I Own Way Too Many/Not Enough Rogue-likes

I love Rogue-like games by which I mean that I like games like Rogue and I also like games that are more like the original Rogue than others, and I also like games that are kinda like Rogue but more modern or with new twists to the formula. Essentially, I don’t necessarily care about the terminology, especially because there have been plenty of sub-genres in the history of roguelikes. What I do care about is the huge backlog of Rogue-like/lite games that I haven’t ever tried out or that I have played briefly and always wanted to return to. Roguelikes (from now on, I’ll probably just stick to this term) are fun but they can get very challenging and frustrating at times if RNG isn’t in your favour, meaning that I often end up not playing a game for a bunch of weeks only to then return to it at another day. Thus, there aren’t too many games like that where I’ve amassed lots and lots of hours in. I mean, I have 208 hours in Risk of Rain 2 and 176 hours in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth/Repentance. I have 102 hours in Hades, 75 in Slay the Spire, and 57 hours in Risk of Rain 1. These are my top 5 roguelikes in terms of playtime and as you may be able to tell, there’s a bit of a jump between the values, especially as Steam doesn’t count hours spent playing a game offline (thanks to my ISP) as Hades and Risk of Rain 1 would have probably overtaken Isaac because of that.

Still, there is a big jump in how much I’ve played specific games. Moonlighter comes in at 42 hours after that and then there’s Dungeon of the ENDLESS, a game that I spent 33 hours in (and a lot more offline but again, no exact estimate), followed by Don’t Starve Together (27 hours), Loop Hero, Luck be a Landlord, and Inscryption (23 hours each), which is then followed by Dead Cells, Don’t Starve, and Ring of Pain (22 hours each), and the list goes on. As you may be able to tell, I drop a game completely at a certain point either because life got too busy or because I “completed” it or didn’t find a new way to play it or I just played something else instead. You also may be able to tell that I own a lot of games in the genre, with these bunch just being the more known once, of course, as I’d have to scroll down the list a lot more to get to all the others.

Now, deciding what to play next is a bit of a hassle, which is why I found Retromation’s solution to it quite interesting. For the next month or so, Retromation (a great streamer and YouTuber btw) is trying out something called a “Rogue Roulette”, meaning that he put all of his roguelike games into a list and then he lets a wheel decide which game gets played when he’s doing these sort of streams. The odds for all the games are the same but if someone subscribes to his Twitch channel or gifts a sub, they can change the odds of one game they want to use by one per subpoint. I liked the idea a lot but I’d probably make it so that people could increase the odds of one game being played via channel points instead… Long story short, I’d love to create something like that just for my personal needs or to decide what to play on stream but getting it sorted out proves to be quite tricky as roulette wheels online either don’t look good or don’t work with 191 entries… or you have to compromise readability and/or the looks of it. Some don’t support changing the weight of each entry while others are a pain to actually fill.

Anyway, I own 191 or so roguelike titles. I say “or so” because I created a static collection on Steam for it and just drag+dropped all the titles in to that – after creating a bunch of dynamic collections for roguelikes, roguelites, traditional roguelikes and action roguelikes. 191 titles are a big number but I’m not sure if it’s good enough. I’d love to play more of them or to play some of them more often but time constraints and the difficulty of starting a game up again after a while just kind of make it incredibly difficult. Arguably, nearly 200 games are too much but there are so many interesting titles coming out now. At the same time, there are games like Revita or Unexplored 2 that I’m incredibly excited about but which I won’t be able to play anytime soon… or rather, I could purchase them but I’m not sure when I’d actually get into them if that makes sense.

I love the genre(s) and enjoy the ideas and the amount of creativity that goes into most of them. Every title feels somewhat different and it’s frankly amazing how many titles there are out there. I’d love to play more or make a bit of a dent into the achievements of some of the games I played a bunch of… or to at least make an effort to play most of the ones I haven’t played at all yet. Even if I don’t get to it anytime soon, though, I love the idea of “collections” on Steam and having a bunch of titles lined up there, as if they were on a shelf. I love how physical copies of games look, after all, but sadly, my books and DVDs take up a lot of space and it’s thus quite hard to add even more objects to the shelves. Either way, this post was prompted by someone arguing that I have too many roguelikes when in reality, I’m not sure if there is such a thing as “too many” roguelikes but personally, even if there is one, I don’t think that I’m there yet.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere else other than Indiecator.org… then this article has been stolen. Please let me know of this via E-Mail. Other than that, feel free to stop by my Twitch streams!