In a roguelike game, resources are ultimately finite and non-renewable. The player explores some randomly-generated dungeon labyrinth which spawns both enemies and resources. Death is a one-way ticket back to the title screen. Small mistakes accumulate, and large mistakes can end a run instantly. Luck can play a big role in individual runs, but flawless play will result in an impressive win rate. Classic games most strictly following the formula are Rogue itself and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Casinos and Casuals
The main idea of roguelikes is that games are supposed to pose a challenge. There are two genres I can think of that shun this principle.
The first is the electronic casino game, in which the player is not allowed to make meaningful decisions. Because real money is being exchanged, losing is the point. I mostly avoid casinos if I can help it, because they are weirdly absorbing in a way that isn't actually fun, and they burn money as quickly and surely as an open flame.
In some sense the opposite of the play-to-lose game, the casual farming game - or lose-to-win game - is the mindless trip to the casino played backward with virtual money. The Learn To Fly series more or less captures the feel of it. Every time you play, you lose, gaining money you can use to buy stuff for your dude, repeating as needed until you win. Lose-to-win games usually include some degree of interactivity that is actually skill-based to some extent, reducing the number of times the player must lose to win if they're playing well. (If gains are kept in check by diminishing returns or hard caps, then the same mechanics might not lead to a lose-to-win game. Rogue Legacy has farm-and-die mechanics, but it's impossible to make any progress off of bad runs.)
Either play-to-lose, or lose-to-win - the final outcome is predestined. These games are possessed with an inertia which plays out inevitably. They are the tree which falls in the forest so long as someone is there to hear it - these games are the opposite of balance.
Desktop Dungeons - Hard Casual
Not all casual games are lose-to-win. In some sense, any game which can be played on a workday to a satisfying conclusion without staying up late can can reasonably be called "casual." This includes Chess, for example, as well as Tetris and Minesweeper.
Desktop Dungeons starts out looking like a dungeon crawling role-playing adventure. You start by choosing a race and a class for a hero, and then you fight your way through a somewhat small dungeon - possibly stopping to worship a local deity along the way. The game does not explicitly seem like a puzzle until you play more and learn to appreciate the huge role played by all kinds of "gimmicks" such as level-up heals and "piety storing" to front-load some forgiveness from your draconian deity - which you will need if you anticipate the need to do something Dracul won't approve of, such as drink a health potion or slay a zombie.
As the finish line is never far away, you can always incrementally build your plan as you go along. "Converting" items from your inventory destroys them and triggers race-specific bonuses. In more long-term games, the tendency to play the packrat because "you never know" can lead to huge end-game surpluses of consumables. Not so in Desktop Dungeons, where even your most useful permanent items will be considered for conversion going into the boss fight. It's a bit of a rush the first time you cannibalize your entire inventory incrementally at just the right times and barely finish the boss with nothing to spare.
This game offers a ton of replayability in the form of race-class-religion combinations. For the harder levels, you may find that one size does NOT fit all, and that hammering away at your favorite setup won't work all the time. (The downside is that preparing for a run adequately requires spending accumulated gold from the town's coffer, and it often takes experimentation to learn what will and won't work with a given level's minions and bosses. A dry run with no preparation is typically in order if you are trying to save gold.)
The game has grown and improved a lot since the free-to-play alpha, both in graphics and in game balance and presentation, but the overall game flow is similar enough that the alpha serves as an informative sample of the finished product without spoiling the whole thing. It's the ideal "demo" from both a player's and a studio's perspective.
Sword of the Stars: The Pit
Unlike Desktop Dungeons, Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a straight-up science fiction dungeon crawl, with the emphasis on crawl - while the original Pit was originally stocked with 30 floors, the first expansion increased this to a total of 40. Considering that it often takes half an hour or more to complete a floor carefully, the audience is absolutely assumed to be deeply invested in the outcome of a run. So The Pit takes the opposite approach - instead of Desktop Dungeon's quick runs with a tight puzzle feel designed to draw in a broad audience, The Pit aims to be a cult classic. (I strongly suggest starting with Gold Edition. It is the second of three DLCs, but it is also sold in the bundle consisting of The Pit + Mindgames + Gold. Mindgames is where the core gameplay reaches maturity with the introduction of psionic powers, but it's just as easy to get Gold from the beginning. The third DLC, The Pilgrim, is a nice expansion if you own and like Gold, in which case you will naturally want more.)
Easily a week or more's gaming time can be devoted to a single run, and each minute is full of tough assessments of risk, reward, and resources. Food, ammo, health, armor, durability, and psionic energy reserves are constantly in a state of flux as the player continuously spends one or two in hopes of either conserving the others or finding more of it. Am I so hungry that I'll waste a few rounds of ammo to get this over quickly? Or is my health high enough that I want to get in melee range? Can I just run away, or will I probably just get surrounded later?
Aside from depth of gameplay, there is an odd and paradoxical depth to The Pit as a work of fiction. The overall plot of The Pit is hokey to the point where Kerberos Productions goes so far to break the third wall. In a random dungeon run, you may decode a random message from The Scout's sister which reads (paraphrasing), "Hey Toshiko, remember the game we used to play with the secret laboratory and the mad scientists and the monsters? I think the monsters are real this time..." Incidentally, the overall plot is that you're diving into 40 floors of corrupted science unleashed because a cure to the Xombie virus is at the bottom, no more and no less.
The depth emerges incrementally with each run and with each new playable character you spend time with, whether it's The Engineer who jubilantly declares that "it can't be worse than calculus!" or the brooding and intense Liir, perhaps best described for outsiders as a "psionic space dolphin". You'll also meet a fraternal Marine, a psionic soldier who was apparently trained on a strict regimen of watching 90s films on VHS, and the avaricious Morrigi - a sort of six-limbed red-and-teal dragon-bird.
Just getting to know your enemies is a bit of a journey. For example, you will enter mortal combat against members of the Zuul race at various life stages. In the early floors, you will find a quiet and seemingly deserted ruins of a research facility where you'll run across a few bats, some rats, and some hairy grub-like fanged Zuul infants, but as you go further, you will find giant rat-like Zuul pups before you eventually encounter the adult female, looking like an apish clawed wolf, and the adult Zuul male, a sort of psionic mastermind and all-around bad guy.
The reason that The Pit bursts with so much fertile imagination is that it is a spin-off of the expand-and-conquer-in-space RTS game Sword of the Stars, belonging to Arinn Dembo's expanding sci fi universe set in the 2400s, including one complete novel to date. If you ever wondered what games would be like if real writer(-anthropologist)s wrote for them, then this is one of the best places you could look.
The Pit is a challenging mad plummet into the depths of a deranged Sword of the Stars buffet of death. Have one of everything, but they're not responsible if it doesn't agree with you. It's a pretty good mix for a hardcore game meant to be played repeatedly - don't bog the player down with too much plot, but do present a rich world and quirky characters with well-controlled voice acting that somehow manages not to be annoying months later.
I do have some quibbles with the game, especially with the inadequacy of the tutorial to unveil the arcane game mechanics one must master to go far in the game. I also feel like the level-up heal breaks the fourth wall in a way that works for Desktop Dungeons but not for The Pit, and some minor control/interface issues get in the way. But there's nothing that can't be overcome by Let's Play videos, the wiki, the forums, and old-fashioned dying from different things until you learn how to play better. I'd like to make suggestions for improvement at length in a separate post sometime, but for I'd just like to recommend The Pit as a modern cult classic hardcore rogue-like that is very slow-paced and takes a weekend or two to warm up to.
(As I mentioned in earlier posts, I started a fan comic about the characters and plot of The Pit, but with a multiplayer twist speculating on how they'd interact with each other.
Also, I finally beat the game on Normal. I was playing as The Scout and I had really good early luck.)
Sword of the Stars: The Pit
Unlike Desktop Dungeons, Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a straight-up science fiction dungeon crawl, with the emphasis on crawl - while the original Pit was originally stocked with 30 floors, the first expansion increased this to a total of 40. Considering that it often takes half an hour or more to complete a floor carefully, the audience is absolutely assumed to be deeply invested in the outcome of a run. So The Pit takes the opposite approach - instead of Desktop Dungeon's quick runs with a tight puzzle feel designed to draw in a broad audience, The Pit aims to be a cult classic. (I strongly suggest starting with Gold Edition. It is the second of three DLCs, but it is also sold in the bundle consisting of The Pit + Mindgames + Gold. Mindgames is where the core gameplay reaches maturity with the introduction of psionic powers, but it's just as easy to get Gold from the beginning. The third DLC, The Pilgrim, is a nice expansion if you own and like Gold, in which case you will naturally want more.)
Easily a week or more's gaming time can be devoted to a single run, and each minute is full of tough assessments of risk, reward, and resources. Food, ammo, health, armor, durability, and psionic energy reserves are constantly in a state of flux as the player continuously spends one or two in hopes of either conserving the others or finding more of it. Am I so hungry that I'll waste a few rounds of ammo to get this over quickly? Or is my health high enough that I want to get in melee range? Can I just run away, or will I probably just get surrounded later?
Aside from depth of gameplay, there is an odd and paradoxical depth to The Pit as a work of fiction. The overall plot of The Pit is hokey to the point where Kerberos Productions goes so far to break the third wall. In a random dungeon run, you may decode a random message from The Scout's sister which reads (paraphrasing), "Hey Toshiko, remember the game we used to play with the secret laboratory and the mad scientists and the monsters? I think the monsters are real this time..." Incidentally, the overall plot is that you're diving into 40 floors of corrupted science unleashed because a cure to the Xombie virus is at the bottom, no more and no less.
The depth emerges incrementally with each run and with each new playable character you spend time with, whether it's The Engineer who jubilantly declares that "it can't be worse than calculus!" or the brooding and intense Liir, perhaps best described for outsiders as a "psionic space dolphin". You'll also meet a fraternal Marine, a psionic soldier who was apparently trained on a strict regimen of watching 90s films on VHS, and the avaricious Morrigi - a sort of six-limbed red-and-teal dragon-bird.
Just getting to know your enemies is a bit of a journey. For example, you will enter mortal combat against members of the Zuul race at various life stages. In the early floors, you will find a quiet and seemingly deserted ruins of a research facility where you'll run across a few bats, some rats, and some hairy grub-like fanged Zuul infants, but as you go further, you will find giant rat-like Zuul pups before you eventually encounter the adult female, looking like an apish clawed wolf, and the adult Zuul male, a sort of psionic mastermind and all-around bad guy.
The reason that The Pit bursts with so much fertile imagination is that it is a spin-off of the expand-and-conquer-in-space RTS game Sword of the Stars, belonging to Arinn Dembo's expanding sci fi universe set in the 2400s, including one complete novel to date. If you ever wondered what games would be like if real writer(-anthropologist)s wrote for them, then this is one of the best places you could look.
The Pit is a challenging mad plummet into the depths of a deranged Sword of the Stars buffet of death. Have one of everything, but they're not responsible if it doesn't agree with you. It's a pretty good mix for a hardcore game meant to be played repeatedly - don't bog the player down with too much plot, but do present a rich world and quirky characters with well-controlled voice acting that somehow manages not to be annoying months later.
I do have some quibbles with the game, especially with the inadequacy of the tutorial to unveil the arcane game mechanics one must master to go far in the game. I also feel like the level-up heal breaks the fourth wall in a way that works for Desktop Dungeons but not for The Pit, and some minor control/interface issues get in the way. But there's nothing that can't be overcome by Let's Play videos, the wiki, the forums, and old-fashioned dying from different things until you learn how to play better. I'd like to make suggestions for improvement at length in a separate post sometime, but for I'd just like to recommend The Pit as a modern cult classic hardcore rogue-like that is very slow-paced and takes a weekend or two to warm up to.
(As I mentioned in earlier posts, I started a fan comic about the characters and plot of The Pit, but with a multiplayer twist speculating on how they'd interact with each other.
Also, I finally beat the game on Normal. I was playing as The Scout and I had really good early luck.)
