In a “true” rougelike (that is, games whose design lineage points directly at Rogue and its ouvre of procedural dungeon crawlers), there is only the player and the run. The game itself is randomized, malleable, ever-shifting, but sturdily bound by a set of rules and interactions that the player comes to slowly understand. Their knowledge and intuition grow, while the game remains the same object, obstinate but not unconquerable.
Rogue and similar titles are turn-based; there is no skillful execution involved. Only decisions to be made and enough knowledge to overcome the whims of luck. I don’t tend to gravitate towards these titles because the weight of failure can feel so brutal, the tedium of repeat attempts so oppressive.
My preferences fall a bit more in line with those of today’s popular sensibilities, which trend towards providing players with some notion of irrevocable progress even when failures abound. Extra lives, checkpoints, and save functionality are all early expressions of this curve towards kept progress, but it's found another common expression through “meta-progression” in the modern wave of popular run-based games.
There’s a satisfaction to progression for its own sake. Leveling up, increasing stats, completing stages; these mechanisms generate a sense of accomplishment. They let players feel like some trials are behind them, and new ones are ahead. And for good reason! It can feel tedious and dull to repeat challenges you’ve already completed because you’re still trying to accomplish whatever lies beyond them.
Regardless, the old becomes new across a variety of vectors and today we find ourselves in a world where procedural generation collide with RPG-like meta-progression. This combination, distinct from the more directly comparative “roguelike”, is often dubbed a “roguelite”, a slightly-judgmental term that signifies a balance between procedurally-generated challenges and layers of meta-progression providing more resources or more options (or both) for subsequent attempts. This tends to mix nicely with an action game layer, where reflex and reaction complement knowledge and systemic mastery.
The roguelite structure is, in a pretty straightforward sense, meant to be the best of both worlds. It kicks your ass at first, then begins handing you tools to fight back on more even grounds, smoothly blending your growing prowess with a growing collection of concrete advantages. Each time you fail, you get consolation prizes that ultimately soften the sting of defeat. It’s a smart approach that lends itself well to games that are complex but not long, a scale of experience that’s approachable for small teams, though it demands careful testing and balancing.
But here’s the thing: everyone has different tolerances for (and interest in) each of these mutually-reinforcing factors. If a game leans too heavily on skill expectations, it alienates those that want their failures to mean something and bring them closer to success. If it leans too heavily on meta-progression, it alienates those who want their skill to feel meaningful. There can even be additional splits between different types of skill, most notably the difference between build-crafting knowledge and realtime execution in action roguelites.
This difference in tolerances brings me to the topic of two roguelite games I’ve been playing recently: Hades II, the sequel to the greek-myth-inspired roguelite juggernaut Hades, and Absolum, a roguelite beat-em-up in a fantasy world that released a month later.
In Hades II, after 31 hours, I’ve beaten the “final boss” of the game. What remains is to repeatedly do so while progressing a number of parallel side stories and advancing the main plot. Each of these runs will take somewhere near an hour to complete. While the game is about skillful execution, I’ve reached a point where it asks me to just complete more runs, with any additional sources of challenge coming from weapon choice and opt-in difficulty intensifiers.
In Absolum, after about 5 hours, I’ve not yet reached the last boss (or even come all that close). My longest runs are about 35 minutes and most of them are closer to 15 or 20. Despite presenting me with much less build variety (at least, so far), the core system has enough depth that I’ve been compelled by just learning the ropes and getting better at the core mechanics.
I don’t know if Absolum is ultimately going to rely on sending me back to the beginning as many times as Hades II will in order to see its story through (I did look around, but couldn’t find much without spoiling myself). I don’t know if my more successful runs will balloon in length like they have with Hades II, making the early parts feel more rote and tedious. And more generally, I’m not sure if I’m just prone to enjoy the earlier parts of these experience curves, when the starting areas still hold novelty and the quest for more skillful execution makes each engagement feel significant. Moreover, I ought not ignore the novelty of the combat system in Absolum; I'm inexperienced with beat-em-up games and might be more easily won over by it.
I’m also still unpacking my general ambivalence towards Hades II, a game that I was doomed to be disappointed in because of my history with the studio’s previous work. In my experience, the intention to make failure rewarding (go talk to your friends, grow your relationships, and enhance your capabilities) has created an odd inversion of the core loop: now, it’s less about truly striving to overcome a challenge and more about walking a long road that will eventually lead to surmounting it. I should be clear that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in fact it’s one of the reasons that Hades II is so approachable and appealing to so many players. But it may not be to my own taste, and the dichotomy between these two games is helping me understand that.
The line between justifiably critical and elitist can be blurry. I want to be more confidently negative, to proclaim that Hades II leans too much on the sheer escalation of its meta-progression rather than building a challenge that revolves around players becoming more skillful with how they handle it; but I also know that it’s part of what makes the game appealing to a wider audience who might avoid it otherwise (even with its difficulty-adjusting option). For now, it’s given me a lot to think about.