I said Noita is my favourtie roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.

If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.

It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.

It’s very open to how you want to play.

Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.

The Dead Cells devs have been putting in work on their multiplayer rogue lite Windblown, which is super fun. Hades 2 is in a great spot and will keep getting better Risk of Rain (1+2) both fantastic

But for really obscure and interesting mechanics and a true rogue like experience: Noita. It’s pixel graphics but every foreground pixel is simulated and there are a craft huge number of interactions between substances and spells. There’s deep lore that you have to be very dedicated to decipher. There’s an actual alchemy system that changes depending on map seed. Oh, and it’s really hard.

I have generally found roguelikes to be too difficult, so if you want a turn-taking, strategic one that leans into the easier side while letting you set up many ridiculous combinations, I enjoy “Backpack Hero”. You get a Resident Evil 4 styled inventory screen, and must arrange/place items for an optimal build. You generally get rewarded for stacking similar items.

Dead cells and rogue legacy 1/2 were a lot of fun. Check out nethack if you want something more casual for mobile or in a terminal, it’s a classic. Switch specific I’d say check out dead cells or Isaac. If you want something casual without a big story or learning a bunch of RPG systems you might want to check out donut county, goose game, or golf story.

A couple weirder Rogue-lite suggestions:

Against the Storm is a Rogue-lite City Builder, which sounds like 2 things that shouldn’t go together but works surprisingly well. It has a generous demo on Steam that lets you freely play up to level 6 or something in the standard biome, so give it a try

Shape-Hero Factory is a Rogue-lite Factory Builder. Another weird combination that is surprisingly effective. It’s in Early Access so there’s a lot of features that are still planned, but you can do full runs and go up to I think Ascension 6. It had a demo during nextfest, not sure if the demo is still there.

People play games on netflix?

I’ve been recently playing Kingsway which is a pretty unique roguelite RPG where the entire game takes place in a fake operating system inspired by the Windows 95 interface. Only on Steam though iirc.

Pretty fun, though I wish there were mods to increase the amount of content in the game.

Technically not… exactly a rogue like, but:

Deus Ex w/ Randomizer Mod and PermaDeath.

You can set it up fairly easily the Steam version of DX and the Revision Mod, which at this point is basically all the most popular DX mods, reconfigured to play nice with each other and be as mutually compatible as possible.

Someone already mentioned Caves of Qud, that one is amazing, Noita is really good, also StarSector is functionally a roguelike but in space.

Also No Mans Sky is basically a rogue like if you turn on permadeath, kick the difficulty up.

If you’ve got interest in deep simulation mechanics you can check out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It’s FOSS and, last I checked, still has an active developer community.

If you enjoy Slay the Spire and are interested in more rogue like deckbuilders, I’m a big fan of Griftlands.

It’s pretty small in scope but it has some fun ideas and three base characters/decks with their own stories you follow. It does have some meta-progression if you care about that. I find making builds in it really fun and it’s incredibly satisfying to see a deck come together and just destroy everything in your path.

I will share my personal favorites:

Faster Than Light, Into the Breach, Inscryption (don’t look up anything just buy and play it)

You owe it to yourself to try some traditional Roguelikes:

• Caves of Qud (Just released 1.0 a month ago. Amazing game. Unique science fiction world full of weird and wonderful characters, complex tinkering crafting system, crazy mutants and really cool cybernetics. Huge amounts of lore and a rich detailed world. I can’t stop playing it!)
• Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Really awesome game with a friendly developer who posts on Lemmy. Extremely well balanced classes: 5 main classes with a 6th in development. Cool character customization and equipment upgrade system. Super deep alchemy system. Probably the best mobile roguelike but amazing on PC too, with a great UI for every platform)
• NetHack (old school, developed since 1987 and still active, very tough game, might not want to try this one first. Incredibly rewarding once you learn it! Absolutely crazy amount of interactions between items, characters, and features in the dungeon. Takes its “verb-based action system” much farther than any other game, including text adventure games)
• Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (very complex but not as brutal and spoilery as NetHack. Extreme replay value due to the huge number of species, backgrounds, skills, and gods)
• Tales of Maj’Eyal (not as many races as DCSS but still a huge variety of character builds. Great music as well)

Slice & Dice is really good. If I play something on phone it is either that or Slay the Spire.

My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.

Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.

Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.

Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.

I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.

And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.

10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.

Just as a bit of a counter to all the Isaac love (and, don’t get me wrong, I love Isaac):

BoI is probably the best roguelite… from the early 2010s. The gameplay is ridiculously solid but the upgrade design and drop system has too much in common with the roguelikes of old where you would often lose a run because the purple potion was instant death on this run.

There are just so many upgrades and synergies that you might become completely unkillable on floor 2 of one run and then have your entire build ruined on floor 5 of a different run. I STRONGLY encourage playing with the wiki or https://tboi.com/ open on a second device/display to avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.

On PC there are mods that integrate this into the game (and I think you can use it with achievements after your first matricide?). And I think Edmund has said he wants to add that to the base game sooner than later?

But contrast that with games like Hades where basically every single upgrade is a pure upgrade and you have good item descriptions before you pick anything up (so it is mostly a case of deciding what damage types you want to spec for). Or Dead Cells where you can easily swap out a weapon if you decide you didn’t like it. But in Isaac? You are basically chugging mystery potions on every floor.