I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.
I keep going back to Diablo, even on the Switch, because I can just run around and kill stuff. Hades is also good.
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_...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/1e85mc5/tried_t...
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.
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.
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.
Though to be honest, I like my Roguelikes pretty limited in scope. I could never get into Nethack because it felt like the number of factors you needed to take into account outstripped my working memory. I found myself going to a wiki, which isn't my favorite activity.
And if we want to really get nerdy about the history of game design, I have a theory about Dark Souls. Dark Souls is a roguelike/lite... but without the three gameplay elements considered most necessary to be a descendant of Rogue: there's no permadeath, it's not turn based, and it's not procedurally generated. And yet... no other game of its era leaned as hard into the idea of incomplete information, high challenge, necessity for experimentation, and risk/reward calculations.
The history of games is so cool, because nothing ever gets forgotten. There's always some visionary who grew up on some genre of game considered outdated and niche but who can adapt that genre into a new form which can find a fresh audience.
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.
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.
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.
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).