design rules. Ancient acid-swilling bone mechs? Yes please

Oh wow, I totally forgot about Wildermyth. That game is incredible, and you get so many amazing stories from it.

In my first full campaign, I had this one tough-ass lady who was my frontline fighter, and near the end of the arc, at age 56, she was hit by a gorgon's stoning attack, which turned one arm and one leg into stone in the middle of the final fight.

Her response? She just beat the gorgon to death with the stone arm, saving the day in a hell of a way. That lady was not letting evil win.

Besides the ones already mentioned above, there’s some other roguelikes I’d consider fairly obvious candidates: The Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain 1 and 2 (mentioned separately because of how radically different they are from each other), Nuclear Throne, Darkest Dungeon, Caves of Qud, FTL, Hades, Spelunky.

Beyond those, some lesser-known recommendations:

  • Wildfrost, a really recent deckbuilding roguelike with tactical elements (there’s a lot of rearranging your units to adjust things like attack order and who is out front taking damage). The design element I find most interesting is the final boss: once you win your first run, a buffed version of your winning party becomes the new final boss for subsequent runs until it too is beaten, which then prompts you to make build decisions not just based on what gives you the best shot at victory, but whether it’ll be a nightmare for you to be on the receiving end later.
  • Cinco Paus, in which you have a set of randomized wands (which can each only be used once per level) whose traits are only revealed when used, and even then, only if they actually came into use—you won’t be told that a particular wand’s attack is lethal to frogs if you use it on a lizard—AND EVEN THEN, the text is all in Portuguese, so assuming you don’t speak the language, you have to piece things together from the icons and your own observations of the wands’ behavior and the handful of words you can parse because they’re similar enough to English words. I wouldn’t say it got its hooks into me at all (I played a few runs and decided to throw in the towel) but it’s undeniably really interesting.