A Quick Loop Back and Forward Through the Modern Heyday of Roguelikes

Welcome back to the start of another essay about roguelikes. Are you honestly surprised that we have somehow managed to find our way back to the ever-looping genre? That the cyclical dirge of gameplay has once again begged itself to be written about? What more could be possibly said about a genre of games that is inherently centered around repetition? Is this intro just a clever metaphor for the constant deja vu that the genre evokes to create a flow state? How many times do you plan on save-scumming this thesis that “the roguelike is good and continues to be good”?  The short answer is when studios stop managing to innovate on the genre, which given the trajectory of the last four years, may actually be like a gaming’s version of Moore’s Law which dictates that every two years the number of transistors in a circuit doubles. So, let’s posit the Rogue’s Legacy Law in that every year, a new roguelike will:

Latch onto a specific style of game  Propel itself into the spotlight for the year  Cascade into many games trying to iterate on the design to varying degrees of success Have a large footprint

Now we could go back and look at the entire history of the genre to try and see if it holds true from the inception, but in interest of time and sanity, we’ll just look at the last five-ish years at some of the most mainstream roguelikes that have captured imaginations and slowly created an enduring legacy for themselves. Dead Cells In the quote unquote modern heyday of “Ro…