A personal favourite is UnReal World.
...into the far north we shall take you.
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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.
COGMIND is, hands-down, the most beautiful Roguelike game I have ever enjoyed. I recommend this game as well! God, I wish it had a mobile port.
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.
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.
Hades 10outta10
I don't think anyone should play anything other than Hades.
Until Hades 2 is released, that is.
I'm so in love with this game it's not even funny. Hated it the first time I played it on Xbox, got it on my steam deck and can't put it down.
Dead Cells is brilliant
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.
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.
I've enjoyed Slay the Spire and Wizard of Legend. The latter is very hard to beat at least for me.
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.
The ones I played and enjoyed:
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
been really loving halls of torment, best description i could give is something between vampire survivor and diablo 2.
Never heard of it and loved both those thanks for the recommendation
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/
this was my first roguelike, we used to play it in high school in 1996 on the lab computers. nice times.
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 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.
I reckon you'd like Caves of Qud if you were a fan of Angband and the like. It's a very ambitious true roguelike along similar lines.
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.
Everspace 1 and 2 are both solid games if you like space exploration and shooting!
Just a note that in Everspace 2, they shed the whole procedurally generated aspect, but they're both still phenomenal games!
Caves of Qud is AMAZING! You should buy it OP
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.
It was updated recently!
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.
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:
Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:
The lack of Cogmind makes me mad.
Yeah nevermind, I just ignored it for some reason.
Where's Zorbus?
It would make me mad too, which is why I already had it in the second line. 😋
Amazing, thanks very much for sharing this. Admittedly I was referring to the Berlin interpretation of a roguelike, so I very much appreciate such an extensive breakdown of some of your recommendations. Haven't heard of a handful of these, will be checking them out with time!
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.
Cataclysm is such a good game and FREE/open-source. The UI and artwork are a bit of an eyesore for new players, but once you learn the mechanics the game really opens up.
It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in that it weeds out all but the most hardcore gamers in the first few minutes of gameplay.
Definitely agree with you there! I've had a few friends who noped out 5 minutes into playing. I get it, it's not for everyone!
I'd recommend: Hades, Dead Cells, The Binding of Isaac, and FTL
I think they're looking for a roguelike and not a roguelite, but those are great roguelites!
What is the difference? I'm not familiar.
There seems to be some disagreement over the term, but I have always liked the explanation that "true" Roguelikes are "like Rogue", in that they have randomly-generated maps, permadeath, and nothing saved between runs; meanwhile Roguelites feature a "meta-progression" system that allows the player some kind of persistent progress that carries over between runs, and maybe other QOL features.
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 was never really a roguelike fan but I loved Hades! The game always makes you feel like you're making progress without feeling grindy, which I think is an issue that pushed me away from most roguelikes.