Favourite Roguelike Games?

[LookingGlass]

So I've just started playing Spelunky [http://www.gog.com/game/spelunky] and despite seemingly being pretty terrible at it, I'm rather enjoying it. As much as they can frustrate me, I've found roguelikes to provide a certain sense of urgency and achievement that's hard to find in the majority of checkpoint-ridden games these days.

My only real prior experience with the genre was The Binding of Isaac and FTL. FTL in particular I found to be a whole lot of fun. What are your favourties?

 

[ShinyCharizard]

My favourite was definitely FTL. That game was like an obsession for me for a good few weeks.

 

[Elijin]

Try out Rogue Legacy and Risk of Rain, they're great.

Also I've heard good things about Desktop Dungeon, but I havent tried it yet.

 

[Orimanus]

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is still my favorite. It is a old school style Roguelike like nethack but it is regularly updated. Unlike nethack though it has an intuitive interface and if you wanted to you could even play it entirely with the mouse. I highly recommend it, it has tons of content and is also completely free.

CataclysmDA is also good, it takes place in a zombie apocalypse and has you scavenging for materials. The game has pretty bad graphics though, even with a tileset but if you can get over that it is pretty good. I do feel it is a little lacking on content but it is still in development so that may change. The UI is keyboard command driven so it can be annoying. I would say it is worth a try, it is also free.

Other than that Dwarf Fortress adventure mode is pretty fun if you can get into it, but it is more about telling a story than actual gameplay, and the UI is horrible. The upside here is the many crazy things that can happen, so you never know what to expect every time you start again. I wouldn't try this unless you are really committed to rogulikes, while the difficulty curve is not as bad as the infamous fortress mode it can still be tough. If you do want to try though download the latest "Lazy Newb Pack" wich includes some nice tilesets.

 

[SlaveNumber23]

Dungeons of Dredmor: Its a pretty traditional Roguelike, with tile based maps and turn based combat. Its surprisingly deep with some great character customization and has a lot of charm to it.

Rogue Legacy: Its basically Castlevania as a Roguelike and its absolutely incredible. Its also very challenging even by Roguelike/Castlevania standards.

 

[Exhuminator]

Here are five recommendations...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Dungeon:_Shiren_the_Wanderer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_of_Druaga:_Fushigino_Dungeon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Dreams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torneko:_The_Last_Hope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_%28video_game%29

I can't think of any PC roguelikes worth mentioning right now.

 

[Launcelot111]

Binding of Isaac all the way for me. The horror of how Isaac looks when he finishes a run never fails to fascinate me.

Beyond that, Dungeons of Dredmor and Rogue Legacy have been scratching my itch recently

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy have destroyed my school success by being addictive as fuck.

 

[O maestre]

Easiest question I've ever had to answer. FTL (faster than light) has stolen many hours of my free time. Very well done it is sad that there are still no clones of FTL because I've been dying to try a similar game.

Star command doesn't count at all since it is very superficial game

 

[fezgod]

Damn, most of mine have been taken already: FTL, Binding of Issac and Spelunky.

Also there's Delver, which is a neat little dungeon crawler.

 

[Emanuele Ciriachi]

Pixel Dungeon [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watabou.pixeldungeon&hl=en_GB] is the best roguelike for Android by far.

 

[Llil]

I prefer the term "Roguelite" when talking about games like FTL or Binding of Isaac. "Roguelike" means a very specific kind of game, a game that is like Rogue. FTL has almost nothing in common with Rogue. It's kind of like RPG which can mean anything from Planescape: Torment to Skyrim, and those have about as much in common as R-Type and Call of Duty. It makes the term meaningless and therefore kills a very useful and descriptive word.

Anyway, pedantry aside, FTL and Spelunky are probably my favourites of these roguelite style games. As far as proper roguelikes go, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is the best one, because it's very easy to get into, but still has enough depth to keep it interesting. Although, the adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress is worth playing for the combat system alone.

I also recently found a game called One Way Heroics. It's has the time pressure that FTL has, but it plays more like a traditional roguelike. It has some persistency with class unlocks and item storage, and it's also pretty easy, but it's fun.

 

[Arkhangelsk]

I personally adore Risk Of Rain. Extremely challenging, it stays fresh with the randomized upgrades, and the soundtrack is brilliant.

 

[DeaDRabbiT]

Ularn (Ultra Larn) was my favorite growing up as a kid. I have no idea how to launch the files however (This is 1997 shit), but if you are technically inclined, I couldn't recommend it enough.

Simple yet addicting.

EDIT: I did a little legwork and found the most updated version of the game. It's got actual graphics, and good sound.

Ahh nostalgia.

http://rogue-life.ourden.org/ularn

 

[Ymbirtt]

Expanding on Llil's dichotomy, if you want to see what a roguelike is actually like, perhaps try Ancient Domains of Mystery [http://www.ancardia.com/download.html] - in which the 'E' key is permanently bound to "clean ears" and 'F' to "wipe face" - or Omega [http://www.prankster.com/winomega/][sup]1[/sup], a game featuring traps which can instantly kill the player, random events which can instantly kill the player, and lesser frost demons, which can appear at random at the very start of the game, and kill the player in a couple of turns.

Roguelikes that are actually like rogue are weird.

[small][sup]1[/sup]Note that this only works for Windows machines. If you're running Mac or Linux, you may need to build it from source. You can find the code here [http://www.alcyone.com/binaries/omega/omega-0.80.2-src.tar.gz]. [/small]

 

[Jazoni89]

Sword of the Stars The Pitt: Gold

A massive amount of content (and they are still adding more regularly), and it has a lot of hidden depth to it.

It also has got that one more go mentality to it, that makes you come back for more.

The perfect Roguelike in my opinion, and one of the most underrated indie games out there.

 

[Harlemura]

Another vote for Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy.
Though I preferred Rogue Legacy, I'd probably recommend Binding of Isaac over it to anyone. It felt like I had to play Rogue Legacy for a while before I was strong enough to not just die as soon as I stepped into the castle (though that might have been me sucking), whereas you can always make some progress in Binding of Isaac regardless of your items, once you learn some of the cheekier enemies' patterns.
Plus Binding of Isaac and its DLC usually go down to like 50p when it's on sale.

I think those are the only two roguelikes I've played. If I have played others, they couldn't have been that memorable.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

So it falls to me to mention ADOM again huh? Oh good, I love sounding like a broken record.

EDIT - Nope, someone beat me to it. Thank Gawd for that.

 

[ZlagarX]

Favourite Rougelike will have to go to Dungeon Crawl:Stone Soup, I just keep comming back for more.

Close seconde is Dungeons of Dreadmore, it has some nice humor and feels more alive, but its pretty easy by rougelike standards.

 

[CriticalMiss]

Rogue Legacy is probably one of the few 'rogue-like' games I've actually enjoyed. It looks good and the gameplay is quite varied since you get randomly generated characters to pick from each generation, plus you actually get a sense of progress when you unlock new abilities and equipment. Although the controls on the keyboard annoyed me to no end, I just ended up playing with a controller instead.

And I'm not sure if Hammerwatch counts, but it's pretty good too.