Roguelikes

I wanted to make a general thread for these types of games. I happen to enjoy them, but a lot of times this style of game doesn't get a lot of attention, so it can hard to track some of the good ones down.

Post your suggestions/favorites here!

A great explanation of why these games can be so amazing:

https://waltorious.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/roguelikes-an-introduction/

 

I've really enjoyed playing Darkest Dungeon. http://store.steampowered.com/app/262060/ . It's one of the few rougelikes I've had fun playing.

You have to work to keep your party's sanity intact as much if not more than their health.

 

I am not a huge fan of them, but I do enjoy FTL once in a while.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/212680/

 

Those definitly have attributes of the original rouge-likes, but I was thinking of some of the "older" style games. Current examples would be Tales of Maj-Eyal, Angband, Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress, and that sort of thing. The games where visual design is a distant second place to complexity and challenge. One of the most intersting aspects of these games is very few of them are ever finished. They stay in "beta" for their entire lives, and the developers sometimes work on them for years at a time, just slowly adding more and more features.

Caves of Qud, for example, has an INSANE amount of world simulation (almost as high as DF) and looks like shit.

 

Darkest Dungeon is my jam. need to start playing that again.

 

I feel like a lot of these games are just designed to look like shit for no reason other then to be hipsters. I am not a massive graphics whore but damn, I need something other than ascii in 2015.

 

Most of the games of this type that I've seen are developed by a single person over long periods of time. Graphics were never a consideration in the first place, so some of these get increasingly more complex without ever changing "styles". TOME, for instance, came out in the mid-ninties as a mod for Angband, and just entered version 4 this year, and FINALLY has graphics. At other times, independant modders come through and design tilesets or updated interfaces to sit on top of the game and make it easier to play.

If it makes you feel better, even though I enjoy this style of game, I still prefer to have a tileset that lets me quickly see what things are without having to examine the manual every few minutes.