I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?
Update: Y’all convinced me. I bought Binding of Isaac and am excited to start. I also tried out Dead Cells via Netflix, but feel like I’d prefer it with a controller compared to mobile. Gonna start with Isaac, and wait for a sale on Dead Cells. Thank you for all the recommendations! I’m saving this thread for future reference.
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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.
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)
I will share my personal favorites:
Faster Than Light, Into the Breach, Inscryption (don’t look up anything just buy and play it)
Slice & Dice is really good. If I play something on phone it is either that or Slay the Spire.
Seconding this. There’s so much to do and so many ways to customize how you wanna play while still unlocking new things to play with. Great, we’ll designed little game that I’ve been playing for years.
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.
Tap for spoiler
I was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
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.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation! I’ve wishlisted it and will pick it up when it goes on sale. The art is absolutely beautiful, I can see how it could get haunting and lonely.
Hollow Knight
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.
avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.
The stupid behavior of X item sucks is part of the fun of the game and why it’s so great, though. You pretty much forget all those broken runs you got, but I’ll never forget the times I found Plan C or used the Bible on Satan. I also think you’re missing that repentance modernized all this and there’s even fewer bad items than before. At this point there are only a handful of truly bad items.
Hades is great and holds your hand, but the fact that every upgrade is more-or-less the same type of skill addition to your build is also boring.
I don’t know if you are into Mystery Dungeon games, but I loved both of Void Terrarium games. Both on switch.
Dead Cells is 50% off on GOG right now.
If you enjoyed Hades, you might like the new Ninja Turtles game, Splintered Fate. It’s definitely a bit more than “inspired by” Hades. Doesn’t quite hit the same, but it’s still a good time.
Dead Cells?
Emphasis, perhaps, on the “lite” part of Roguelite. But it does have that Roguelike run structure where the levels and the items you find therein are randomized. But with side scrolling platforming gameplay with a very distinct set of fast double-jump-dodge-roll-parry-combo mechanics that I think can best be summed up as ninja gameplay. And you will get killed… a lot. There is a permanent progression system of a sort in the form of unlocking more weapons and items (and later, to re lock items you don’t like), but your core stats remain the same. This is one of those games where the real progression is on your own personal quest to git gud.
I think it’s pretty unique in that it has no dud weapons or items whatsoever. Everything – literally everything – has the potential to be viable and can be absolutely deadly when wielded in the right hands. Even the joke items.
It also has not one, but two weapons which involve beating the shit out of your enemies with frying pans. What’s not to love?
There is indeed a Switch version.
In the style of Slay The Spire : Griftlands, Monster Train, Wildfrost, Accross The Obelisk, Dicey Dungeons (kinda)
More action oriented : Risk of Rain Returns, Risk of Rain 2 (both games are awesome and quite different), Rogue Legacy 1 & 2, Gunfire Reborn, Spelunky 1 & 2
Unique : Balatro, Noita, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Cultist Simulator, Ballionaire, Luck Be A Landlord
Feel free to search about any of these games or ask some questions about them.
Would not recommend Crypt of the Necrodancer, considering barely anybody ever beats the game even by default, and then completing the full story is far too hard to not be frustrating
Can’t say it’s not difficult, but it’s not a reason to not talk about it. OP may be one of the 10% who could finish it.
For people who found it to difficult, Cadence of Hyrule is the same concept ported in the Zelda universe. It’s easier, more forgiving and if you die, you don’t have to start all over again. And its musics are awesome, Zelda music remixed by Danny Baranowski.
Binding of Isaac is some OG classic stuff if you haven’t played that one, and Neon Abyss is a fun side-scrolling game on a similar vibe. Rogue Legacy 1 (very OG) and 2 and Dead Cells are also side scrolling , with a dash of Metroidvania.
If you like Slay the Spire, Astrea is the same thing but with dice, and Monster Train also scratches the same itch.
Came here to suggest The Binding of Isaac, but it looks like people already convinced you. Hope you love it! I’ve achieved 100% completion at around 870 hours, and one of my acquaintances is currently at 4.1k hours played of that. It’s an incredible amount of fun
Star traders frontiers if you want a more management spacy concept
