I've played through a half dozen roguelikes to completion of the final (final) boss of whatever it offers. Off the top of my head, Dungeon Crawl, 20XX, Enter th

I've played through a half dozen roguelikes to completion of the final (final) boss of whatever it offers. Off the top of my head, Dungeon Crawl, 20XX, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain 1/2, Signal Decay, Dead Cells. It's an indie friendly genre in that it enables lots of gameplay with limited content. But the design trope you've mentioned is waning on me. Most of these games have compounding benefits of good play early in the game to game state near the end, an hour later. Most of these games are easy to play for the first 80% and then quite challenging for the last 20% (BUT, it's still easy to mess up and so early penalties feel really bad). And so it's really frustrating playing them if the first half of your run just feels ok because you're inclined to think it's better to just restart. Enter the Gungeon was the absolute worst offender. Rare health restores at every level meaning you need to play well even on easy early levels. Hugely important max hp boosts granted only for flawlessly completing each level boss. Items have no indicator for how useful they are unless you get a feel for them or look them up, then have a bunch of hidden synergies which are also unexplained; and even then you have no agency in getting other items to make your crappy loot more viable than permanent garbage. And lastly, a single rare item which doubles the length of a run but vastly increases your chances of long term success. People love rare OP combos but they kind of suck. I'd rate Risk of Rain 2, Dead Cells, and Dungeon crawl having the best implementations of this.