Gaming

COGMIND.

COGMIND COGMIND COGMIND.

Cogmind is legitimately the most underrated "real" roguelike around. Everyone knows about CDDA and Caves of Qud or whatever, I never see anyone talk about Cogmind. It's such a rabbit hole both gameplay and actually story-wise (because yeah, it actually has a story, despite being a traditional roguelike) that I can't help but wonder how the hell it's developer keeps going.

They have a blog where they talk about the game. It's borderline obsessive.

If I look at any one aspect of it closely I inevitably end up going "wait, what the hell?" because it goes farther than I expected. In-game computer terminals, the way word of your presence travels throughout the caverns you're in, each tile actually being a 3x3 space which affects how much "cover" you have... playing for quite a few hours before meeting other truly sentient robots and realizing that oh, there's, like, lore. A lot of it.

Hades 10outta10

Ancient Domains of Mystery is really really good if you can get into it. It's available on Steam, but you can get the free version which is identical except for the UI from https://adom.de/

Caves of Qud is phenomenal and you won’t regret playing it. If you have a phone, I’d highly recommend Shattered Pixel Dungeon. It may be one of the cleanest versions of the genre. It’s also available on PC, but I’ve never played it there.

Similarly, I think Hoplite on the phone may be the most distilled version of the genre, pared down to the barest essentials and utterly glorious as a result.

Binding of Isaac is my favorite.

If you are curious about a classic originator in the genre, and willing for a steep learning curve, I highly recommend to check out Nethack: "NetHack is a single-player roguelike video game originally released in 1987 with ASCII graphics. It is a descendant of an earlier game called Hack, which is a clone of Rogue" It's still under development today! I prefer the tile-based versions over the ascii versions. And if you can play it on a touch-screen device, that can be an even better experience.

Dead Cells is brilliant

I've very recently spent a close to a hundred hours on a single character on Caves of Qud, and I've hardly scratched the surface of what would be it's endgame areas. If you can handle the interface it's an incredible game with near endless possibilities. The build variety is pretty massive with the way mutations/cybernetics and skills/stats interact with each other, allowing you to build your characters exactly how you want.

Tales of Maj'Eyal is also an excellent choice with a huge variety of ways to play with it's dozens of classes and a wide variety of races to play to keep things fresh each run. The world itself is static, but each zone itself is random per run, and it also has the ability to tune the difficulty a bit to your liking, as well as having a couple expansions to check out too (with another on the way).

Cogmind is another one I've put a decent amount of time into that has a ton of depth, allowing you to pick and choose what parts to strap onto your bot for each run. Stealth hacker runs, ranged artillery explosion builds, incredibly fast ninja melee builds, there's a myriad of cool ways to experience all it has to offer.

These are all pretty in depth games, and the first 10-30 hours could easily be seen as your tutorial, so don't be discouraged by being overwhelmed by things, and don't be afraid to look things up if you need to!

I got very addicted to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead for a while... so much so that I ported it to Android so I could play on my commute to work.

https://cataclysmdda.org/

You would really enjoy Caves of Qud. It’s like DCSS but science fantasy in a crazy world instead of pure fantasy. Mechanically they’re fairly equivalent; both offer a lot of deep builds and complicated ways to solve the problem of “how do I survive this next turn?”

My go-to is Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

A personal favourite is UnReal World.

...into the far north we shall take you.

The only one I know is Dead Cells. I could play it all day even though I'm awful haha.

I'd recommend: Hades, Dead Cells, The Binding of Isaac, and FTL

Holy god, I never thought I'd see someone else mention DCSS in the wild!! I used to play that a bunch about a year or so ago. Truth be told, I kind of miss it once in a while. Devilishly hard, but I did manage to break into Hell once. Even killed one of the pandemonium lords.

Shit... I might start playing again.

Try out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It's like a 90's sci-fi that gets hit by every single apocalyptic, world-ending disaster at once.

I've enjoyed Slay the Spire and Wizard of Legend. The latter is very hard to beat at least for me.

Caves of Qud is AMAZING! You should buy it OP

Man I'm sad we don't have an /r/roguelikes here. Discussion of the genre has been clobbered by the much more popular roguelites and it was nice to have a forum focused on traditional roguelikes. There's a discord but it's not the same.

Some lesser known ones that I think are quite cool:

Shadow of the Wyrm, open world fantasy with a nice vibe.

Dawn of the Mexica, quite brutal lethal combat with an uncommon setting.

Forays into Norrendrin, traditional dungeon crawler setting with distilled gameplay systems. Brogue-adjacent.

The Ground Gives Way, also a traditional dungeon crawler but with a really interesting fatigue-based equipment system and non lethal combat options. Cool item effects and stuff.

Lost Flame, if dark souls was a roguelike. Quite involved combat where attacks are telegraphed and you can dodge them, use abilities for movement etc. Great atmosphere.

The ones I played and enjoyed:

• Noita
• The Binding of Isaac
• Hades
• FTL
• Risk of Rain
• Darkest Dungeon
• Dead Cells
• Rouge Legacy

Edit: woups was still editing the list and accidentally hit the post button.. Added more

Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead/Bright Nights are the obvious recommendations I have, though they are more managing/survival games than a classic roguelike.

One that I come back every now and then and don't see recommended often is Prospector, it's about exploring space.

Also I try NetHack every three or four years but I can't make it hold my attention long enough to learn it.

I highly recommend OneBit Adventure. It is available on mobile and Steam. The last time I checked it is still in active development, So you will see new features and improvements frequently.

CoQ is indeed a quality game, that I would recommend. Another one, if you are interested in sci-fi, Cogmind. It has pretty amazing graphics, even if you use ASCII style.

CDDA, is fun sci-fi post-apocalypse, with zombies. But its complex. But real fun.

Ancient Domains of Mystery, but not the half 3D one.

ADOM

Dwarf Fortress adventure mode, coming to Steam eventually. Also available in older versions for free.

Dwarf Fortress

More Action: FTL, Spelunky, Angband, Barony

Not sure if it count but Street of Rogue is kinda like a 2d GTA or Saints Row only without the cars and there's lots of characters with completely different playstyles like you can go guns blazing as a soldier or play as a pacifist doctor who can't really fight and has to use stealth or other means to do objectives or be a gorilla rescuing other gorillas who's very strong but cant talk to people or use guns or be a zombie who weak on its own but once it gets going you'll start the zombie apocalypse.

There're also these mutators which can be used as accessibility options cause I use it to slow the game down but it can be used to turn off some of the stuff that you don't like in the game.

Brogue is worth a try. I like the back-to-the-genre-roots minimalism and the hybrid-ascii aesthetics. I alternate between DCSS and Brogue these days.

been really loving halls of torment, best description i could give is something between vampire survivor and diablo 2.

Golden Light if you're into horror games.

DCSS is my usual recommendation but you're already playing it.

I poured way too much time into Rogue, Moria, Angband and Zangband back in the day... Sad to see Zangband completely disappeared - no idea if there's a similar flavour floating around.

Played a couple of newer more graphical (and probably better balanced games) but I actually found them less engaging.

My son was madly into Shattered Pixel Dungeon for a while.

Darkest Dungeon is a game I keep coming back to. Long story short, it's a roguelike where you send a group of four heroes into a dungeon and you fight lovecraftian horrors there. It's also really well narrated!

I'm currently playing Hades (a top-down, isometric brawler). The gameplay is really fun and with different weapons, skills & upgrades per run, it stays entertaining for a long time. The story is simple but engaging, and after almost every run, there are some characters with new dialogue that tells you more about it.

If you're into Pokemon, the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are fantastic. They aren't the hardest roguelike in the world (still harder than a mainline Pokemon game though), but they're fun. The stories are also incredible (can only speak for Rescue Team and Explorers, haven't played the 3DS titles yet).

Check out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. There's a version on Steam to support the developers, but you can download the executable for free from their website just like DCSS.

I didn't see anyone recommend in the comments, but I very much enjoyed Dreamscaper. It has a nice story revolving around the main character confronting hwr psychological issues in the world of her dreams. Combat is fun, slower paced and a little more tactical than most.

Also, fwiw, I'm not generally a roguelike fan, but I liked this one. Whether that makes you more or less likely to take my recommendation is up to you lol.

Tangledeep is honestly really underrated. Beautiful graphics, great music, monster taming, swapping to whatever job class you like.... My favourite roguelike hands down.

The Pokémon mystery dungeon games are also amazing, a little more simplistic but still great. If you want a punishing challenge then the Shiren series might be for you!

I tend to play a lot of the old text-tile games that I cut my teeth on back starting with Angband. Any of those variants are enjoyable, but I pretty much stick to Zangband (Angband adding in the work of Zelazny) and frogcomposband (It's a mouthfull, but FUN).

Ah, look at everyone recommending action roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is dead, long live the Berlin Interpretation! I'll happily n'th Caves of Qud and Cogmind as amazing turn-based traditional roguelikes, and I'll add to that pile the following lesser-known gems:

• Dungeonmans: Very much a no-frills traditional roguelike but also a very good one and probably the closest thing out there to "DCSS but better".
• Tangledeep: Borrowing more from the Japanese side of the genre, with things like pets and item dungeons and sharply limited healing.
• DoomRL/Jupiter Hell: This is what it sounds like, a turn-based top-down version of Doom where cover and movement are everything. DoomRL is the original free version, while Jupiter Hell is the souped-up Steam version stripped of all trademarks.
• Rift Wizard: This one is weird but amazing - you can only attack via magic, you have a limited number of casts of all your spells, and you need to clear an entire level before advancing. But you have a mostly-free choice of new spells each level, and the goal is to put together something hilariously broken before the game outscales you.

Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:

• Angband: A truly ancient free game whose roots go back to the mainframe days. Still has living variants in addition to vanilla, of which IMO the best are Sil and FrogComPosBand.
• Nethack: Another truly ancient free game from the mainframe days, this one was really intended to be a puzzle an entire university would work together to solve. If you try it today, expect to need spoilers.
• ADOM: The last of the ancient free trifecta, this is less arcane and more story-focused than Nethack but has some truly awful dick moves. Spoilers are an absolute must. Sort of like a proto-Qud. The original is free, but there's an enhanced tiles version on Steam as well.
• Golden Krone Hotel: A more modern game where you flip between human and vampire.
• Sproggiwood: A highly streamlined traditional roguelike where a given dungeon run will last less than an hour, but there's metaprogression between dungeons.
• Brogue: A free fantasy roguelike that, like Cogmind, completely eschews experience points.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: A free roguelike immersive sim set in the post-apocalypse, complete with zombie hordes.
• Hydra Slayer: A math roguelike. You can only kill a hydra by cutting off all its heads, and if you don't cut off all of them then some number grow back. Your weapons do things like halving the number of heads, or cutting off exactly three heads (doing nothing if there are fewer than three).
• HyperRogue: The hyper stands for hyperbolic geometry.