While there were games with aspects of Rogue before it conquered university Unix systems, like Beneath Apple Manor, Rogue still deserves its status as the namesake of the roguelikes. Its great popularity on campuses inspired a slew of expansions and variations.
The world of early roguelikes wavers in its documentation and preservation. There’s several early roguelikes that are nearly unplayable today: the Roguelike Restoration Project (their site appears to have returned to the internet in 2022) has tried to preserve them but its manager has time constraints. I know that Herb Chong, who created a variant called UltraRogue, is still around, and has expressed interest in getting the code running again, but it’s a difficult project, not the least reason for being that the original game saved games by creating and reloading raw chunks of memory. (Roguelike Restoration Project put the original source up here if anyone wants to take a crack at it.)
Several versions of UltraRogue, as well as many versions of Rogue, Advanced Rogue, Super Rogue, XRogue, and others, can be found on The Rogue Archive. Playing some of them might be difficult, but the code is there, sometimes in object form, sometimes as source. It preserves the code for Rog-O-Matic, the computer program that, itself, plays Rogue. You can even find more obscure variations of Rogue there, like HexRogue (which has become unplayable on its home site since Java support for browsers was abandoned), zRogue (an implementation for the Infocom zMachine), PalmOS versions, something called Advanced SuperTurbo Rogue Plus, and more.
I’ve always maintained my affection for Rogue, even if in the eyes of many it’s deficient in features these days. But that means it’s short, it won’t consume weeks of your free time to finish it, while it’s also complex enough to maintain interest, and challenging enough that it’ll take a while to master. If, in this Year of our Frog 2024, you haven’t tried Rogue yet, well, why not? You’ll probably die, but in the end, that’s better odds than real life!
John Harris: I’ve been playing a ton of Glitch revival Odd Giants, which I mentioned last month. It’s incomplete but still under development, and the original game was never complete anyway. I might write something more on it in the near future.
Josh Bycer: I just started playing Warriors of the Nile 2. it’s a tactical strategy game with roguelike elements too, a lot of ways to break the game with the right skills and every character has their own abilities and strategies to use.
Phil Nelson: I finally have been playing the recent Marvel’s Spider-Man games and Miles Morales really does kick ass as a game most of the time, but I still run into some bullshit. In a more just world we’d have a proper Spider-Man roguelike.
I like how Josh and Phil are talking about roguelikes, and I’m really into an old non-violent MMORPG with like maybe 100 players. I’ve always got to be contrary I guess.
For this cast, I sat down with Jonathan White who is the developer of the Last Sunshine and the recent re-release The Last Sunshine Rekindled. We spoke about his background and developing a combination of a shooter and a roguelite.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Rogue Legacy is the game that popularized what would become the sub-genre known as “roguelite” — the idea of having a focus on persistence as progression in a roguelike. Since its release, the roguelike and lite genres have blown up across the board. With all these new flavors, Rogue Legacy 2 has recently left early access and now asks the question: can the original roguelite show these newcomers some new tricks?
The Liter Side
The basic gameplay of the original returns with a new story. A Kingdom has fallen to a mysterious corruption, the guardians have been taken over by a strange force, and you once again sign away your life and your descendants to Charon to figure out what’s going on. The upgraded visuals are impressive, with improved lighting that makes everything pop.
If you missed the first one, the progression of the game comes in the form of your estate/castle. Gold, earned by killing enemies and finding treasure chests can be used after a run to add additions to your castle. These additions become progressively more expensive, but they will unlock new classes, raise stats, add new quality of life features, and more.
In runs, you can find blueprints that can be used to acquire new equipment pieces with a set bonus for wearing them all. Unlike the first game, your major improvements this time come in the form of heirlooms that are placed in each biome. Once unlocked, they stay active for the rest of the game. Runes, that offer passive bonuses, are still locked to completing a variety of puzzles and mini challenges throughout the world. A new unlock is in the form of “scars” which are bonus challenges whose resources can be used to unlock additional features and boost your stats even higher. The roguelite nature of Rogue Legacy 2 is on full display, and I can just see people attempting level 1 challenges or “low level” runs.
the persistence is back in full force
A new resource “resolve” acts as a reserve used to equip relics that provide a variety of passive bonuses that can be found in a run. Once your resolve gets less than 100, further drains will reduce your max health. These relics can be worth it and with the right ones can easily break a run.
Class diversity has been given a facelift with more classes, more special powers, and of course, more whacky traits. The traits were a big part of the original’s charm, with characters having traits that affect their run but can also earn you more gold for taking them.
Everything about Rogue Legacy 2 brings back the charm of the original, but it also brings back the issues I had as well.
Floaty Fighting
Of the variety of action roguelikes I’ve played, both Rogue Legacies feel the most inconsistent in terms of movement and combat for several reasons.
While it may not look like it, there are aspects of bullet hell in both games in how you must dodge attacks. Many enemies can launch all varieties of projectiles at you, some that track, some that can go through walls, etc. One of the biggest annoyances with the game is the lack of standardized alerts about oncoming attacks.
Some attacks the game will warn you that the enemy is about to do them, others they won’t. The same goes for incoming projectiles off-screen — some of them the game will let you know, other times you’ll get hit with no warning. It becomes very frustrating when you are trying to keep track of things and you can have three different projectiles and no way to tell how they behave. You have no invincibility frames while dashing (only one class gets an I-frame dodge), and it’s very common to have a situation where dodging one attack puts you right in front of another.
The enemy physics is one of the most frustrating aspects of the game, to the point that I’m glad that there is an assist option to disable damage when coming in contact. Many classes have attacks that don’t push the enemy back when you hit them. This can lead to issues of enemies that you’re trying to attack, and they just fly or dash straight into you and do damage. For classes that can crit off dash attacks, it is far too risky to use this move on the later areas as you’re increasing the chance of you taking more damage.
Since enemies don’t respond to attacks, you can dodge all their projectiles, get into melee range and start hitting, and they’ll launch an attack with no tell and hit you without any means of dodging. Many of my deaths came from situations where it felt like the game was just not giving me a way to succeed — rooms where projectiles come from all angles, with enemies of varying tells, that all hit like a truck if I run into them or their attacks. I found that range attacks can break the difficulty in a lot of the later areas simply by not having to try and duck and weave around projectiles while trying to hit enemies.
The Daily Grind
Rogue Legacy 2 is certainly a roguelite and is by far one of the most grind-heavy out there. Every form of progression will take time to gather the necessary resources to upgrade. As with the first game, the general positioning and difficulty of the biomes don’t change, which means that your best way of grinding resources is to always go to the hardest area you can in order to maximize the gold you find. Just like with the first game, and with roguelites in general, you’re going to have a lot of throwaway runs that are just there to grind resources before having your “serious runs.”
skill is still the primary factor in winning fights
The biggest hurdle to progress much like the first game is just how tanky the bosses are. Expect to spend a lot of minutes dodging the same patterns as you whittle down their health bars. A new feature that allows you to gain bonus damage requires you to hunt down clues in each biome. Damage is the most important stat, as killing enemies fast prevents them from firing back at you obviously. Because the cost of all upgrades gets progressively more expensive as you spend, it’s very easy to make things harder for you by getting upgrades that aren’t directly helping you but increasing the cost of everything else (the game has been patched with a recommended upgrade path). For people who do finish the game, there is an extensive array of post-game content and progressive difficulty if you really want to keep the rogue-lite-ness going.
A Family Reunion
Rogue Legacy 2 is the bigger, better-looking version of the first game. If you enjoyed the first game through and through, this is certainly more to love. If you were hoping for some refinements to the design and pain points, then this action family tree simulator still has some thorns to deal with. This is still the quintessential roguelite on the market and a must-play for fans of the original.
This was played with a press key provided by the publisher
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Revita is another action roguelike to come out of early access recently. And while it does feel like a greatest hits collection of action roguelike mechanics, the game’s principal twist does separate it from the pack but does so in a polarizing way.
Rebirth
The story of the game follows a young boy who keeps waking up in a mysterious tower that he is forced to climb. Standing in his way are various monsters and creatures that represent the stages of grief, hinting at some earth-shattering secrets going on. The basic gameplay involves running, jumping, shooting, and dodging enemy attacks on procedurally generated floors. While the game features set room layouts, what enemies can spawn is entirely random per area/biome.
As with any action roguelike, you’re going to find a number of items that can change how your character behaves and do damage. The first twist of the game is that your health is also your currency. Shops, shrines, treasure chests, and other things will require you to sacrifice your health. As you kill enemies, you’ll accumulate souls that can be transformed into more health or give you more of a health pool.
The sheer number of unlockables is extensive, and I haven’t seen a pool like this since The Binding of Isaac. The different varieties of items can lead to crazy runs, but your skill is still going to be the main factor. As you play through the game, progressive difficulty unlocks will increase the difficulty of runs and add in new modifiers to deal with. Where the game goes with this is somewhat original for the action roguelike genre.
A Difficult Story
For most games, the progressive difficulty is simply there for expert players who are done with the story and just want to keep pushing up the challenge. With Revita, the difficulty is part of the story. Once you get to difficulty level 5, the game will challenge you to perform a specific task to move the story along and unlock even more difficulties and levels to play. This is like The Binding of Isaac which had its share of secrets and additional content. However, you cannot even get anything that would be considered a real ending without raising up the difficulty.the progressive difficulty provides a lot of replay value for people who want the challenge
For those that do manage this task, they will find even more difficulty levels, secrets, and harder challenges to go after. At the time of writing this review, the developer has changed the conditionals for the first set of challenges, which is good due to their difficulty and RNG messing with it. However, if you find that unlock to be difficult, the game has far more in store, and while this does leave the game with plenty under the surface to find, I don’t know how many people are going to be motivated this way.
Pushing Through the Pain
Revita reminds me a little bit of Spelunky 2 and how there is more going on for expert players than there is for casual/core ones. While it does feel nice to know that there is a lot more to this game for someone like me, I do question if there’s enough to motivate someone to make the trek up the difficulty ladder.
The problem is that unlocking the many secrets to Revita is not just about getting good at the game, but also figuring out the conditions for its secrets and being able to execute it with randomly chosen items showing up each run. The base game, or level 0 of difficulty, is on the easy side compared to other games in the genre. If someone plays, beats the game and thinks that is it, they’re going to leave disappointed.
Even with the number of difficulty settings that you can unlock, and there are plenty, the base path through doesn’t feel like there is enough variance in the same ways as Hades or The Binding of Isaac. As with Hades, your starting weapon dictates a lot about how you’re going to be playing over the run. However, where Hades has the different god buffs, or The Binding of Isaac has items that radically change your build, Revita doesn’t have that many that would be considered that run-affecting. In total, there are five main biomes, and two variants of two of them that you will do per run. I’ve found that I was relying on the same basic strategies each run and that they were working.
From an expert standpoint, trying to get through challenges hitless can be frustrating as screen shaking, the camera zooms, and the bullet physics themselves can make it hard to gauge dodging. The bullet physics in the game varies from linear directions to those that have their own simulated physics to them. There were times due to the rng of how bullets behaved that there didn’t seem to be a safe way to dodge them.
One of the more annoying aspects of Revita’s progressive difficulty is that several levels introduce elements that increase the duration of the runs. By the time I was hitting level 10+, a single run would take about an hour, with the combination of the lack of variance, started to wear thin for me. I think I would have preferred fewer difficulty settings but make their differences more pronounced. Some, like increased bullet spawn and enemy speed were a big deal, but it took until shard 14 before I started to see more interesting ones that affected things.
Continuing the Cycle
Revita has a lot of charm to it, and the game makes use of a variety of action roguelike mechanics and systems. If you’re hoping for an example that radically changes the formula in the same way as Hades did, then this game doesn’t go that far. If you’re a veteran of the genre looking for another challenge to dive, or climb, into, then this is a solid entry for the year.
This was played with a press key provided by the developer.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
7DRL is a yearly gamejam where participants try to complete construction of a roguelike game within a week. Every year a number of unique and ingenuous games come out of it, some of them later getting built into full releases. Josh’s stream is a good place to find interesting projects to play and watch.
the progressive difficulty provides a lot of replay value for people who want the challenge