The Codex of Roguelikes

[fuzz]

https://spellsweaver.itch.io/alchemist

Was briefly mentioned in this thread. In Alchemist you play as a faust bargained apothecary. It's a low fantasy setting, you're not a wizard nor a common adventurer - it takes knowledge, time and resources to prepare yourself to be in any fighting capability. Lots of fun, in-world fitting descriptions/instructions (Mix untainted metallic dust with water. Get it to the boiling-point. Dissolve something dead and something umbral in the hot water to invite rot and decay. Pour the boiling liquid into the bottle).

Spoiler

Game has a story-line, the main quest acts as a guide, introducing keybindings, UI elements and game mechanics to prepare the player for the increasingly harder dungeons. There is no experience gain from killing monsters (hi, Infra Arcana), you're progressing by finding occult, practical or academic tomes of knowledge, which you can then use to progress through your research tree, unlocking various potion/item recipes, determined by the path you've chosen.

Spoiler

There is some imsim stuff going on: fire made from the molotov cocktail you've thrown has a chance to spread to the connecting tiles, if there's a wooden object in it's path (table, chair) it will burn, barrel full of gunpowder will explode, barrel full of wine will have it's contents evaporated; one of the possible interactions with tiles is pushing, you can throw a freezing potion on a creature and push it into the endless pit; monsters have varied behaviours, bats are fast and aggressive but fear fire, so you can juggle your torch and puch'em to a pulp; there's monster in-fighting ie. frogs are passive and flee when injured, snakes will not attack unless provoked, frogs get bitten if accidentally pathing into a snake and die, leaving a corpse that you can loot for ingredients; locked doors can be opened by throwing metal dissolving potion on a lock, by using lock-picks or just by kicking them in.
Game has surprisingly lots of sounds for a solo developed roguelike, really immersive. We have a weather system with proper ambiance, graphical and gameplay effects: sudden rain in the early adventures will make your common offensive fire potion useless, on the upside cold-blooded creatures take longer to do any actions; windy weather will spread fires faster; storms occasionally drop lightning stunning everything. Game tracks time, distilling ingredients, crafting potions takes a while, there's at least one quest that is time sensitive. In general each interaction takes one minute, there's a day-night cycle and from the dev's youtube videos, there will be seasons with appropriate weather that comes along with it.

Moar screenshots from the game's website

There's no endless scrolling open-world, you've got a central hub from which you can travel to different locations. Locations get saved so you can come back if you've missed something or discovered some new way of getting resources. I was really low on something metal, while exploring abandoned farmhouse I noticed there were a few nails to pickup where there were broken doors, so I backtracked to already explored places to smash few of those myself and get on with the production of rustic potions. Also saw that there are these special gloves that can break down huge crystals, will have to come back later on to alleged heretic's home and harvest stuff he had in the basement.

The "free" version that you can download has all the content of the paid one. There's a Linux version too, but it was running with higher CPU temps (especially in the main menu) than a Windows version via wine. Go figure.

 

[Kabas]

Alchemist is great. Very good looking game for something that uses what i assume a modified stock art/photos.
Only one thing irks me - a lot of your time is going to be spent on amassing your hoard of rare or not so ingredients which will inevitably be lost upon your death because of some stupid mistake you made. Meaning that upon restarting you will need to gather your shit all over again which is a chore enough to make me lose interest in trying again.

Methinks this game shouldn't have been a roguelike in the first place but it might be just me because i am not really into roguelikes. Feel free to ignore me.

 

[fuzz]

Sure, on the first run you'll probably be picking up everything, because you don't know which stuff grinds/distills into and then die. Hopefully you can learn something from that death and overcome the problem next time. That's the way she goes. Usually you can't be looting everything in roguelikes because of limited space. No item limit here probably promotes hoarding but at least you don't have to juggle items around and comfortably learn about them. After a while you get to know what loot is crucial early on and what you can skip.

 

[Irata]

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.30 The Reavers Return
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/0-30-the-reavers-return

We are pleased to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup 0.30 “The Reavers Return”!

DCSS 0.30 features the return of the legendary Reaver background. These warrior-mages start with two new powerful yet situational spells: Kiss of Death and Momentum Strike. They also start with the Hailstorm spell, which has been moved down to level 3 yet can sometimes miss.

The new Armataur species replaces Palentongas.
7 new spells and changes to existing
Lugonu changed

 

[Covenant]

DCSS 0.30 features the return of the legendary Reaver background.

They've gone so far with removing things that now they have to remove their own removals.

 

[WhiteShark]

I came around to liking Palentongas even though they replaced something else I liked and now they're gone too... DCSSamsara continues.

 

[PapaPetro]

DCSS 0.30 features the return of the legendary Reaver background.

They've gone so far with removing things that now they have to remove their own removals.

Horseshoe Theory comes for game design.

 

[Snufkin]

https://youtu.be/dAse3sZItYE
This is roguelike that have been getting lot of attention lately. I havent played it yet tho.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

https://youtu.be/dAse3sZItYE
This is roguelike that have been getting lot of attention lately. I havent played it yet tho.

I tried the demo and game doesn't really feels like a roguelike. There is really no moment to moment gameplay, it heavily favors your build instead. Map is small and enemy died fast

Maybe because it's still early in the demo

 

[PapaPetro]

https://youtu.be/dAse3sZItYE
This is roguelike that have been getting lot of attention lately. I havent played it yet tho.

What's the appeal?

 

[xuerebx]

Going by looks it seems pretty cool....another game on my never-ending RL wishlist.

 

[PapaPetro]

Going by looks it seems pretty cool....another game on my never-ending RL wishlist.

Well I'll check it out then when I get back to my PC.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

https://youtu.be/dAse3sZItYE
This is roguelike that have been getting lot of attention lately. I havent played it yet tho.

What's the appeal?

it's kinda the 3.5 of roguelike

dungeon is divided to multiple room instead of floor, room is small (altho can be varried from open room to having lot of walls), each room probably last for 5 min of combat before you move to the next. There are lot of Dungeon, I dunno think completed Run would need 10 - 15 from the screen?

It also has roguelite element of difficulty level, everytime you finish a run a new difficulty unlocks

game is very build heavy, you can choose 3 out of 8 main skill tree (and have total of 8 skills). Itemization is all unique, not some random sword but each equip has decent side effect that can support your build or even build defining

e.g. I played summon build and get a shit early game banner that summon 4 rats everytime i enter the room

 

[PapaPetro]

https://youtu.be/dAse3sZItYE
This is roguelike that have been getting lot of attention lately. I havent played it yet tho.

What's the appeal?

it's kinda the 3.5 of roguelike

dungeon is divided to multiple room instead of floor, room is small (altho can be varried from open room to having lot of walls), each room probably last for 5 min of combat before you move to the next. There are lot of Dungeon, I dunno think completed Run would need 10 - 15 from the screen?

It also has roguelite element of difficulty level, everytime you finish a run a new difficulty unlocks

game is very build heavy, you can choose 3 out of 8 main skill tree (and have total of 8 skills). Itemization is all unique, not some random sword but each equip has decent side effect that can support your build or even build defining

e.g. I played summon build and get a shit early game banner that summon 4 rats everytime i enter the room

Thanks dude. Sounds like they took a lesson from Brogue and more coffee break type roguelikes for more condensed runs (compared to long run deep delver roguelikes like DCSS or Angband/Umoria). I like the single screen simplicity for floors like in ADOM (a lot easier to mentally recall), so that'll be cool to check out the pacing in the floor2floor mechanics. Also I the meta-game progression seems pretty compelling and I liked that from Tales of Maj'eyal (unlocking Adventurer class was the tit's nipple for me).

How's the color/lore. Is there monster memory recall? I love reading into the stat blocks for Multi-Hued Ds and U Balrogs.
Any novel remedy for savescumming outside of the honor code / savefile wipes?
Also is there a Wizard/Debug mode? I use this to figure out the game mechanics and optimal tactics/strategies before doing clean runs.

 

[Dadd]

Are there newer games with interesting necromancy/curses/evil magic systems?

 

[PapaPetro]

Are there newer games with interesting necromancy/curses/evil magic systems?

What's got you into that stuff? Very specific request for occult roguelikes.
There's Infra Arcana; the Lovecraft stuff usually scratches that itch since that Crowley stuff was popular around that turn of the century time.
Lovecraft being a fork/branch of the occult movement.

 

[Dadd]

Are there newer games with interesting necromancy/curses/evil magic systems?

What's got you into that stuff? Very specific request for occult roguelikes.
There's Infra Arcana; the Lovecraft stuff usually scratches that itch since that Crowley stuff was popular around that turn of the century time.
Lovecraft being a fork/branch of the occult movement.

Incidentally, I've been playing Infra Arcana a lot, which had me want similar dark spells but with a more complex system and more player agency than picking up manuscripts and levelling up characters. This works well for Infra Arcana but I want to try something more involved.

 

[Alex]

(...)
Anywho, always hated the ugliness of FPS blobbers despite loving the party dungeon delving mechanics; thought it'd look better with bird's eye-view ASCII.
(...)

A top view blobber is going to spoil one of the major points of blobbers; the difficulty of exploring and mapping the environment. I mean, a top-down game like what you suggest is not necessarily a bad idea, but it shouldn't be called a "blobber". In fact, I would say that despite the name, the complexity of exploration is more central to the genre than there being multiple party members.

 

[PapaPetro]

(...)
Anywho, always hated the ugliness of FPS blobbers despite loving the party dungeon delving mechanics; thought it'd look better with bird's eye-view ASCII.
(...)

A top view blobber is going to spoil one of the major points of blobbers; the difficulty of exploring and mapping the environment. I mean, a top-down game like what you suggest is not necessarily a bad idea, but it shouldn't be called a "blobber". In fact, I would say that despite the name, the complexity of exploration is more central to the genre than there being multiple party members.

Most if not all ASCII roguelikes are gridded though.
For most roguelikes you still have to explore the grid to reveal the map tile-by-tile; Blobbers are the same and typically have a map to go along with the first person view on the ground. So exploration is preserved regardless as the only thing you lose is the first person graphics.
I'm just not seeing it as a major disqualifier here; seems congruent.

Legend of Grimrock

Umoria

 

[PapaPetro]

Are there newer games with interesting necromancy/curses/evil magic systems?

What's got you into that stuff? Very specific request for occult roguelikes.
There's Infra Arcana; the Lovecraft stuff usually scratches that itch since that Crowley stuff was popular around that turn of the century time.
Lovecraft being a fork/branch of the occult movement.

Incidentally, I've been playing Infra Arcana a lot, which had me want similar dark spells but with a more complex system and more player agency than picking up manuscripts and levelling up characters. This works well for Infra Arcana but I want to try something more involved.

There's some classes/playstyles in Tales of Maj'Eyal that seem up your alley.
I haven't played all the classes (and their specific mechanics) yet in that game, but there might be something there for you.
Some that stick out:
Necromancer
Cursed
Doomed
The Defiler Classes
The Writhing One
Cultist of Entropy

I've had fun with the game, but it's just way to big to explore every class and their unique spell mechanics to find it all out.
I usually just default to playing Wizards or Battlemage type classes myself.
Hopefully it's got something for you.

 

[Alex]

(...)
Anywho, always hated the ugliness of FPS blobbers despite loving the party dungeon delving mechanics; thought it'd look better with bird's eye-view ASCII.
(...)

A top view blobber is going to spoil one of the major points of blobbers; the difficulty of exploring and mapping the environment. I mean, a top-down game like what you suggest is not necessarily a bad idea, but it shouldn't be called a "blobber". In fact, I would say that despite the name, the complexity of exploration is more central to the genre than there being multiple party members.

Most if not all ASCII roguelikes are gridded though.
For most roguelikes you still have to explore the grid to reveal the map tile-by-tile; Blobbers are the same and typically have a map to go along with the first person view on the ground. So exploration is preserved regardless as the only thing you lose is the first person graphics.
I'm just not seeing it as a major disqualifier here; seems congruent.

Legend of Grimrock

Umoria

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

I didn't mean that rogue-likes (or other games with similar kind of view) can't have exploration. But because the environment is "spoiled" to the player in those games, many kinds of exploration hazards and challenges that are possible in blobbers don't really work in games where you have a top view of the action. Traps such as rotating rooms, rooms that teleport you to a similar room when you enter, or even getting lost from running away from some monster either don't work in such games or require a lot of stuff to be built around them.

 

[PapaPetro]

Traps such as rotating rooms, rooms that teleport you to a similar room when you enter, or even getting lost from running away from some monster either don't work in such games or require a lot of stuff to be built around them.

Thanks for the clarification.
Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of spinners/teleporter traps in Blobbers myself; even in Blobber-esque Gold Box games where it used blobbing for First-Person for the strategic adventure screen and individual party Tactical for combat screen.
(MM 6-8 was a game changer for me in this regard for Blobbers as it broke its own mold while still retaining its essence.)
While Roguelikes have no need for spinners or a compass because the overhead direction is always fixed, there are still teleporter traps that can dump you in an unexplored (and dangerous) part of the map. It works well with the procedural generation traditional to Roguelikes while Blobbers typically had pre-designed static maps that could play on the player's reliance and sense on maintaining correct direction.
I think what you desire is that feeling of losing your bearings/potentially getting lost in the dungeon. Hence why Blobbers traditionally have a compass or some sort of direction detecting ability, especially when dungeon delving.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

What's the best version of Cataclysm to be playing right now?

 

[xuerebx]

What's the best version of Cataclysm to be playing right now?

I had the same question and I was told "Bright Nights", apparently?

 

[PapaPetro]

I had the same question and I was told "Bright Nights", apparently?

Anything but version 0.G
I eventually liked Nested Containers since it allowed you to drop cargo before a fight and it made inventory management generally more exciting (was much better than the alternative of pushing a shopping cart around everywhere).
But the continued gutting of CBMs/Bionics and Science-Fiction in favor of "Realism" was silly given the initial lore/premise in a Zombie/Lovecraftian survival Apocalypse.
Also not a fan of the implementation of Proficiencies and Weariness with regards to crafting; it's unfun and an artificial annoyance to slow down the game. They should've just focused on adding more/harder content instead (like expand the crafting/tech tree to include futuristic stuff you could craft to combat futuristic enemies, like better Power Armor, custom CBMs and crafted beam weapons).

Sometimes I go back and play 0.C back when you could craft a Pneumatic Rifle. That was fun.
Also the Magiclysm mod is pretty cool and adds some spice/options/threats to any version. Though it continually suffers from balance issues (e.g. getting instantly mauled by a super fast Owlbear or Troll; or taking down this bitch with 5600 HP (Distance + A LOT of .50 cal ammo)).
I love the Translocator Gate that allows you to teleport between multiple places/bases. Way better than the Fast Travel feature they implemented in the Overworld Map and well worth the effort to eventually build that network of tele-gates.
Also I feel less compulsion to use Debug menu teleporting to conserve my real life time.