I don’t recall exactly when I became the massive fan ofroguelikesand roguelites that I am today, but if I had to make an educated guess, it would’ve been when I stumbled upon the original Binding of Isaac in my freshman year of college. The idea of a game that effectively resets every time you die was naturally intimidating at first, and I almost ragequit the whole thing more than a few times.
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But that’s the thing about roguelikes: no matter how inherently difficult they may seem, there’s always a reason to the rhyme, a distinct pattern that only starts to emerge with enough failures and exposure. It’s a style of gameplay that encourages gradual improvement, and pure progress at its finest.
The very first time I cleared an Isaac run was a full-on event, with my roommate and I going out for pizza to celebrate. If you’re looking to experience that rapturous feeling for yourself, these are the games that’ll get you into the roguelike genre.
10The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth
The One That Pulled Me In
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Technically speaking, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the roguelike rabbit hole by the original Flash-basedBinding of Isaac, which I first played as a demo on Newgrounds.The Binding of Isaac: Rebirthis a full remake of that game with updated graphics and retouched mechanics, but the spirit of the original is alive, well, and somehow equal parts accommodating and hostile.
Isaac is something of a blueprint upon which more than a few top-down action roguelikes are built, and there’s a good reason for that. When you start the game, the mechanics are fairly straightforward: you shoot in four directions, you drop bombs, you find items, you kill bosses.
Most of the more complex, esoteric items, power-ups, and enemy types don’t come until way later, when you’ve already found your footing.
The game does a good job of only being as difficult as it needs to be for your current level of progression. It’s no cakewalk, but it shouldn’t be too long before you start clearing runs with some degree of regularity. At that point, the game starts taking the limiters off and hitting you with the good stuff, and by then you’re already firmly sucked in.
9Enter The Gungeon
Precise Like A Laser Sight
Enter the Gungeon
If Binding of Isaac set the baseline for top-down action roguelikes, thenEnter the Gungeonwas the game that raised the bar. The games share a lot of the same DNA, from their projectile-based combat to their randomly-generating dungeon layouts, but Gungeon builds a little more on its… infrastructure, for lack of a better word.
For instance, rather than a singular means of attack that gradually builds and changes with the items you get, Gungeon allows you to hold multiple weapons that you can swap between on the fly, which allows you to swap up your combat style as necessary. Of course, this is offset by your guns’ limited ammo, so that extra freedom doesn’t come for free.
You need to build out your kit to accommodate those multiple combat styles, evolving in a more divergent fashion. Gungeon’s dodge rolling mechanics are offset in a similar fashion, giving you a definitive means of dodging, while also making you dodge a larger quantity of bullets.
Gungeon’s main hub area and many random shops and safe zones also allow the run to develop and diverge in more interesting ways, even introducing inter-run sidequests and storylines.
If The Gameplay Doesn’t Get You, The Story Will
Speaking of storylines, the idea of integrating a proper, linear narrative with a roguelike, something that you’re borderline expected to start over repeatedly, sounds ridiculous on paper. Maybe so, but that didn’t stop Supergiant Games from trying, and the result wasHades, arguably its most successful game, if not one ofthemost successful roguelikes ever made.
Hades’ die-and-retry mechanics are actually woven into the game’s narrative, as Prince Zagreus, son of Hades, will always return to his father’s home upon death in the underworld.
Hades and the house’s denizens are always kept abreast of your progress in runs, which means whenever you return or encounter them in the wild, they’ll almost always have something new to say to you. Fun fact,Hades’ script is over 300,000 words long, and it feels like it.
That’s not to say the gameplay isn’t great as well; it totally is, opting for high-speed melee combat with evolving weapons bolstered by boons of the gods.
Plus, even if you don’t beat a run, you obtain resources that gradually develop your abilities and the game’s mechanics, keeping you developing at a steady clip. It’s pretty much guaranteed that either the gameplay or story will hook you; They’re both that excellent.
A Simple Game, Refined
A good way to get into the roguelike genre is to try one thatcrosses over with a game or genre you’re already familiar with. Luckily, there are alotof these for pretty much every other kind of game you can think of. If the more elaborate genre hybrids don’t appeal to you, then allow me to ask a simple question: do you know how to play cards? Yes? Congratulations, you know how to play Balatro.
Balatro’s meteoric success, at least in my humble opinion, is built on the fact that a statistically significant portion of people understand the basics of poker. If you can recognize a full house or a flush on sight, you’re already waist-deep. In addition to that, though, Balatro’s main appeal is taking those established rules in ridiculous new directions.
With the help of Balatro’s many rule-bending Jokers, you can not only score exponentially more from the poker hands you know, but even invent entirely new hands that normally wouldn’t exist. I remember the first time I pulled off a flush house, I had a little Anton Ego/Ratatouille flashback moment to when I tried to make my own card game as a kid.
6Cult Of The Lamb
Half-Rogue, Half-Sims
Cult of the Lamb
Speaking of genre hybrids, another genre of game that requires a decent time investment and trial-and-error is a base and community-building game. It takes time to optimize your base, get your supplies of materials and food up and running, and generally figure out how to keep everyone happy.Cult of the Lambtakes that, and combines it with roguelike dungeon crawling to bridge the gaps.
To keep your commune of cultists happy, you need to build houses, grow and provide food, and establish vital amenities like a communal bathroom. Some of this can be handled on-site, but most of it will require you to venture out into the wilds, punishing heretics. Compared to other dungeon-crawlers, Cult of the Lamb’s run structure allows for more consistent breaks and victories.
To actually clear one of the game’s dungeons completely, you’ll need to succeed four times. In between each of those smaller victories, you can return to your cult and utilize your newly-gained resource. Making your cult happy, in turn, will give you newer and better abilities to pursue continued victories.
5Vampire Survivors
Let Them Come To You
Vampire Survivors
The randomly-generating dungeon aspect of many popular roguelikes can be a little offputting, requiring an extra layer of strategy and planning from you to ensure you’re not bumbling into a trap or progressing beyond your means. If you’re not a fan of pursuing enemies and riches, perhaps it’d be easier to let the enemies and riches come to you inVampire Survivors.
A large portion of Vampire Survivors’ core gameplay loop is automated, with monsters continuously spawning in and approaching your location, and XP gems getting sucked up as you walk around. All of your weapons and abilities deploy on their own as well, so all you have to do is be standing in the right place to land attacks.
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Vampire Survivors is a nice little encapsulation of what playing most roguelike games feels like. It starts fairly slow and leisurely, but gradually ramps up in intensity, consuming you if you haven’t built out your kit properly. The only difference is this process happens on its own rather than needing you to take the first step.
4Inscryption
A Roguelike That Wants To Be Finished
Inscryption
A complaint I’ve occasionally heard about roguelike games is that they take too much time and effort to realistically finish. There’s some truth to this, at least for roguelikes that actually have a definitive endpoint. If youprefer to play games that can actually be beaten, even accommodating repeated runs, then a good compromise isInscryption.
Inscryption’s card-centric gameplay loop has roguelike elements, requiring you to build and optimize your deck and making you start over if you blow it. However, what differentiates Inscryption from other roguelike deckbuilders is that, for both mechanic and narrative reasons, it’s a game that wants to be finished.
Progressing in runs, as well as solving puzzles in the cabin both unravel the story and unlock new, helpful mechanics that give you an edge in your runs. The game actually has hard choke points, stopping you if you proceed too quickly with a really good deck and making you start the run over, just to ensure you actually get everything that’s coming to you.
Even with those, beating Inscryption shouldn’t take you nearly as long as other, similar games.
3Ballionaire
The Hypnotic Power Of Pachinko
Ballionaire
There’s something inherently satisfying about seeing a ball bounce around in a little enclosed space, whether it’s in a pachinko machine or the Plinko game in The Price is Right. Either of those could be considered a proto-roguelike in themselves, given their random nature, so it shouldn’t be especially surprising that a game emerged to take advantage of that.
If you like seeing balls bouncing off stuff, you’ll love Ballionaire. Ballionaire is a delightfully simple little score-based roguelike, wherein you need to drop a ball into a board of peg triggers and try to accumulate as much money as you can. The basic concept is very approachable, as it’s just random physics dictating a falling ball.
The hook is that all of the triggers you can place on the board can synergize with one another, generating more money or special effects when striking in a particular order. It doesn’t require all that much thought; you can win runs semi-consistently with a bit of gut instinct.
Ballionaire is also a very user-friendly experience. As opposed to some roguelikes that don’t adequately explain their gimmicks, Ballionaire gives you a full lowdown on peg effects and the pegs that synergize with them, which saves you a Google search.
2Rogue Legacy
The Original Rogue-Vania
Rogue Legacy
It kind of feels like theroguelike and metroidvania genreswould be antithetical to one another, as the latter requires extensive exploration and backtracking that the former’s looping nature makes difficult. It’s not impossible, though; all you need is a carefully-designed map and a lineage of bozos to send into a proverbial meat grinder.
Rogue Legacyincorporates elements of both of those genres using a map with several permanent points interspersed with randomly-generated dungeon pathways. Even though the layout changes with every death (unless you pay to lock the castle down), repeated runs gradually acquaint you with the “flow” of the map, and a general idea of where everything is going to be relative to the starting point.
Rogue Legacy’s lineage system also helps to keep things fresh, with each subsequent adventurer having different stats, classes, and traits. Traits, especially, can make runs far easier, more difficult, or dumber if you get something like I.B.S. You choose how your family tree grows and develops, which in turn broadens your exploration abilities and tactics.
It’ll Pummel You And You’ll Like It
Perhaps above all other elements and factors, there is one thing roguelikes are known for: being punishingly difficult. Many modern roguelikes have toned this down a bit, hence the creation of the roguelite subgenre, but some of the older games don’t do things that way. If you’re specifically interested in roguelikes for the difficulty factor,Spelunkywill give your ticket a good punch.
From the moment you start Spelunky, you can feel just how oppressive its vibe is, despite its cute and cartoony aesthetic. You can’t take a lot of damage, you don’t have much in the way of defending yourself, it’s difficult to find upgrades, and so on. Don’t expect the game to hold your hand, either; there’s a strong possibility you’ll be dead before the end of the first level.
As I said at the top, the peak of the roguelike genre is pure progress, and Spelunky epitomizes that. Youwilllearn the ins and outs of every level, youwilllearn enemy patterns and weaknesses, and youwilllearn how to avoid every type of trap, or youwilldie. High difficulty breeds strong competitors, and once you get good at Spelunky, no one can touch you.
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