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Now I have to look up what's available on Switch. I've tried other Roguelikes, but often they get tedious without a keyboard (Darkest Dungeon, Into the Breach)

Now I have to look up what's available on Switch. I've tried other Roguelikes, but often they get tedious without a keyboard (Darkest Dungeon, Into the Breach). I still want a game I can play kicking back with the Switch. I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.

jghn 2y ago
My biggest beef with modern roguelikes, including everything you mentioned, is almost none of them make me think, "Wow, this feels like rogue to me". Which is not to say that I don't like some of them, but I like them for completely different reasons. Tangentially related: As someone who not just played the crap out of Rogue in the early 80s but also Wizardry 1, I was ecstatic to find out recently that the latter was rereleased on modern platforms [1]. It's the original DOS game with some better graphics. They included some new play options to make it less punishing, but one can disable all of them to have the authentic experience [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_...
- dogline 2y ago
  Yeah, maybe they're not "roguelikes", but more "dungeon crawlers". I like dungeon crawlers. Don't know why. The assembly language Rogue for the Coco, mentioned in the article, was one of my first games I spent a lot of time on, and maybe that stuck.
  - jghn 2y ago
    I did see that Epyx Rogue is available on Switch as a port from an Amiga version, but it's not without UI bugs [1]. Also previously when I mentioned Wiz 1 I'd forgotten the Switch was part of the sub-thread, it's available on switch as well. Have been playing the hell out of it lately :) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/tried_the_port_of_rogue_on_the_switch_read_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/tried_t...
- throw4847285 2y ago
  There was a linguistic shift that happened and what the term Roguelike means changed dramatically. Roguelike used to refer to a game based pretty closely on Rogue: procedurally generated dungeons, perma-death, item identification, a hunger mechanic, a specific implementation of turn based combat. Even ASCII graphics were considered necessary for some people. There was an organization formed to police the boundaries of what constituted a Roguelike that was, for better or worse, like the Académie Française in its pedantry. In Japan, Roguelikes never went out of style in the same way because traditional dungeon crawlers kept being made. So Roguelike elements found there way into games as diverse as Azure Dreams and Baroque. It took longer for American devs to realize that the basic joys of a Roguelike: the novelty of procedurally generated content, the pressure of permadeath, and the risk/reward tradeoff of trying to go down one more floor. Once indie devs caught the Roguelike bug, it became an epidemic of inserting elements of a Roguelike into every genre imaginable. This new genre was deemed the Roguelite, though this didn't make the Rogue purists happy as they had a much more restrictive definition. And some people just call them all Roguelikes. Personally, I love both Roguelikes and Roguelites, whatever you want to call them. Slay the Spire is one of the greatest video games ever made, and that wouldn't exist without Rogue, even though on the surface it shares very little in common with its ancestor. Under the surface you find the same joys: risk/reward, high difficulty, just one more run.
  - jghn 2y ago
    Yeah, I did go down that rabbit hole several years ago. It is what it is. One big part of it for me are the graphics. If the graphics/UI aren't kind of shitty, it's not going to "feel like Rogue" to me. I don't need ASCII per se, for instance I did most of my Rogue playing on the Mac port in the early/mid-80s. This isn't the full issue for me though. Take Darkest Dungeon as an example. I love that game. And it checks all the standard boxes, even my "kind of shitty" graphics. But ... it's not Rogue.
    - throw4847285 2y ago
      Dungeons of Dredmor is kind of ideal: not ASCII but very functional. Same with the Shiren games I've played. Even if the graphics are clearly better than ASCII, what makes something feel like Rogue is that there's no attempt to hide the artifice. The grid is clearly a restrictive grid. Simple icons are used to represent various types of items. There's something very clearly "programmed." An unidentified item can be broken down into a handful of variables: item type, cursed or not, effect, etc. In fact, I wonder if Rogue is one of the reasons I got into programming. The first real thing I tried to code was a version of Rogue. The rules are so clearly defined. Playing it is kind of zen.
kibwen 2y ago
If you want a similar vibe but in a game explicitly designed for controller inputs, and if you like rhythm games, then try Crypt Of The Necrodancer (or its Zelda-themed spinoff, Cadence Of Hyrule). In the same vein of controller-native games, if you want a platformer that is the spiritual sucessor to Nethack, then you want to check out the Spelunky series.
jamesgeck0 2y ago
Hardcore purists categorize the genre into "traditional roguelikes" (could be mistaken for original Rogue if you squint) and "roguelites" (all the other genre mashups). In the traditional category, Switch has Shiren 5 and 6, Jupiter Hell, and Tanglewood. Maybe Dragon Fang Z and Void Terrarium, haven't played them. Crown Trick and Crypt of the Necrodancer/Cadence of Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite traditional and not quite "lite." ...and that's about the extent of it. A lot of traditional roguelikes are hobby projects without widespread commercial appeal that never make off PC. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of quality roguelites on Switch.
- Sesse__ 2y ago
  > Crown Trick and Crypt of the Necrodancer/Cadence of Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite traditional and not quite "lite." I always felt like an important aspect of “lite” was whether death was real permadeath or whether good performance in one game could make the next one easier. In that aspect, COTN feels like it's a roguelite in the default (non-all-zones) mode; you get to collect a bunch of upgrades that you keep for the next run, and you can also take the zones one by one. But all zones is hardcore permadeath.
throw4847285 2y ago
I mean, Shiren is a roguelike designed from the ground up for console. I went back and tried the original Shiren (Mystery Dungeon 2) on the Super Famicom via an emulator, and it's amazing how much they just nailed the balance. In some ways it's simpler than Rogue, but in other way it's deeper. The folks at Chunsoft made some impressive games, and they single handedly kept the flame of the commercial Roguelike alive for decades (at least in Japan).
code2code 2y ago
If you like a Roguelike that doesn't need a keyboard, then you might like our Amiga game Roguecraft, which is a Lovecraft-inspired coffee break Roguelike for the Amiga. We have plans to port it to the Switch, but it is easy to get it running on an Amiga emulator. =) https://thalamusdigital.itch.io/roguecraft https://thalamusdigital.itch.io/roguecraft
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
Slay the Spire is great with a gamepad.
- Litost 2y ago
  For any Slay the Spire fans, the Downfall fan expansion is well worth playing. The ability to go backwards through the game as some of the various bosses challenging the normal characters alone makes it a great variant. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_the_Spire_Fan_Expansion/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_...

jghn 2y ago

My biggest beef with modern roguelikes, including everything you mentioned, is almost none of them make me think, "Wow, this feels like rogue to me". Which is not to say that I don't like some of them, but I like them for completely different reasons. Tangentially related: As someone who not just played the crap out of Rogue in the early 80s but also Wizardry 1, I was ecstatic to find out recently that the latter was rereleased on modern platforms [1]. It's the original DOS game with some better graphics. They included some new play options to make it less punishing, but one can disable all of them to have the authentic experience [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_...

dogline 2y ago
Yeah, maybe they're not "roguelikes", but more "dungeon crawlers". I like dungeon crawlers. Don't know why. The assembly language Rogue for the Coco, mentioned in the article, was one of my first games I spent a lot of time on, and maybe that stuck.
- jghn 2y ago
  I did see that Epyx Rogue is available on Switch as a port from an Amiga version, but it's not without UI bugs [1]. Also previously when I mentioned Wiz 1 I'd forgotten the Switch was part of the sub-thread, it's available on switch as well. Have been playing the hell out of it lately :) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/tried_the_port_of_rogue_on_the_switch_read_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/tried_t...
throw4847285 2y ago
There was a linguistic shift that happened and what the term Roguelike means changed dramatically. Roguelike used to refer to a game based pretty closely on Rogue: procedurally generated dungeons, perma-death, item identification, a hunger mechanic, a specific implementation of turn based combat. Even ASCII graphics were considered necessary for some people. There was an organization formed to police the boundaries of what constituted a Roguelike that was, for better or worse, like the Académie Française in its pedantry. In Japan, Roguelikes never went out of style in the same way because traditional dungeon crawlers kept being made. So Roguelike elements found there way into games as diverse as Azure Dreams and Baroque. It took longer for American devs to realize that the basic joys of a Roguelike: the novelty of procedurally generated content, the pressure of permadeath, and the risk/reward tradeoff of trying to go down one more floor. Once indie devs caught the Roguelike bug, it became an epidemic of inserting elements of a Roguelike into every genre imaginable. This new genre was deemed the Roguelite, though this didn't make the Rogue purists happy as they had a much more restrictive definition. And some people just call them all Roguelikes. Personally, I love both Roguelikes and Roguelites, whatever you want to call them. Slay the Spire is one of the greatest video games ever made, and that wouldn't exist without Rogue, even though on the surface it shares very little in common with its ancestor. Under the surface you find the same joys: risk/reward, high difficulty, just one more run.
- jghn 2y ago
  Yeah, I did go down that rabbit hole several years ago. It is what it is. One big part of it for me are the graphics. If the graphics/UI aren't kind of shitty, it's not going to "feel like Rogue" to me. I don't need ASCII per se, for instance I did most of my Rogue playing on the Mac port in the early/mid-80s. This isn't the full issue for me though. Take Darkest Dungeon as an example. I love that game. And it checks all the standard boxes, even my "kind of shitty" graphics. But ... it's not Rogue.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    Dungeons of Dredmor is kind of ideal: not ASCII but very functional. Same with the Shiren games I've played. Even if the graphics are clearly better than ASCII, what makes something feel like Rogue is that there's no attempt to hide the artifice. The grid is clearly a restrictive grid. Simple icons are used to represent various types of items. There's something very clearly "programmed." An unidentified item can be broken down into a handful of variables: item type, cursed or not, effect, etc. In fact, I wonder if Rogue is one of the reasons I got into programming. The first real thing I tried to code was a version of Rogue. The rules are so clearly defined. Playing it is kind of zen.

kibwen 2y ago

If you want a similar vibe but in a game explicitly designed for controller inputs, and if you like rhythm games, then try Crypt Of The Necrodancer (or its Zelda-themed spinoff, Cadence Of Hyrule). In the same vein of controller-native games, if you want a platformer that is the spiritual sucessor to Nethack, then you want to check out the Spelunky series.

jamesgeck0 2y ago

Hardcore purists categorize the genre into "traditional roguelikes" (could be mistaken for original Rogue if you squint) and "roguelites" (all the other genre mashups). In the traditional category, Switch has Shiren 5 and 6, Jupiter Hell, and Tanglewood. Maybe Dragon Fang Z and Void Terrarium, haven't played them. Crown Trick and Crypt of the Necrodancer/Cadence of Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite traditional and not quite "lite." ...and that's about the extent of it. A lot of traditional roguelikes are hobby projects without widespread commercial appeal that never make off PC. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of quality roguelites on Switch.

Sesse__ 2y ago
> Crown Trick and Crypt of the Necrodancer/Cadence of Hyrule straddle the gap, not quite traditional and not quite "lite." I always felt like an important aspect of “lite” was whether death was real permadeath or whether good performance in one game could make the next one easier. In that aspect, COTN feels like it's a roguelite in the default (non-all-zones) mode; you get to collect a bunch of upgrades that you keep for the next run, and you can also take the zones one by one. But all zones is hardcore permadeath.

throw4847285 2y ago

I mean, Shiren is a roguelike designed from the ground up for console. I went back and tried the original Shiren (Mystery Dungeon 2) on the Super Famicom via an emulator, and it's amazing how much they just nailed the balance. In some ways it's simpler than Rogue, but in other way it's deeper. The folks at Chunsoft made some impressive games, and they single handedly kept the flame of the commercial Roguelike alive for decades (at least in Japan).

code2code 2y ago

If you like a Roguelike that doesn't need a keyboard, then you might like our Amiga game Roguecraft, which is a Lovecraft-inspired coffee break Roguelike for the Amiga. We have plans to port it to the Switch, but it is easy to get it running on an Amiga emulator. =) https://thalamusdigital.itch.io/roguecraft https://thalamusdigital.itch.io/roguecraft

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

Slay the Spire is great with a gamepad.

Litost 2y ago
For any Slay the Spire fans, the Downfall fan expansion is well worth playing. The ability to go backwards through the game as some of the various bosses challenging the normal characters alone makes it a great variant. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_the_Spire_Fan_Expansion/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_...