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Comment by morsch | Hacker News Reader

I hope the trend ends soon. I know the games are great, eg Hades looks and plays fantastic. But the mechanic just isn't doing it for me. And it's increasingly difficult to find indie games in genres like platforming and light RPG that aren't roguelite. If Diablo 1 had been made today, hardcore mode would be mandatory...

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Roguelites force you to improve and meet the demands of the game in a way that few other games can boast. Most other difficult single-player games, you can get by through attrition, forcing your way through a difficult section via a mountain of lost lives and increasingly precise muscle memory tailored to that exact scenario.

With roguelites, you can't do that -- or at least, not nearly to the same degree. With the level layout and enemy setup changing every time you play, you have to think things through, and improve yourself at the system level, rather than brute force mastering one corridor at a time.

In a way, it's not entirely unlike multiplayer games; you can never fully memorize what to do, as the details keep changing.

I would say the problem is the exact opposite - most rogielikes (Hades included) are basically impossible the first time you play them, you need to grind a whole bunch of currency to get permanent buffs.

I actually like rogue-likes, as long as they don't have the ability to buy permanent buffs, but that seems to be the current standard.

Permanent buffs, especially substantial ones, seem more like the exception than the rule to me. Nuclear Throne has no permanent buffs until you at least clear your first run, and even then it's fairly minor. Enter the Gungeon lets you unlock new guns to show up on future runs -- that kind of thing is very common, but ostensibly they're supposed to be sidegrades -- but I don't remember getting flatly stronger. And while I only played Slay the Spire once, I got a clear on that first try.

That said, there are a shitton of roguelikes out there these days, and I've only sunk substantial time into a relative handful, so maybe I'm wrong.

Ehh, the average unlocked item in games like Gungeon might be "sidegrades" but your character's power level is generally driven not by the average item, but by the single best item you found. And for that reason, unlocking a small number of exceptionally good items does tend to make the game much, much easier. Gungeon has quite a few things to unlock that greatly trivialize the game, e.g. Clone.

There are lots of non rogue-lite platformers coming out all the time (perhaps everyday), but not as many big, get a ton of press, critically acclaimed ones. Indie devs have backed away from the genre a little bit because production values and quality expectations are really high, and it's very crowded. Anyway if you want to try a new platformer from 2020 that's not rogue-lite I suggest looking at

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Super Meatboy Forever

Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials

Adventures of Chris

The Pedestrian

Shady Part of Me

Fwiw I never liked roguelikes but absolutely love Hades. Both for the way they handle progression and the story.

Rogues make a lot of sense for indie shops because the content scales better. A level which takes 15 minutes to beat can be reused over and over and over for the same amount of dev time.

Not to worry - I'm just now getting into them, which alone guarantees they're no longer cool.

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