Best roguelikes – Get lost in tantalizing gameplay loops with these classics

There’s an entire dungeon overflowing with the best roguelike games these days as the genre has undergone a renaissance over the last decade. Modern roguelikes are a departure from the original 1980 namesake, leaning into totally new settings or blending game genres. Mixing things up has become the norm, with fresh ideas being thrown into the rogue blender in search of the perfect potion.

That’s not to say that the traditions are dead, though. Some of the best roguelikes are still carrying the torch (and twenty unidentified scrolls) for the old school of dungeon crawling. Every new experiment on the formula brings innovation that flows in both directions, so every roguelike benefits from the weird and wonderful departures of the genre. Plucked from the mass of roguelike games hastily chucked into our pack over many hours of frantic gathering, our list brings together every type for you to identify your new favorites.

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• While there are lots of great new roguelikes that play with genre boundaries, there are still a bunch of fantastic traditional roguelikes out there.
• Roguelikes aren’t afraid to reinvent genre staples in clever ways, whether it means leaning into multiplayer or weaving in deckbuilder mechanics.

• Traditional roguelikes are still mostly at home on PC, while those tuned to action and platforming are easier to find on consoles.
• Roguelikes require a fair amount of patience, but reward perseverance with deep strategies and bountiful replay value.
• Multiplayer has been a big addition to the genre, with several superb options if you want to play with your squad.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

The classic roguelike formula is alive in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, an open-source source free-to-play roguelike with an ever-changing cast of 27 races, 26 classes, and countless factors at play. In each new expedition into the dungeon in search of the Runes and Orb of Zot you can swap up your starting choices, but everything else is in fate’s hands. 

Entirely turn-based in the traditional ‘when you move, the world moves’ style, DCSS allows you to ponder every single move carefully – or just play like me and blunder ahead at top speed, trusting your troll’s regeneration to keep you alive. While it’s not the most difficult classic roguelike, it’s certainly a long-term investment to master (ask me about my fifteen-year saga in search of my first wins), and every new scroll, potion, and piece of magical gear represents an opportunity to change your fortunes.

Balatro

If you dissect Balatro, the entire concept feels like a game made out of spare parts and childlike wonder, like siblings grabbing pieces from different board and card games and mixing them up to make a new game of their own. While Balatro at a glance is a poker roguelike, where you try to build the best poker hands to win the most points, there are a lot of twists and turns on the journey that make it a well you’ll keep coming back to draw from. 

Cheating in a variety of creative ways is core to the game, whether it’s narrowing and modifying your deck until it’s nothing but face cards or spades, or making it so that your hand of choice is worth astronomical point totals. It’s an amazing feeling when your strategy gathers steam and becomes a winning slot machine pull every hand, but, equally, there’s a real rush when getting so close to a strategy working and losing. You’ll be back for just one more hand, again and again.

Barony

Translating a dungeon-crawling roguelike into first person is a task that Barony nails, but more importantly, it succeeds at creating a cohesive and fun multiplayer roguelike. After the usual starting song and dance of choosing your race and class, Barony drops you into a world of angry rats and falling boulder traps and says ‘good luck’ by killing you in the tutorial. 

Once you get a handle on the basics of stabbing and spelling enemies without immediately being turned into a protagonist-flavored paste, the options open up, letting you revel in the fun of mastering combat and searching every crack and crevice of the dungeon for loot to help you survive. 

Playing with a friend or three has its own challenges, since you’ll have to share consumables and equipment, but if a friend dies, you can revive them by getting to the next floor, which certainly helps soften a lot of the bad feelings when someone drops early.

Slay the Spire

While there were roguelike deckbuilders before Slay the Spire, none perfected the secret sauce that it had brewing on the gaming stovetop as well. Fast-paced and well-balanced, Slay the Spire has you carefully picking and upgrading your deck, fine-tuning it like an engine about to run a rally race in the Mad Max universe. 

Given how self-explanatory the card system is, you can jump in and understand how it works quickly, while still having ample space to refine your strategy. With neutral cards and relics, and a unique set of upgradable cards for each of the four characters, there are different ways to kit every run out while you chart a path through the different random encounters, keeping the game feeling fresh for ages.

Risk of Rain 2

It was tough to pick a favorite between the original and the sequel, but Risk of Rain 2 introduces upgraded ingredients to the recipe to give it a whole new (third) dimension. Exploring the surface of Petrichor V in search of survivors of a missing ship (in fact, the ship from the original game) is your goal, and each stage has you roaming the randomly generated landscape with your chosen character, using your abilities to dispatch enemies and the currency they drop to open chests and vending machines packed with powerful items that will modify the way you play. 

Each level has a boss, and you can’t wait too long to find and beat them because the difficulty is always climbing upwards. The third-person view and action combat make it perfect for co-op multiplayer, letting you tackle it with up to three friends in tow – easily making it one of the best roguelike games on Steam for playing online with friends. 

Spelunky 2

Still the reigning king of the roguelike platformer, Spelunky 2 expands on its predecessor with more areas, more traps, more characters, more items, and… going to the moon? Uncomplicated and easy to figure out, the ruins you explore will take you for a ride if you think being accessible means being easy. 

Whether you’re getting gunned down by a shopkeeper, falling on spikes, or shot by arrow traps, there’s no shortage of ways to die if you’re careless for even just a moment. More than most other roguelikes, Spelunky 2 iterates more heavily on your skill increasing with each run, expecting you to refine your platforming ability rather than rely on a new set of random items and skills.

Caves of Qud

Few games can say they’ve won a Hugo award, but Caves of Qud is on that very short list. For every bit that screams traditional roguelike, Caves does things in new or downright weird ways, from the deeply simulated game world to the retrofuturistic sci-fi setting. 

Every time you set out, you can explore the world, take on quests, implant yourself with cybernetics, mutate an extra arm, and trade drams of water for a laser rifle, or just get turned into a scorch mark by a Chrome Pyramid’s swarm rack. 

Caves of Qud feels every bit the rags-to-riches epic as your character scavenges from the ruins of ancient societies and the scraps of their technology, trading, mutating, implanting, and skilling up to take on everything that crushed you before.

Hades 2

Supergiant Games has a pretty legendary batting average, and after Hades, the sequel had its work cut out. Hades 2 is everything you could want from an action roguelike. Playing as Melinoë, princess of the underworld and younger sister to the first game’s hero, you’re setting out to take down the Titan of Time, Chronos.

With the same fluid action combat, Hades 2 nails the gameplay loop while also adding more progression and better powers the more runs you rack up. As you fight your way through rooms of enemies and stack up random upgrades, Melinoë is just so much fun to control that no matter what godly boons you pick, you’re going to find new ways to beat each area. 

Enter the Gungeon

Equal parts irreverent and fun, Enter the Gungeon is a bullet hell action roguelike that’s been dipped in bright colors, rolled in bullet breading, and deep fried in gun oil. With each run, your Gungeoneer slowly claws their way to better equipment and weapons, but using your dodge roll to dive through hails of enemy fire never gets old, and neither does the trove of guns at your disposal. 

Every run lets you tweak your build, from adding an extra weapon to your arsenal to modifying what every bullet does, and certain items and guns synergize to mix things up even further. With endless replayability and sleek controls, Enter the Gungeon is also one of the best roguelikes on Switch if you’re looking to play on the go.

Dwarf Fortress

No list of the best roguelikes is complete without Dwarf Fortress, the monolithic dwarven story generator, civilization simulator, and roguelike. Every new fortress starts from a small band of misfit dwarves with limited supplies and quickly branches down into the earth. Your new home grows daily as you carve out a network of rooms and passages, filling them with storage, workstations, bedrooms, and a garbage pit where every problem you can’t solve gets thrown. 

Managing the whims and appetites of a small cadre of dwarves is challenging enough, but as your population booms and you encounter everything from marauding goblins to unleashing a forgotten beast, it’s inevitable that you’ll have fun. Dwarf Fortress is unusual in that it has no final goal, but the stories that come out of each colony after its inevitable death spiral are every bit as valuable as a victory screen.

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