Poll of the Day > No roguelike "unlocks" like Binding of Isaac

(+) Yeah! (+)

Binding of Isaac is the only roguelike that lets you literally crash game if you high-roll enough.

Others try to imitate it, they are also "overwhelmingly positive", but they water down the high-roll and constantly cheat you out of killer combos because they would hate it if you didn't face a challenge. They would really hate it if you killed every enemy on frame one. Only RoR2 is remotely close.

Every RoR2 run I have, I don't ever finish the game, instead I try to go "infinite", which is to get so powerful you will 100% never die, even if you want to. That's a true ending. I've gotten it a couple dozen times.

I agree 100%.

RoR2 = Risk Of Rain 2, right?

You can pretty easily break nethack/pathos if you know what youre doing, Im sure there are others as well

Depending on the game, Ive had some Roguelikes with crazy good runs. Especially when they have crazy good combos

RoR1 is also pretty easy to break, especially if you exploit the Command artifact and the bonus stage that lets you farm indefinitely.

i think that's the entire appeal of vampire survivors... but it's not really a roguelike

Lokarin posted...

i think that's the entire appeal of vampire survivors... but it's not really a roguelike

Persistent unlocks, so at best it is a Roguelite. It is also some kind of inverted Tower Defence or something.
Yea, I am not really sure what to call it, aside from more fun that it seems at first glance.

Edit: then again, it probably emphasizes the problem of naming genre's after games, as not everyone sees a game the same way and might consider certain aspects more intrinsic than others.

I don't see why you couldn't call Vampire Survivors a roguelike, aside from the focus on surviving until the end of a timer instead of trying to reach a concrete end goal. It's got the basic concept of trying to work with randomized abilities to progress through procedurally generated levels, at least.

Also, I haven't played it yet, but my understanding is that Noita can get pretty stupidly broken at times. Like, falling to your death because you accidentally blew up the entire ground with the right/wrong build kind of broken.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Edit: then again, it probably emphasizes the problem of naming genre's after games, as not everyone sees a game the same way and might consider certain aspects more intrinsic than others.

And that comes back to the issue that "roguelike" isn't so much a genre as it is a format: It doesn't describe how the game plays, it describes how the gameplay loop works (that is, you play in short, significantly randomized "runs" instead of progressing through a persistent world).

Because Roguelikes do not have persistent mechanical gains from runs, they are just about each single run. Roguelites do have those.

While that is the distinction, roguelikes without any sort of metaprogression are pretty rare these days, so there isn't a lot of value in bothering to differentiate when describing a game unless you're discussing how much metaprogression there is.

Roguelite vs roguelike do not have nearly as authoritative definitions as people pretend they do. Roguelike as a term has existed for FAR longer and the primary use of the term for the last like 30 years has been games that play similar to Rogue- which Binding of Isaac really doesn't. It's not turn based, the power progression is wholly different, the pacing is wholly different, it's not ASCII, etc. Hell the fucking wikipedia page calls Binding of Isaac a roguelite because it strays so far from being like Rogue.

People who pretend roguelike vs roguelike are dichotomic definitions have probably never even played an actual roguelike. Permadeath and metaprogression aren't the deciding factors. There's a bunch more factors of varying importance and it's more of a sliding scale than either-or.

That's what I'm getting at with calling it a format and not a genre (at least with the modern use of the term). That means you can have a roguelike ARPG, or a roguelike FPS, or a roguelike TBSRPG... the defining features are permadeath and randomization between runs, not whether or not the gameplay is turn-based or anything like that (which is a matter of genre).

neon abyss is fun

I should really play Neon Abyss. I picked it up in a Humble Choice a while back (along with Atomicrops, which was surprisingly awesome), but haven't touched it yet.

hera posted...

neon abyss is fun

I enjoyed it a lot

If you like slower roguelikes you can become pretty much a demi-god by the end of COGMIND, but it's hella hard to get that far