Taking the chance to plug my favorite: Heat Signature. It's by the same author as Gunpoint and is best described as "procedurally generated Hotline Miami in space".
Each "round"of action is typically 3 minutes or less so it is great for brief moments of free time.
I wish I could get into Heat Signature. I bought a copy, but somehow it's languishing in time spent compared to previous games like FTL and Into the Breach, I feel like it's a bit more frenetic in action compared to these (noted that it's a bit unfair to compare with Into the Breach and Jupiter Hell, which are turn-based)
Is there something I'm missing about the game play?
I love Heat Signature!!! Glad to run into a fellow fan.
I've followed the dev(s) since Gunpoint. But HS is probably gonna stay as my all time favorite of them.
I just love the depiction of space and how you're this tiny ship in the vast system. How your life is fickle.
I honestly never put it together that it was a roguelike until you mentioned it. I just enjoyed the hell out of it without even thinking of what genre it was.
I was actually pretty disappointed in Heat Signature. It really felt like at some (very quick) point progression in items tapered off and then everything was just kind-of-the-same.
Damn, I wish I knew about this ahead of time. I would have "attended". I'm not much of a conference person, so I feel like I only hear about the cool ones as they're going on or after they finished.
As a DF fan since the early days, it's amazing to see it come to Steam, and wow, having just seen the updated store page with the new interfaces they've been working on for the past two years, I'm so excited.
I can't wait to take a few days to myself, and start working on some silly dwarf trick, complete with cisterns, reservoirs, waterfalls, a huge forge, and a vampire bookkeeper entombed in the stairwell.
DF is just one of those games that you either love or just don't get ... I just love it and it is the only game I have played on and off for so many years now.
That one time that was just so amazing to me is after one of the big tree updates when I realized that they will shed their leaves in fall, covering the whole map with red ... best graphics ever!
Something I think would be an interesting sociology research topic is what the difference is between the sort of person who prefers Moria/Angband, and the sort of person who prefers NetHack.
Maybe many like them both, but once I discovered NetHack, I thought it was obviously far superior, yet I have a sibling who was totally in the other camp no matter what I said.
To be clear, I never came anywhere near ascending or anything. But basically, I felt like each game of NetHack was a unique story, and even dying was usually interesting, while Angband amounted to just grinding until some bad luck happens.
On modern roguelikes, I like Shattered Pixel Dungeon to play on a crowded subway, as I only use the smartphone to chat with gf/family over Telegram, books with FBReader, background music and such.
I prefer Angband to NetHack because NetHack is "silly." Permadeath makes every decision serious, and I want the game to match that. But I get why other players may want something else. They're both amazing games.
Angband it's a bit dumb for me, a promising town but then just a dungeon with very repetitive gameplay.
Nethack' s dungeon with the philosphy The Dev Team Thinks On Everything (even more in Slashem) makes each gameplay unique as people stated.
On each decision being serious, Slashem it's the reverse: the first levels are a breeze, then you'll have to think twice a lot in order to fight and/or escape or even safely move.
I'll plug my current favorite, Jupiter Hell. It's nethack'ish in that it's turn based, and knowledge from previous games enhances player skills for future games (i.e. your skills improve in playing the game, versus some rogue-lites where grinding gets you in-game enhancements to the character/avatar). A key component is also the audio, where creatures make distinctly different noises and is also indicative of spacial locality.
My favorite traditional roguelike was Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I haven’t played it for a few years, however, so I don’t know about its current state.
In recent years, I’ve played tons of Slay the Spire, some Monster Train, and most recently Into the Breach. All technically roguelites, I believe, but still scratch that same itch for me.
Hell has become much scarier than it used to be. There's a pretty cool new species that can't use spellbooks but gains spells at level ups and trains all spellcasting form a single skill. Food is gone. Many quality of life simplifications. Most spells have become a more interesting than the previous iteration of "fire blast" vs. "ice blast".
I'd say on a whole it's become a much nicer experience.
Many people seem to rage against the removal of content that felt flavorful or gimmicky or part of the tedious grind that they grew up with. I think the game has gotten much better personally. They also removed enemies that could break your consumables and inventory encumbrance limits (items, not armor encumbrance). I can't really imagine playing with them again.
Food in particular always felt stressful and time consuming even though I never made it to the end without an enormous stash of permafood.
I’m not sure about Monster Tain but Slay the Spire is not a roguelite, it’s a proper roguelike. The key distinguishing factor is that the meta-game progression doesn’t make the game easier, it just makes more of the content available. A fully unlocked StS on ascension 20 is much more difficult than the starting game.
The original roguelite was Rogue Legacy which started you with a weak character and allowed you to get stronger through multiple runs and deaths. By the end you had a very powerful character which made it much easier to win. This is the essence of roguelite gameplay: metagame progression that reduces the difficulty and rewards repeated play, helping you to win the game without having to master it.
IMO Enter the gungeon did the metaprogression without making your character stronger part really really well, would hugely recommend trying it out if you haven't and don't mind it being real time.
I find the pleasure in mastering a roguelike to be quite similar to that found in the honeymoon phase of learning a new skill or exploring a new domain of knowledge. Addictive, fresh and empowering. Almost like experiencing the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect with each new game I find, until that curve drops and the game inevitably destroys me (damn you Caves of Qud).. Well, most of the time.
Anyway, if anyone is looking for any recommendations I really enjoyed Cataclysm-DDA (super cool) and Caves of Qud for the old school ASCII feel. Then there's Dead Cells, Noita and Hades for a more modern take.
I would also give Cataclysm DDA my warmest recommendations. Such a refreshing game after year's with nethack and DCSS.
Finally a roguelike ditching the fantasy setting for an apocalyptic world.
After ten years or so it's still in very active development and it's a pleasure to watch the github repo for what's new every week.
Some recommendations; play it as an open world game and not a roguelike, aka save cheat whenever you want to. It's a very time-consuming game, so loosing a character does not feel like a lessons learned like it does in nethack and dcss, because you basically loose hours spent on training your characters soft skills
(reading books, practicing skills). To get the gist and get you through the first days please check out the YouTube channel of Vormithrax, he had some amazing tutorials. And if your stuck the official discord is filled with nice people willing to help out.
Last recommendation (bit controversial) is to check out the tileset undeadpeople. It has been removed by the creator due to him putting out some statements not accepted by the community, but you will find mirrors all over reddit, but the tileset is just one noch above the rest imho.
Have you tried Caved of Qud? The setting is also (further into the future) post apocalyptic but there's a little more plot/direction given where CDDA is more simulationist. Probably my favorite rogue-like these days.
I am aware it exists, but I have kinda put it off as I often feel that forks fail to deliver better than the original (worth to mention as a worthy fork is UnNetHack!).
Is BN any good? Worth playing if your not into the magic stuff?
That high when playing a new, difficult roguelike for the first time, not knowing what works and what doesn't, is survival horror porn. It's the brief few days I truly feel like a child again.
If you liked those, might want to give One Step From Eden a try. It's a mix of deck building combat + real time action, quite fast paced and is technically well done.
In may case, Slashem with Revolution Void from (from Jamendo, better if you get it from Archive.org) Opened Paradise (from Magnatune).
The first it's Jazz with a bit of Electronics, making Nethack/Slashem's randomness notorious, and the second one it's for when I pick up the Doppleganger Monk race/role combo and I begin an slaughter down the dungeon.
I attended this conference in person in 2019. It's an excellent conference! There may be no more serious group of practitioners of applied procedural generation in the world.
I've really enjoyed Neon Abyss - it's a platformer roguelike with procedurally generated levels, difficulty that scales from reasonable to impossible, and runs take 10-20 minutes so it really respects your time. There's a ton of variety in the items and power ups (and how they interact with each other), so runs end up feeling very different.
I watched some of the talks last night and even as someone who doesn't know anything about game design beyond a few YouTube videos, it's been really interesting and engaging! Huge props to the speakers and organizers.
There’s a dead comment with a negative take about the YouTube comments being turned off, and I just wanted to point out - the conf is hosted in a really cool custom real-time conference mud, built by em lazer-walker. It’s a fun thing that is worth checking out
Each "round"of action is typically 3 minutes or less so it is great for brief moments of free time.