Roguelike resurgence

Gamers are often categorized by types.  There’s always the casual gamers, First Person Shooter fans, the swarming mass of League of Legends players, the people who stick to only one game for forever, and many others. Roguelike is a genre mostly enjoyed by extreme thrill-seekers, perfectionists, high-achievers, and generally anyone who enjoys high-risk gameplay. Roguelike games, basically, are not for those who have the faint of heart.

As a subgenre of RPG games, roguelike games are characterized by fairly steep learning curves, unforgiving difficulty, substantially unpredictable gameplay, and being severely punishing to mistakes.  As the name suggests, they were first popularized by the 1980’s game “Rogue” and many other UNIX-based games of similar mechanics. In general, some of the popular features in those games include turn-based combat and movement, completely randomized dungeons, randomized item effects, highly unpredictable adventures, and “permanent death”, which means upon hitting a “Game Over” screen, one must start a new game from the beginning. With these set of factors, the developers intended to give players a unique adventure during each playthrough, while presenting an extraordinary sense of achievement for beating the game. Within a few years, these games exploded in popularity for many of the hardcore gamers of that generation.

Classic roguelike games were praised for being versatile and offering great challenges, but heavily criticized for being too difficult and unforgiving, and most of the time having outdated graphics, content, and other design aspects. Despite random content, the limited gameplay aspects offered in those games can make them repetitive and boring. Additionally, with luck being a dominating factor in gameplay, many find only frustration after a series of losing streaks just because the Random Number Generator isn’t in their favor. With the popularity of other more casual games and lack of innovation in the genre, roguelike games were seen as anti-fun and quickly lost popularity after the 1990s.

However, this doesn’t mean roguelike games are dead – they are always around to fulfill the special niche, and waiting for their big comebacks. Personally, I still have nightmares from my Dead Space 3 Hardcore mode in which one mistake means you are dead and your save is gone. Whenever you encounter a game with “hardcore mode”, “ironman mode”, or other extreme difficulties with limited or no saving, you can thank influences from roguelikes in the making of AAA-titles that allow them to also cater to the most hardcore of players. Among many other titles, Blizzard’s Diablo series cited roguelike games as a heavy influence, with ideas like a randomized map, items, and the optional permanent death.

What I saw as the true reemergence of this genre was the resurgence of what can best be described as roguelike-hybrid games, especially with games like Risk of Rain, FTL, Rogue Legacy, and The Binding of Issac. These games all share one similar advantage: they modernized roguelike games while mixing them with novel and popular styles. One great example is FTL: Faster Than Light, a game that puts the player in a spaceship that has to travel on a perilous journey. Through a customizable ship, weapons, support, staff, and other systems, FTL offers the player with a highly versatile and adaptable playstyle and strategy, but accompanies that with seemingly insurmountable challenges. Despite being played like a classic hardcore game with no “revive point” (we all love a random rebel elite cruiser that destroy our hard work, right?), FTL has different levels of difficulties, offers some content that persists through games, and gives the player more unlocks as they accomplish certain requirements. This give players some flexibility and enjoyment while retaining fidelity to traditional roguelikes.

In my opinion, roguelike games should be something at least attempted by all gamers. Especially now, looking at the more modern ones in the genre, a lot of innovations were done to make them exciting in their own ways and satisfy less hardcore players. With the surge of Indie developers, roguelike games were also populated en masse by smaller studios with unique ideas, with many of the critically acclaimed ones produced by developers that were relatively ordinary beforehand. The bottom line is, however, these games are usually cheap, anyway, so why not pick them up at the next summer Steam sale or Humble Bundle?