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Toadsmash
Jun 10, 2009

Dave Tate's downsy face approves.
It's a difficult comparison. DCSS has a giant pile of mechanics that will absolutely wipe the floor with you if you don't figure out how they work and deal with them appropriately, and has the same focus as Dungeonmans on forcing you to use your consumables early and often while tuning the drop rates of said consumables to a MUCH more punishing degree of scarcity. It's actually a fair bit simpler a game from a mechanical standpoint (DCSS), but yes, the overall tuning is much less forgiving from the gitgo. Dungeonmans wants to make you feel like a hero. That's not to say that it won't walk all over you in a fit of good old hubris, but the occasions it will do that to you don't tend to sneak up on you the way DCSS likes to. Dungeonmans tends to tell you clearly and loudly when you're in for a difficult fight.

Toadsmash fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Jul 26, 2017

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RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

I have figured out how people are getting insane numbers on the Kingsway leaderboards. There's some WILD numbers in the yearly leaderboards and I'm positive I know how those numbers are happening too but it seems like it would take a ton of luck.

zirconmusic
Nov 17, 2014

Unstoppable Trash Panda

Herbotron posted:

Tangledeep is running perfectly for me and is pretty fun as is, can't wait to see what the full release is like! Found a bug, though, when the player swaps places with an allied Floraconda, the surrounding ring of thorns from the Floramancer Master trait doesn't move. If the Floraconda moves itself the ring remains displaced from it, but otherwise behaves normally.

Are there any plans for a weapon mastery for staves? Seems a bit odd that they are the only(?) weapon type to not get one.

Yes, there are definitely more masteries coming. Staff and Fist masteries for sure, and then once those are in I'm doing 3rd and 4th tier for all weapon types. (The JP costs will be tweaked a bit, so it will be more like 300 -> 500 -> 700 -> 900 or something.) You'll only be able to learn one Ultimate mastery per character but they'll be badass. A couple ideas we had were like...

* Sword: When you parry, your crit gets boosted +25% (remember: critting puts your parry at 100%)
* Dagger: Auto attack enemies that move next to you, for free
* Axe: If you kill an enemy when attacking, you get a bonus attack (whirlwind) for free

That kind of stuff :D Might be too broken I dunno, we'll see! There's so much I want to do you have no idea.

atelier morgan
Mar 11, 2003

super-scientific, ultra-gay

Lipstick Apathy

Toadsmash posted:

It's a difficult comparison. DCSS has a giant pile of mechanics that will absolutely wipe the floor with you if you don't figure out how they work and deal with them appropriately, and has the same focus as Dungeonmans on forcing you to use your consumables early and often while tuning the drop rates of said consumables to a MUCH more punishing degree of scarcity. It's actually a fair bit simpler a game from a mechanical standpoint (DCSS), but yes, the overall tuning is much less forgiving from the gitgo. Dungeonmans wants to make you feel like a hero. That's not to say that it won't walk all over you in a fit of good old hubris, but the occasions it will do that to you don't tend to sneak up on you the way DCSS likes to. Dungeonmans tends to tell you clearly and loudly when you're in for a difficult fight.

Yeah, I beat dungeonmans on my sixth mans, and the biggest difficulty in that run was just how long and boring the final dungeon was (its gotten shorter and better since)

meanwhile on dcss at the same time i was still a year, a tournament and about 150 hours from my first dcss ascension despite playing it semi-regularly for a few years already

And if you think the dungeonmans final dungeon is long and boring it has NOTHING on extended postgame dcss, or a regular run of adom for that matter

victrix
Oct 30, 2007


The final dungeon dilemma: By the time players get there, they already have enough gear and power to beat it, so all the expansive floors filled with loot and enemies are filler.

Typical rpg problem really, just doubly so in roguelikes where being over-prepared and cautious mean you're usually on your victory lap by the time you hit the end.

That being said, for Dungeonmans specifically, the length was toned down awhile back, and if you're playing really aggressively, diving into higher level dungeons and (eventually) the final dungeon early can be both fun and effective, as you get access to much stronger gear a lot faster than you normally would.

Otherwise, just bring detection scrolls and you can zip through the last dungeon with ease.

Angry Lobster
May 16, 2011

Served with honor
and some clarified butter.
Unless you open a door and suprise, sharkhounds!

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

In Dungeonmans, loot you dont need can be used as weapons to throw at people with your mind.

victrix
Oct 30, 2007


Angry Lobster posted:

Unless you open a door and suprise, sharkhounds!

I didn't say easy :v:

Use detection scrolls, make sure you have skills and scrolls to get out of dodge, and don't go far from the entrance.

It's risky, but it's a fun way to play, especially after you've done the supermans with 1000 stremf.

Mystic Stylez
Dec 19, 2009

Talking about Dungeonmans, when items are put into that chest in the main hall, if you don't take them and die, will they be available to your next character (and so on until you take them) or are they character based?

megane
Jun 20, 2008



They'll be gone. They're for the character that turned the thing in.

madjackmcmad
May 27, 2008

Look, I'm startin' to believe some of the stuff the cult guy's been saying, it's starting to make a lot of sense.

megane posted:

They'll be gone. They're for the character that turned the thing in.

Gonna change that One Day (tm) so that it becomes a pool of starting boosts for having your Academy grown up. More filthy casual ez mode, I know.

Garfu
Mar 6, 2008

Much like buttholes, families are meant to be tight.
Hey the Gay to Death Tangledeep review was removed or turned positive, grats!

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

madjackmcmad posted:

Gonna change that One Day (tm) so that it becomes a pool of starting boosts for having your Academy grown up. More filthy casual ez mode, I know.

It always struck me as kind of weird how after a point it became impossible for characters to get any Academy Revitalizing Punch.

madjackmcmad
May 27, 2008

Look, I'm startin' to believe some of the stuff the cult guy's been saying, it's starting to make a lot of sense.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

It always struck me as kind of weird how after a point it became impossible for characters to get any Academy Revitalizing Punch.

They're training wheels. New(ish) players get them, they're pre-id'd and full of power, and they go looking in their bags for them when they need them. Eventually they run out, hopefully by that point the player has already discovered their bags are full of healing and recovery items and have learned to Use Their Consumables.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Cross-posting from the steam thread, because roguelikes are cool

I said I'd do it and I'm finally home and able to talk at length about my favorite genre! Roguelikes: The Effortpost.

Roguelikes are my favorite genre because they combine dungeon-crawls with tactical gameplay, good puzzle-esque situations, and as they're usually turn-based I can take the time to think about my moves and die anyways. They are renowned for their difficulty, but honestly, that's part of the skillset? Every roguelike will kill your characters unless you learn why/how you're inviting death and close the gap in your defenses. Dungeonmans wants you to use your consumables, DoomRL generally wants you to be aggressive, Caves of Qud wants you to look at every monster and then usually run screaming from them until you're packing more grenades. Learning the flow of every game and the complex systems at work in them is immensely satisfying, and their replayability is an added boon. I've spent hours with these things, and hope you do too! :D

The Best in the Genre
(according to me, but my opinions were shaped by time in the roguelikes thread so go there for details!)

DoomRL aka DRL, because Zenimax is a butt. This roguelike is fast, easy to play, and effortlessly captures the feel of playing Doom. Shotguns are powerful, levels are fun to explore, and due to the multiple difficulty levels and challenges there's a ton to do in it. It's also the best bang for your buck - this one's free!

Dungeonmans! The best just-explore-dungeons-and-kill-things game on the list! Pick a starting class, grab your gear, and go. The skills are all distinct and powerful, combat is quite tactical - movement comes into play a lot, with powers that let you manipulate where things are as much as where you go. It's also the best game on this list for beginners (outside of Sproggiwood, which is simpler) as there's a legacy mechanic - as you explore the world and kill champions, you find items that give you stat ups. You can take these back to your base (the academy) and level up - and these are available to all future characters in that world, so if you're bad at roguelikes, you can eventually steamroll the game with your massive stats - or hit the ideal where you get high stats that you use more effectively as you've also gotten good at playing. And when you're ready, try Ironmans mode, or - gulp - buy the DLC, which adds difficulty sliders and all kinds of weird new mechanics.

Also: this game is also goon-made (hi madjackmcmad!), and is genuinely funny without relying on memes for the humor. (And if you're allergic to humor, there's not much writing so you can hurry up and fight punks and bees to your heart's delight!) Bonus thread link!

Caves of Qud is a game where you can shoot robots to death with your mind-lasers, kill a bear and wear its face, and share water with famous apes. It is the best open-world rpg on Steam, with a big expansive world to explore, endless cave systems, and a lengthy (and difficult) main quest. I don't have sufficient words to explain how cool this game is, so I'll settle with: it's made by goons Unormal and Hand of Luke, it's getting regular updates (1.0 is not too far away!) and the thread has helpful people who'll get you running as an axe-turtle who shoots ice from your hands.

Bonus notes: you can turn off death in the options if you don't like the difficulty, the UI is getting reworked as we speak, and I cannot emphasize how atmospheric this game is. Just wandering around in the jungle feels threatening and eerie, which is really impressive.

Crypt of the Necrodancer! Dance as you kill your foes, or: time your moves to the beat as you do a simple dungeon crawl - but it's simple so you can do decisions on the fly, and it's really tightly designed with interesting enemy designs/patterns, interesting items, and great, great music. There is a mode to turn off the beat mechanic if you don't have good reflexes, but try it even if you don't have a sense of rhythm - it's just plain fun!

868-HACK, my favorite simple roguelike. It's almost an arcade game in how fiendishly simple it is. You collect weird/cool powerups as you navigate a gauntlet of enemies and floors - and then loop the game until you die, racking up a really high score! It also recently got an expansion(!), which is even better. :D

Good But Not Great

ToME, mentioned for posterity because it's so dang popular - it's like Diablo, the roguelike. Pop a lot of popcorn monsters with its distinctive skill system that's based around cooldowns and using your powers at the appropriate times - until you find the champions who will wreck you unless you're ready for their challenge. BUT before you buy it, download it here! The game is free on its website and the one you buy on steam is the version with some extra optional goodies. I'm, uh, I'm not into this game enough to tell you what DLC to buy or more about it, but it's still very well regarded in the roguelikes thread and worth a gander!

Desktop Dungeons is dungeon crawling turned into a puzzle. Exploring restores your health and mana, so you have to figure out the optimal path through a dungeon with a variety of different classes. It's fun, but tricky - and absolutely worth a look if you love puzzles. (Skip the goat dlc, though! I hear it's essentially a challenge mode for advanced players!)

Dungeons of Dredmor, a clunky classic. It's funny(!, yes, the writing holds up!), its skill-tree hasn't been duplicated by anyone else yet, and it brought roguelikes to the mainstream. I like it, even if it is too long and the final boss isn't great. It has a lot of charm, weird interesting mechanics, and the skillsets are marvelous. Using communism is just a magical way to play any game.

One Way Heroics - A weird yet cool game where you race across the kingdom to kill the Overlord before his creeping darkness swallows up everything. Plus Edition adds a TON of content and refinements to the game, practically remakes it into something even better, so grab that if you can! There is a remake of it that's way more expensive, but I hear it's nowhere near as good: get this one.

Sproggiwood. No time for dungeon diving? New to the genre? This is the holy grail of accessible roguelikes. It's fun to play, cute to look at, and surprisingly vicious. Savage mode is no joke. Play it, and learn to hate twinned monsters! (It's also made by the Caves of Qud developers, and is essentially the antithesis of that game - this is short, straightforward, and has a set of classes instead of an anything goes skill system. Just as addicting, though!)

AuroraRL weird sci-fi roguelike. It feels like it was made in the 90s, and it's exceedingly weird, but it goes on sale for like a dollar so give it a gander if you want to explore the galaxy and fight strange new aliens.

Morphblade - honestly it feels like a phone game. A simple-yet-complex gauntlet of enemies where you upgrade the board itself with different tiles as you progress. I like it, it's by the Gunpoint guy, but it's not a deep game.

Cogmind is fantastic, not on steam YET, and there to fill the void for sci-fi roguelikes. It's a game where you're a robot fighting other robots, and you literally take their parts and cobble yourself together like a frankenstein of various robot parts. You're on a desperate race to escape a complex owned by a malicious AI, and you'll find other rebels as you dig up scraps of plot and new parts on your way out. The game isn't entirely combat - there's hacking, which gives you substantial advantages over your enemies as you can at higher levels dismiss squads after you, hack into other robots, and produce maps of every sector. There's stealth/flight - making yourself into a small flying robot is a good way to just zoom your way to the endgame, and as you can get parts lying around, not just from combat, you can usually find enough cool jets to get you around even behemoths!

Now, the game isn't quite done, and it's coming to steam in early access, but you can see the roadmap here, and essentially everything's in. Maps, gameplay, lore, everything. I've sunk hours and hours into it, and I'm eager to pour more in when it arrives on Steam!

DCSS It's like ToME in that I don't love it, and additionally it's not on Steam, but it is one of the modern pillars of the genre, so. Check it out? It's free, fun, and you can play as a vampiric cat. Go the thread, talk to people who love the game instead of me. (Sorry folks I kept dying to Sigmund and never clicked with it!)

Don't Bother, Included for Posterity's Sake

Bionic Dues, Arcen's weird unpolished game where you swap out different robots as you fight other robots. Worth a gander but you won't love it.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit. ..... you could do better. I'm sorry, but this game is terrible and I don't like it. It's one of the few sci-fi roguelikes, but DoomRL is free. Please play DoomRL instead.

Newcomers

Tangledeep, zirconmusic's kickstarted baby - it's recently dropped on Steam in early access, with plans to finish it by December. Right now it's really content-rich and fun, though! It feels like a SNES game (even has music by the Secret of Mana guy) with a class system, where you ascend through a ruined cave/dungeon system. There's bandits, frogs, and robots - and as you fight them you learn skills for your class, and there's a neat class-swapping mechanic so you can build fun hybrid characters ala Final Fantasy Tactics. My favorite so far is playing as a Floramancer who keeps a pet Floraconda and all the sweet punching skills from the Budoka class. :D

Midboss, a roguelike built around possessing your enemies so you take their forms and skills as you level up. I like it, but I'm also...hmm. It has a problem where the first few floors in any game are similar as you relearn the initial monster skills, but the deeper you get into it, the more varied monsters you find, so the fights get more complex and fun. Absolutely worth looking at, and I love the card system for showcasing your deaths.

Golden Krone Hotel is a fun find for me - you play as a vampire hunter who turns into a vampire as you explore a hotel full of horrible critters. Half the monsters in the game won't touch you if you're a vampire, and vise-versa - so you have to judge the use of potions that swap you back and forth carefully, along with juggling the light mechanics - vampires burn in sunlight! - and the spell system. It's modern, pretty sharp, and I like spinning it up for a game here and there. It's still in EA, but we'll see if it stays this good with updates.

Not Roguelikes
(At least not in my steam library. fight me)

FTL, THE game to play if you want to be captain kirk. Not a fan of the final boss, but you owe it to yourself to play at least one or two games of this. The combat is incredibly fun, and I enjoy sending my crew around my ship to repair things.

Spelunky is the Indiana Jones experience. I mean I don't need to sell this one do I? Everyone knows it. A+ platforming, D- snakes.

Risk of Rain, my new favorite Spelunky-esque game. It has great dynamic difficulty and cool items - you try to clear five stages and their bosses before the timer reaches the insane difficulties, steadily getting stronger - or dying. I love it a lot!

Invisible Inc - one of my favorite games, period. I'd easily say it's the best game on this list, in my personal list of faves. It's a game where you lead a team of special agents through a series of shadowrun-esque hits on corps. Steal their credits, tech, KO their guards, and get out via teleporter before their security catches you. There's a plot, but it's short - every run is over in 72 hours with a final mission that you can prep for. (It's kind of FTL-esque but it's nowhere near as ball-breaking, and so it's actually fun!) Now, I'm going to open up a minefield: everything in the game is procedurally generated, but wait, it's actually good. You're there to learn the patterns of every guard and robot, so you can figure out how to thread the needle. Thanks to a lengthy EA period where they got the game balanced, it creates a fantastically tense puzzlebox that's endlessly replayable.

Now, I could gush for hours, but I'll settle for these last notes: the game gets better the harder it gets. I was initially bored with the game on easy mode, but bumping it up even one difficulty level made the game come alive, because you're supposed to be performing heists under the wire. It feels incredible. Second, the DLC. Get it, but don't activate it until you've beaten the game at least once - it doubles the length of the campaign and makes it even harder, it adds all kinds of cool things, and it's definitely there for advanced players.

Dungeon of the Endless Another game I love to pieces, but it's a hybrid. It's a roguelike/tower defense/line defense where you search a dungeon for the exit - and once you find it, run a running defense as you escort your power source out of there. I lost like a solid week to it when I first got it, and there's lots about it to love - the resource management is interesting, the heroes are fun, and it's just, it's fun to play.

Two things though: - the difficulties are very easy and easy, but these should be renamed Normal and Hard. Normal is doable. Hard is, oof. A good challenge but not fun to play like Normal is.
- Every time you open a door, monsters spawn in all of the UNLIT rooms. Spread your heroes out so you keep specific rooms lit - you'll face less monsters and also protect your harvesters. (Also open one door at a time, else you'll be overwhelmed.)

Summary

Work at the top, play your way down! There's a lot of cool roguelikes on steam, and I know I'm missing classics - ADOM's on steam, there's XLarn, etc - but I've only put things on this list that I've actually played. Now - if you've already played all of these and want to venture beyond the stuff on steam, here's a quicklist of cool roguelikes that should be on steam, but aren't: Demon, Infra Arcana, IVAN, Brogue, Sil - the genre is huge, vibrant, and has a game for almost every occasion.

But in case you haven't, and you've read this entire post without picking anything, go back up there and either install Doom or buy Dungeonmans. You'll have a good time!

P.S. Don't play Nethack. Look it up as a historical entity, admire the cockatrice egg gloves thing, and then play something better.

StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jul 28, 2017

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?
Might be worth noting that Sproggiwood is also on mobile, which is where it really shines.

Highblood
May 20, 2012

Let's talk about tactics.
I still like nethack gently caress you guys it's great

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?
Not for any kind of newcomer, it's not.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

help there's three tigers standing on each other.

Angry Diplomat
Nov 7, 2009

Winner of the TSR Memorial Award for Excellence In Grogging

Synthbuttrange posted:

help there's three tigers standing on each other.

Just attack them in melee, I'm sure it'll be fine

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Highblood posted:

I still like nethack gently caress you guys it's great

It's a fascinating game - it was my first roguelike and I have fond memories of kicking doors until I died.

But it's also the reason I never checked out roguelikes for years because I thought they'd all have super complicated UIs and I'd die easily to random horrible things and so on. And I mean, that's the genre, but you gotta dress it up in better clothes to make people come back and play more!

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Synthbuttrange posted:

help there's three tigers standing on each other.
:allears:

Highblood
May 20, 2012

Let's talk about tactics.
To be fair when I played it all other roguelikes were in fact just as clunky and complicated, the difference being that nethack was the only well documented one

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Highblood posted:

To be fair when I played it all other roguelikes were in fact just as clunky and complicated, the difference being that nethack was the only well documented one
That is absolutely fair. In its time, it was one of the best RLs available, especially for being free and so content-rich. The industry's just grown without it.

hanales
Nov 3, 2013
Hello Roguelike people.

I recently played Neon Chrome when it was free on PS+. I enjoyed it greatly, but it wasn't very deep. What it did do was make me want to play more similar (I guess would be a hybrid roguelike since it has permanent upgrades). Anything in the scifi world to be recommended? Preferably on console (any of them).

The good news is that it got me over my fear of permadeath losing all your forward progress games, but I don't think I'm yet ready for the perma lose all character and forward progress.

tweet my meat
Oct 2, 2013

yospos
Infra Arcana is really hard, but I'm still enjoying throwing myself at the wall with it.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

hanales posted:

Hello Roguelike people.

I recently played Neon Chrome when it was free on PS+. I enjoyed it greatly, but it wasn't very deep. What it did do was make me want to play more similar (I guess would be a hybrid roguelike since it has permanent upgrades). Anything in the scifi world to be recommended? Preferably on console (any of them).

The good news is that it got me over my fear of permadeath losing all your forward progress games, but I don't think I'm yet ready for the perma lose all character and forward progress.

After watching a video of its gameplay, I, hmm. I want to point you towards Brigador for a similar move-and-shoot in a tactical manner. Each level in Brigador will pay out cash that you can use to unlock stuff for freelance mode (where you'll spend most of your time) or lore (which is worth reading.)

That said it has different controls, and is isometric instead of top-down, so it might not be what you're looking for - but I think it has the same feel.

Angry Diplomat
Nov 7, 2009

Winner of the TSR Memorial Award for Excellence In Grogging
Dungeonmans also has that individual permadeath/overall progress system if you want to try a traditional roguelike that does that. Sproggiwood does, too.

RyokoTK
Feb 12, 2012

I am cool.

StrixNebulosa posted:

After watching a video of its gameplay, I, hmm. I want to point you towards Brigador for a similar move-and-shoot in a tactical manner. Each level in Brigador will pay out cash that you can use to unlock stuff for freelance mode (where you'll spend most of your time) or lore (which is worth reading.)

That said it has different controls, and is isometric instead of top-down, so it might not be what you're looking for - but I think it has the same feel.

Yeah bear in mind that Brigador is completely dissimilar from Neon Chrome in its gameplay, and also has a kind of grungy sci-fi look rather than the shiny cyberpunk feel too.

The obvious choice if you want an action roguelite with guns is Nuclear Throne, but I don't think there really are any other games in the genre that have that hard cyberpunk bent to it.

Angry Diplomat
Nov 7, 2009

Winner of the TSR Memorial Award for Excellence In Grogging
Risk of Rain is kind of an action roguelite; the only thing you really gain between runs is access to new items and classes, but said items and classes tend to be dope as gently caress and it's way the hell easier to win with the Chef and everything unlocked than it is to win with the Commando and only the starting items.

Plus RoR is really loving good, so...

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

Angry Diplomat posted:

Dungeonmans also has that individual permadeath/overall progress system if you want to try a traditional roguelike that does that. Sproggiwood does, too.

They do this differently though. In Dungeonmans, new characters get to inherit half of stat points gained by any previous character, and they can access a random assortment of gear via the Ancient Artifacts system. Sproggiwood instead lets you buy perks like reducing the XP required to level, putting more shrines in the dungeon, and making store prices cheaper. You can also purchase guaranteed starting gear for a class; normally they start with basic gear (e.g. the Farmer starts each dungeon with a Pitchfork and Dungarees), but you can buy upgraded versions (e.g. Pitchfork of the Witch-King) after having found them in the dungeon, at which point they become available for that specific class for all future dungeon dives.

The effective difference is that Dungeonmans lets you smooth out the early game, while Sproggiwood lets you adjust the overall difficulty and eliminate the random factor of what gear you find.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Sproggiwood is also adorable even as you mad-pumpkin carpet-bomb enemies while Dungeonmans lets you add custom sprites and faces you with three tigers standing on top of one another.

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

StrixNebulosa posted:

Cross-posting from the steam thread, because roguelikes are cool

I said I'd do it and I'm finally home and able to talk at length about my favorite genre! Roguelikes: The Effortpost.

Roguelikes are my favorite genre because they combine dungeon-crawls with tactical gameplay, good puzzle-esque situations, and as they're usually turn-based I can take the time to think about my moves and die anyways. They are renowned for their difficulty, but honestly, that's part of the skillset? Every roguelike will kill your characters unless you learn why/how you're inviting death and close the gap in your defenses. Dungeonmans wants you to use your consumables, DoomRL generally wants you to be aggressive, Caves of Qud wants you to look at every monster and then usually run screaming from them until you're packing more grenades. Learning the flow of every game and the complex systems at work in them is immensely satisfying, and their replayability is an added boon. I've spent hours with these things, and hope you do too! :D

The Best in the Genre
(according to me, but my opinions were shaped by time in the roguelikes thread so go there for details!)

DoomRL aka DRL, because Zenimax is a butt. This roguelike is fast, easy to play, and effortlessly captures the feel of playing Doom. Shotguns are powerful, levels are fun to explore, and due to the multiple difficulty levels and challenges there's a ton to do in it. It's also the best bang for your buck - this one's free!

Dungeonmans! The best just-explore-dungeons-and-kill-things game on the list! Pick a starting class, grab your gear, and go. The skills are all distinct and powerful, combat is quite tactical - movement comes into play a lot, with powers that let you manipulate where things are as much as where you go. It's also the best game on this list for beginners (outside of Sproggiwood, which is simpler) as there's a legacy mechanic - as you explore the world and kill champions, you find items that give you stat ups. You can take these back to your base (the academy) and level up - and these are available to all future characters in that world, so if you're bad at roguelikes, you can eventually steamroll the game with your massive stats - or hit the ideal where you get high stats that you use more effectively as you've also gotten good at playing. And when you're ready, try Ironmans mode, or - gulp - buy the DLC, which adds difficulty sliders and all kinds of weird new mechanics.

Also: this game is also goon-made (hi madjackmcmad!), and is genuinely funny without relying on memes for the humor. (And if you're allergic to humor, there's not much writing so you can hurry up and fight punks and bees to your heart's delight!) Bonus thread link!

Caves of Qud is a game where you can shoot robots to death with your mind-lasers, kill a bear and wear its face, and share water with famous apes. It is the best open-world rpg on Steam, with a big expansive world to explore, endless cave systems, and a lengthy (and difficult) main quest. I don't have sufficient words to explain how cool this game is, so I'll settle with: it's made by goons Unormal and Hand of Luke, it's getting regular updates (1.0 is not too far away!) and the thread has helpful people who'll get you running as an axe-turtle who shoots ice from your hands.

Bonus notes: you can turn off death in the options if you don't like the difficulty, the UI is getting reworked as we speak, and I cannot emphasize how atmospheric this game is. Just wandering around in the jungle feels threatening and eerie, which is really impressive.

Crypt of the Necrodancer! Dance as you kill your foes, or: time your moves to the beat as you do a simple dungeon crawl - but it's simple so you can do decisions on the fly, and it's really tightly designed with interesting enemy designs/patterns, interesting items, and great, great music. There is a mode to turn off the beat mechanic if you don't have good reflexes, but try it even if you don't have a sense of rhythm - it's just plain fun!

868-HACK, my favorite simple roguelike. It's almost an arcade game in how fiendishly simple it is. You collect weird/cool powerups as you navigate a gauntlet of enemies and floors - and then loop the game until you die, racking up a really high score! It also recently got an expansion(!), which is even better. :D

Good But Not Great

ToME, mentioned for posterity because it's so dang popular - it's like Diablo, the roguelike. Pop a lot of popcorn monsters with its distinctive skill system that's based around cooldowns and using your powers at the appropriate times - until you find the champions who will wreck you unless you're ready for their challenge. BUT before you buy it, download it here! The game is free on its website and the one you buy on steam is the version with some extra optional goodies. I'm, uh, I'm not into this game enough to tell you what DLC to buy or more about it, but it's still very well regarded in the roguelikes thread and worth a gander!

Desktop Dungeons is dungeon crawling turned into a puzzle. Exploring restores your health and mana, so you have to figure out the optimal path through a dungeon with a variety of different classes. It's fun, but tricky - and absolutely worth a look if you love puzzles. (Skip the goat dlc, though! I hear it's essentially a challenge mode for advanced players!)

Dungeons of Dredmor, a clunky classic. It's funny(!, yes, the writing holds up!), its skill-tree hasn't been duplicated by anyone else yet, and it brought roguelikes to the mainstream. I like it, even if it is too long and the final boss isn't great. It has a lot of charm, weird interesting mechanics, and the skillsets are marvelous. Using communism is just a magical way to play any game.

One Way Heroics - A weird yet cool game where you race across the kingdom to kill the Overlord before his creeping darkness swallows up everything. Plus Edition adds a TON of content and refinements to the game, practically remakes it into something even better, so grab that if you can! There is a remake of it that's way more expensive, but I hear it's nowhere near as good: get this one.

Sproggiwood. No time for dungeon diving? New to the genre? This is the holy grail of accessible roguelikes. It's fun to play, cute to look at, and surprisingly vicious. Savage mode is no joke. Play it, and learn to hate twinned monsters! (It's also made by the Caves of Qud developers, and is essentially the antithesis of that game - this is short, straightforward, and has a set of classes instead of an anything goes skill system. Just as addicting, though!)

AuroraRL weird sci-fi roguelike. It feels like it was made in the 90s, and it's exceedingly weird, but it goes on sale for like a dollar so give it a gander if you want to explore the galaxy and fight strange new aliens.

Morphblade - honestly it feels like a phone game. A simple-yet-complex gauntlet of enemies where you upgrade the board itself with different tiles as you progress. I like it, it's by the Gunpoint guy, but it's not a deep game.

Don't Bother, Included for Posterity's Sake

Bionic Dues, Arcen's weird unpolished game where you swap out different robots as you fight other robots. Worth a gander but you won't love it.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit. ..... you could do better. I'm sorry, but this game is terrible and I don't like it. It's one of the few sci-fi roguelikes, but DoomRL is free. Please play DoomRL instead.

Newcomers

Tangledeep, zirconmusic's kickstarted baby - it's recently dropped on Steam in early access, with plans to finish it by December. Right now it's really content-rich and fun, though! It feels like a SNES game (even has music by the Secret of Mana guy) with a class system, where you ascend through a ruined cave/dungeon system. There's bandits, frogs, and robots - and as you fight them you learn skills for your class, and there's a neat class-swapping mechanic so you can build fun hybrid characters ala Final Fantasy Tactics. My favorite so far is playing as a Floramancer who keeps a pet Floraconda and all the sweet punching skills from the Budoka class. :D

Midboss, a roguelike built around possessing your enemies so you take their forms and skills as you level up. I like it, but I'm also...hmm. It has a problem where the first few floors in any game are similar as you relearn the initial monster skills, but the deeper you get into it, the more varied monsters you find, so the fights get more complex and fun. Absolutely worth looking at, and I love the card system for showcasing your deaths.

Golden Krone Hotel is a fun find for me - you play as a vampire hunter who turns into a vampire as you explore a hotel full of horrible critters. Half the monsters in the game won't touch you if you're a vampire, and vise-versa - so you have to judge the use of potions that swap you back and forth carefully, along with juggling the light mechanics - vampires burn in sunlight! - and the spell system. It's modern, pretty sharp, and I like spinning it up for a game here and there. It's still in EA, but we'll see if it stays this good with updates.

Not Roguelikes
(At least not in my steam library. fight me)

FTL, THE game to play if you want to be captain kirk. Not a fan of the final boss, but you owe it to yourself to play at least one or two games of this. The combat is incredibly fun, and I enjoy sending my crew around my ship to repair things.

Spelunky is the Indiana Jones experience. I mean I don't need to sell this one do I? Everyone knows it. A+ platforming, D- snakes.

Risk of Rain, my new favorite Spelunky-esque game. It has great dynamic difficulty and cool items - you try to clear five stages and their bosses before the timer reaches the insane difficulties, steadily getting stronger - or dying. I love it a lot!

Summary

Work at the top, play your way down! There's a lot of cool roguelikes on steam, and I know I'm missing classics - ADOM's on steam, there's XLarn, etc - but I've only put things on this list that I've actually played. Now - if you've already played all of these and want to venture beyond the stuff on steam, here's a quicklist of cool roguelikes that should be on steam, but aren't: Demon, Infra Arcana, Cogmind, Brogue, Sil - the genre is huge, vibrant, and has a game for almost every occasion.

But in case you haven't, and you've read this entire post without picking anything, go back up there and either install Doom or buy Dungeonmans. You'll have a good time!

P.S. Don't play Nethack. Look it up as a historical entity, admire the cockatrice egg gloves thing, and then play something better.

Maybe add Space Rogue to the list? Sort of a shinier, not so crushingly hard take on FTL?

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


nethack is not a bad game and people should play it. but to win in a reasonable number of attempts you need to know stuff you'd never learn on your own.

anyone who wants to get into it should dive in, play enough to understand the basics, and then watch good nethack players play for a while. i watched the old goon let's play. once you have a sense of the needed gear for finishing the game and how to get it, ascension should come relatively easily and instant death should be very rare

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Jul 27, 2017

Kobold Sex Tape
Feb 17, 2011

[psychopath who doesn't care who he hurts voice] but half of those games in the list aren't roguelikes though

RoboCicero
Oct 22, 2009

"I'm sick and tired of reading these posts!"
Have you tried Cogmind? If you don't, I think I have a spare key lying around I can gift you in return for writing that up (in the hopes it'll make it on the list next time :v:)

hito
Feb 13, 2012

Thank you, kids. By giving us this lift you're giving a lift to every law-abiding citizen in the world.

RoboCicero posted:

Have you tried Cogmind? If you don't, I think I have a spare key lying around I can gift you in return for writing that up (in the hopes it'll make it on the list next time :v:)

Ditto for Invisible Inc.

Danger - Octopus!
Apr 20, 2008


Nap Ghost

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

The effective difference is that Dungeonmans lets you smooth out the early game, while Sproggiwood lets you adjust the overall difficulty and eliminate the random factor of what gear you find.

Also, and this is what makes Dungeonmans one of the best roguelikes for me, this means that after a few runs (and particularly once you have a few ex-Dungeonmans haunting the academy) the opening section where you rebuild your powers and level back up to where you were before you died becomes much faster. I find the grind of repeating samey early content and having limited powers so dull in games, so the way this section gets faster and faster with repeated plays in Dungeonmans is great.

Danger - Octopus! fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jul 27, 2017

Eela6
May 25, 2007
Shredded Hen
Fun list. I'm glad that DoomRL, the best game of all time, is at the top of the heap. Considering that some of the games (DoomRL) you've listed aren't available on steam, I think it's crazy that you haven't mentioned DCSS. It's the most popular (and best!) traditional Roguelikes it definitely should have a mention. When people ask me about getting into 'real' roguelikes I tend to point them to DoomRL and then DCSS.

PS: Nethack is good and people should play Nethack. It's deeply flawed, yes, but it has it's own magic - it's a very special product of it's time & place. There will never be something like it again.

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vorebane
Feb 2, 2009

"I like Ur and Kavodel and Enki being nice to people for some reason."

Wrong Voter amongst wrong voters

hanales posted:

Hello Roguelike people.

I recently played Neon Chrome when it was free on PS+. I enjoyed it greatly, but it wasn't very deep. What it did do was make me want to play more similar (I guess would be a hybrid roguelike since it has permanent upgrades). Anything in the scifi world to be recommended? Preferably on console (any of them).

The good news is that it got me over my fear of permadeath losing all your forward progress games, but I don't think I'm yet ready for the perma lose all character and forward progress.

I can't believe no one's suggested Enter the Gungeon, so I did. Blacksea Odyessy is cool too but it's buggy, I can't even see the menus lately, though it's fine if I can blindly click through them into the game.

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