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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

You can actually just walk straight to the exit, no need to fight anything.

Or you can walk up to a random monster and get beaten to hell and back. I dunno, that wasn’t exactly a fun experience either.

Agreed. This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win. In fact it may be unrealistic to expect a "daily" game to have that. This is more about getting a high score and sharing with friends how you approached the same dungeon.

> This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win.

Most classic roguelikes are reasonably easy to win provided you know and follow the obscure, nearly impossible to find by yourself and very rigid optimal way to go. That’s why I like to call checkbox ticking games.

You're just playing them wrong. The optimal way to appreciate rougelikes is to spend days reading the source code and constructing a set of spreadsheet models, simulators and research collection of obscure forum posts. Then grind patiently along the extremely boring, very rigid optimal way to go.

No checkboxes ticked.

It is exhilarating.

Ah, the average Eve player. One day they'll even realize it's a game and not an accounting job

"Easy" is not the same as "easy after years of practise".

> In fact it may be unrealistic to expect a "daily" game to have that.

Why? Plenty of roguelikes and -lites have daily seeded runs. The genre is pretty much optimal for a "daily" format.

Apologies, I was being too brusque. I mean that this new "Wordle variant" kind of popular daily game which takes about ten minutes, is easily shared with friends and family, and requires hardly any practice/knowledge, is not that well-suited to rogue-likes. I feel that most people playing Wordle variants enjoy getting a daily sense of accomplishment after 10-15 minutes, from day 1. Perhaps I'm wrong!

There’s a subgenre of traditional roguelikes known as “coffee break roguelikes”. These games are specifically designed to be highly compressed experiences without sacrificing the characteristic difficulty of the genre. They happen to be a perfect fit for this sort of daily game. I’m not aware of any that actually do this though!

The roguelite Spelunky HD has a daily seed with a leaderboard. That game can be finished in 10-15 minutes (if you’re really good)!

Wow, so I was wrong. Thanks for the info!

Hah, I believed the instructions and collected all the mushrooms before exiting.

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