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.

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/

Hades 10outta10

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.

Caves of Qud is AMAZING! You should buy it OP

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

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

The ones I played and enjoyed:

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

I would say, The Binding of Isaac is one of the Rouge Likes everyone should have at least tried. Its one of my favorite games overall!

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

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/

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

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'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!

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

Dead Cells is brilliant

A personal favourite is UnReal World.

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

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

My go-to is Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

Everspace 1 and 2 are both solid games if you like space exploration and shooting!

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.

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.

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).

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.

This is a little bit of a deep cut, but the roguelike add-on to Remnant From the Ashes honestly slaps if you enjoy the core gameplay loop. (The pitch is "Dark Souls with guns," which is like 70% accurate.) High quality 3rd person gunplay, awesome abilities, fun enemies, wacky builds, beautiful maps.

EDIT. Remnant is on sale for $13 on Steam! A very good deal, esp. with Remnant 2 coming out this year!

Darkest Dungeon is also great if you like oppressive horror vibes.

I like rogue-lites a bit more, so thethese games may or may not fit your interests.

• Permadeath mode in No Man's Sky
• Darkest Dungeon
• Everspace 1
• Ziggurat
• Eldritch
• Heavy Bullets
• Teleglitch
• Legend of Grimrock on Ultra Ironman difficulty
• Legend of Grimrock 2 with roguelike mod
• Dark Souls