Gaming

Hades 10outta10

COGMIND.

COGMIND COGMIND COGMIND.

Cogmind is legitimately the most underrated "real" roguelike around. Everyone knows about CDDA and Caves of Qud or whatever, I never see anyone talk about Cogmind. It's such a rabbit hole both gameplay and actually story-wise (because yeah, it actually has a story, despite being a traditional roguelike) that I can't help but wonder how the hell it's developer keeps going.

They have a blog where they talk about the game. It's borderline obsessive.

If I look at any one aspect of it closely I inevitably end up going "wait, what the hell?" because it goes farther than I expected. In-game computer terminals, the way word of your presence travels throughout the caverns you're in, each tile actually being a 3x3 space which affects how much "cover" you have... playing for quite a few hours before meeting other truly sentient robots and realizing that oh, there's, like, lore. A lot of it.

Dead Cells is brilliant

Caves of Qud is AMAZING! You should buy it OP

Man I'm sad we don't have an /r/roguelikes here. Discussion of the genre has been clobbered by the much more popular roguelites and it was nice to have a forum focused on traditional roguelikes. There's a discord but it's not the same.

Some lesser known ones that I think are quite cool:

Shadow of the Wyrm, open world fantasy with a nice vibe.

Dawn of the Mexica, quite brutal lethal combat with an uncommon setting.

Forays into Norrendrin, traditional dungeon crawler setting with distilled gameplay systems. Brogue-adjacent.

The Ground Gives Way, also a traditional dungeon crawler but with a really interesting fatigue-based equipment system and non lethal combat options. Cool item effects and stuff.

Lost Flame, if dark souls was a roguelike. Quite involved combat where attacks are telegraphed and you can dodge them, use abilities for movement etc. Great atmosphere.

A personal favourite is UnReal World.

...into the far north we shall take you.

I've enjoyed Slay the Spire and Wizard of Legend. The latter is very hard to beat at least for me.

Check out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. There's a version on Steam to support the developers, but you can download the executable for free from their website just like DCSS.

Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead/Bright Nights are the obvious recommendations I have, though they are more managing/survival games than a classic roguelike.

One that I come back every now and then and don't see recommended often is Prospector, it's about exploring space.

Also I try NetHack every three or four years but I can't make it hold my attention long enough to learn it.

My go-to is Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

Holy god, I never thought I'd see someone else mention DCSS in the wild!! I used to play that a bunch about a year or so ago. Truth be told, I kind of miss it once in a while. Devilishly hard, but I did manage to break into Hell once. Even killed one of the pandemonium lords.

Shit... I might start playing again.

I tend to play a lot of the old text-tile games that I cut my teeth on back starting with Angband. Any of those variants are enjoyable, but I pretty much stick to Zangband (Angband adding in the work of Zelazny) and frogcomposband (It's a mouthfull, but FUN).

I highly recommend OneBit Adventure. It is available on mobile and Steam. The last time I checked it is still in active development, So you will see new features and improvements frequently.

been really loving halls of torment, best description i could give is something between vampire survivor and diablo 2.

Try out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It's like a 90's sci-fi that gets hit by every single apocalyptic, world-ending disaster at once.

CoQ is indeed a quality game, that I would recommend. Another one, if you are interested in sci-fi, Cogmind. It has pretty amazing graphics, even if you use ASCII style.

CDDA, is fun sci-fi post-apocalypse, with zombies. But its complex. But real fun.

Golden Light if you're into horror games.

I've always enjoyed roguelikes but never really been able to spend a lot of time with a single one until Risk of Rain. It's my absolute go-to.

Ancient Domains of Mystery is really really good if you can get into it. It's available on Steam, but you can get the free version which is identical except for the UI from https://adom.de/

I didn't see anyone recommend in the comments, but I very much enjoyed Dreamscaper. It has a nice story revolving around the main character confronting hwr psychological issues in the world of her dreams. Combat is fun, slower paced and a little more tactical than most.

Also, fwiw, I'm not generally a roguelike fan, but I liked this one. Whether that makes you more or less likely to take my recommendation is up to you lol.

I poured way too much time into Rogue, Moria, Angband and Zangband back in the day... Sad to see Zangband completely disappeared - no idea if there's a similar flavour floating around.

Played a couple of newer more graphical (and probably better balanced games) but I actually found them less engaging.

My son was madly into Shattered Pixel Dungeon for a while.

Everspace 1 and 2 are both solid games if you like space exploration and ahooting!

This is a little bit of a deep cut, but the roguelike add-on to Remnant From the Ashes honestly slaps if you enjoy the core gameplay loop. (The pitch is "Dark Souls with guns," which is like 70% accurate.) High quality 3rd person gunplay, awesome abilities, fun enemies, wacky builds, beautiful maps.

EDIT. Remnant is on sale for $13 on Steam! A very good deal, esp. with Remnant 2 coming out this year!

Darkest Dungeon is also great if you like oppressive horror vibes.

I'd recommend: Hades, Dead Cells, The Binding of Isaac, and FTL

I got very addicted to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead for a while... so much so that I ported it to Android so I could play on my commute to work.

https://cataclysmdda.org/

Ah, look at everyone recommending action roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is dead, long live the Berlin Interpretation! I'll happily n'th Caves of Qud and Cogmind as amazing turn-based traditional roguelikes, and I'll add to that pile the following lesser-known gems:

• Dungeonmans: Very much a no-frills traditional roguelike but also a very good one and probably the closest thing out there to "DCSS but better".
• Tangledeep: Borrowing more from the Japanese side of the genre, with things like pets and item dungeons and sharply limited healing.
• DoomRL/Jupiter Hell: This is what it sounds like, a turn-based top-down version of Doom where cover and movement are everything. DoomRL is the original free version, while Jupiter Hell is the souped-up Steam version stripped of all trademarks.
• Rift Wizard: This one is weird but amazing - you can only attack via magic, you have a limited number of casts of all your spells, and you need to clear an entire level before advancing. But you have a mostly-free choice of new spells each level, and the goal is to put together something hilariously broken before the game outscales you.

Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:

• Angband: A truly ancient free game whose roots go back to the mainframe days. Still has living variants in addition to vanilla, of which IMO the best are Sil and FrogComPosBand.
• Nethack: Another truly ancient free game from the mainframe days, this one was really intended to be a puzzle an entire university would work together to solve. If you try it today, expect to need spoilers.
• ADOM: The last of the ancient free trifecta, this is less arcane and more story-focused than Nethack but has some truly awful dick moves. Spoilers are an absolute must. Sort of like a proto-Qud. The original is free, but there's an enhanced tiles version on Steam as well.
• Golden Krone Hotel: A more modern game where you flip between human and vampire.
• Sproggiwood: A highly streamlined traditional roguelike where a given dungeon run will last less than an hour, but there's metaprogression between dungeons.
• Brogue: A free fantasy roguelike that, like Cogmind, completely eschews experience points.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: A free roguelike immersive sim set in the post-apocalypse, complete with zombie hordes.
• Hydra Slayer: A math roguelike. You can only kill a hydra by cutting off all its heads, and if you don't cut off all of them then some number grow back. Your weapons do things like halving the number of heads, or cutting off exactly three heads (doing nothing if there are fewer than three).
• HyperRogue: The hyper stands for hyperbolic geometry.

Brogue is worth a try. I like the back-to-the-genre-roots minimalism and the hybrid-ascii aesthetics. I alternate between DCSS and Brogue these days.

Not sure if it count but Street of Rogue is kinda like a 2d GTA or Saints Row only without the cars and there's lots of characters with completely different playstyles like you can go guns blazing as a soldier or play as a pacifist doctor who can't really fight and has to use stealth or other means to do objectives or be a gorilla rescuing other gorillas who's very strong but cant talk to people or use guns or be a zombie who weak on its own but once it gets going you'll start the zombie apocalypse.

There're also these mutators which can be used as accessibility options cause I use it to slow the game down but it can be used to turn off some of the stuff that you don't like in the game.