Finding the right game orrogueliketo play with your best friend or significant other can be a challenge. After all, you have to find a game that fits both of your tastes and that both of you can enjoy for at least a few hours. Of course, ideally, 2-player games that also don’t break the bank are always preferred!
One Step From Eden
Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos
Ember Knights
Children of Morta
Wizard Of Legend
Synthetik: Legion Rising
Vampire Survivors
The 15 Best Roguelikes For Under $20
These are the best roguelikes for under $20 right now so you don’t have to worry about taking out a small loan to pick them up!
Since roguelikes are such a diverse genre, you’ll find something to love for both you and your partner so here are 10 of the best games you may pick up for under $20.
There are some games included in this list that can support more than two players. While these games can be played with more than two players, their two-player co-op experience is still fun enough to justify their inclusion.
10. One Step From Eden
WHERE TO PLAY
Most co-op modes take the challenge out of the game, but One Step from Eden’s co-op adds new challenges by having a partner that can make battles much easier. However, your partner can also make dangerous situations much worse if both of you aren’t prepared for it.
One Step From Eden is a grid-baseddeckbuilding roguelikewhere you’ll have to battle through a series of events to reach a boss at the end of a biome. Fans of Slay the Spire will recognize this formula, but having it in a co-op action grid-battler creates a unique collaborative experience. Players have to share the deck of cards, their energy pool, and their health pool. Card effects, like shields, will also only affect the player that uses them.
This makes the co-op a challenging yet unique experience. You and your partner have to collaboratively work together to create a good deck of cards, coordinate fights, and get comfortable dodging attacks as a team. Failure to dodge properly can result in both of you getting hit, which means your team’s HP is taking twice the damage. But in exchange, you and your teammate are playing two cards at once, and flying through your deck much faster.
9. Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos
Classic Legend of Zelda fans and anyone who loves the retro-dungeon-crawling genre will love Ruins of Tasos. It combines roguelike mechanics with the classic gameplay of games like The Legend of Zelda Four Swords to create a fun game to share with your partner!
If you and your partner are fans of classic Zelda games, and you both wish there was a roguelike version of them, then Ruins of Tasos will be the answer to your prayers. In Ruins, players jump into the shoes of the goddesses' chosen heroes as they journey across several different biomes to reseal monstrous titans that threaten to destroy the land. Each dungeon is procedurally generated, and if players die in the dungeon, they’re immediately ejected and lose all the items they gained in the dungeon (with a few exceptions). Once you’re back in town, you can spend currency to help build the town, unlock new upgrades, and upgrade your character’s stats.
Fans of Zelda who enjoyed Four Swords will also love the co-op play of Ruins of Tasos. Players have to work together to solve puzzles, take down bosses, and if one of them dies, find a way to resurrect the poor soul without dying themselves. The teamwork and callback to classic Zelda games makes Ruins of Tasos a worthwhile adventure for roguelike and Zelda fans alike.
8. Ember Knights
Bringing together the fun power-scaling of Hades, the need for accurate dodging in a Souls game, and the top-down action of a classic Zelda game, Ember Knights is an amazing dungeon-crawling game whether you’re playing with your partner or up to 3 other friends.
Much like Ruins of Tasos, Ember Knights recreates the feeling of Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, by having players crawl through dungeons for upgrades and weapons while also working together to stay alive. However, while Ruins and Zelda will focus on their story, Ember Knights instead focuses on combat, out-of-run upgrades, and creating crazy builds while you’re in a run. In that way, it’s similar to Hades while still paying respect to classic Zelda games.
Playing with a partner means you’ll have to split the number of revives you’re allowed to have, share the items that can increase a player’s stats for the run, and share healing potions. Everything else is individualized for the player, like gold, and power-ups. In this way, Ember Knights can replicate the feeling and chaos of Hades while still allowing your partner to have their moments to shine.
7. Children of Morta
If you love Diablo games or classic ARPGs like Gauntlet, then you’ll also love Children of Morta. You and your partner get to blast through hordes of monsters much like other ARPGs, but Children of Morta also encourages you to precisely dodge through boss attacks, and create some crazy powerful builds by the end of your run, much like other popular action roguelikes.
Children of Mortais an ARPG roguelike where you and your partner will take control of a member of the Bergsons family. Each one has a unique backstory, abilities, and even special combos with other family members. In-game, they play similarly to the classes ofDiablowith a main attack and a few different spells for you to choose from.
In co-op, players get to work together to take down hordes of mobs and if you’re playing online, you can both split up to explore the map more efficiently. But melting through huge waves of monsters through the power of your teamwork is an amazing feeling to watch as the game gets more and more difficult. It’s a balance between simplicity and synergistic builds both within your own character and as a pairing with your partner will bring you and your partner back for more runs.
6. Wizard of Legend
Have you ever wanted to control the elements with awesome looking kung fu in a way that’s similar to Avatar the Last Airbender? Wizard of Legend takes that concept and combines it with the roguelike formula, so you and a partner can unleash the elements into a gauntlet of enemies.
Wizard of Legendallows players to live out their element-controlling kung fu dreams. Players get to choose their favorite elements (and elemental combinations) and battle through a gauntlet to see if they’re the titular Wizard of Legend. Spells are a 16-bit feast for the eyes, featuring beautiful artwork that can rocket from one side of the screen to the other, or gracefully massacre entire tides of enemies that attempt to cross your path.
One of the best parts of Wizard of Legend is just how much customization there is at the beginning of each run. Even if your partner isn’t a huge fan of action roguelikes, or has poor reflexes, you may still create a fairly tanky build for them to learn and get comfortable in. Plus, having them choose their favorite element, favorite spells, and a decent starting relic will give them the best possible start to build from later in the game. Once you’ve reached that late stage, Wizard of Legend becomes a blast as you both work together to unleash crazy spells to melt through the combat rooms in this game or to vanquish the challenging bosses that will stand in your way.
5. Voidigo
Voidigo is a gorgeous, cartoony game whose light-hearted humor and blood-pumping boss fights will keep any duo on the edge of their seats.
Between the bright sprites and light-hearted humor, Voidigo stands out among the roguelike crowd through its colorful looks and creative gameplay. During each run, you’ll have to hunt after a series of bosses, and along the way, you’ll get different upgrades and weapons to help you on your journey. It’s in these fights that some of the wacky fun of Voidigo can be seen, as players jump on enemy heads to stun them or use a cute Axolotl to tear through enemies.
In co-op, each player has their own ammo and health bar, but the items will have to be split between the two players. This means if you and your partner both want a gun, you’ll have to find some amicable way to settle who gets it. But where Voidigo truly shines (besides through its hilarious aesthetic) is in its bosses. During a hunt, players will have to work together to activate several beacons to fully unlock a boss' HP. However, the boss will also hunt after you, traveling to different beacon rooms to defend them and only allowing the player to activate the beacon if they successfully drive the boss away.
4. Synthetik: Legion Rising
Synthetik: Legion Rising can be a challenging co-op game to play. But stick with it, find the class you love the most, and you’ll be rewarded with an amazing twin-stick roguelike shooter.
Need a more challenging twin-stick shooter to run through with a partner? Synthetik: Legion Rising has you and your partner working together to put down a robotic revolt. The key theme Synthetik focuses on is difficult but rewarding mechanics. Everything from reloads to boss fights will follow that theme - guns will jam if you time your reload wrong, and bosses will shred you to bits if you aren’t careful. But mastering these mechanics not only makes you a more deadly machine, but it also creates an engaging experience where you’ll rarely (if ever) be bored.
Even playing with a partner follows this theme. In co-op, it’s very easy to accidentally get each other killed. Friendly fire is on by default, and some of the abilities in the game are so large that it’s hard to dodge the effects of them without careful warning to your partner. But the reward for working together is clearing entire maps with laser-focused precision and getting access to stronger unlocks for your character, better guns, and more variations in levels.
Having one partner in charge of a close-combat character and another in charge of a ranged character already adds plenty of diversity in your co-op teamwork. But 30XX adds another level to this by creating fun, yet challenging side-scroller stages to conquer.
30XX fulfills the dream of every Megaman X player by offering a co-op mode where one player can play as X (Nina) and the other plays as Zero (Ace). Much in line with other roguelikes, but refreshing for long-time side-scroller fans, are the procedurally generated levels in 30XX. It keeps each run new and exciting, while the metaprogression unlocks ensures that, no matter what, you’re always making progress one way or another.
However, if you’re trying to find a fun game to play with a partner who may not enjoy roguelikes (or may need to be eased into the genre) then you can set 30XX to Mega mode, where progress carries over between runs, and you’ll be able to select bosses similar to a traditional Megaman game. Once you feel confident in the game, you can swap the mode to Standard, and try your hands at a roguelike run.
2. Vampire Survivors
While it’s limited to just local co-op, VAmpire Survivors offers such a fun two-player experience that it’s worth picking up and playing. Plus, it’s hard to find a roguelike that offers gameplay as addictive as this for the same price.
Vampire Survivorsis a beautifully simple game - walk around a map filled with enemies and collect XP. Your weapons will fire automatically, and enemies will drop XP whenever they’re slain. When you collect enough XP, you’ll level up and get a new weapon or support item. In solo play, you’ll have 6 slots for weapons and 6 slots for support, which can lead to some absurdly powerful combos. However, in a two-player co-op, this is dropped to 4 weapons and 4 support items for each player. This means each player has to be more careful with what items they want, since they have fewer slots, but when they work together, they’re much stronger than a solo survivor is.
Two-player co-op is also a nice sweet spot, since it doesn’t clutter up the screen too much until later levels, and it’s easier to communicate with one other person in which direction you and your partner want to head to.
1. PlateUp!
Recreate the hectic experience of working in a kitchen with PlateUp! It’s more fun than it sounds, but being forced to rely on your partner more heavily than other games makes this a fun experience even with just two players.
Compared to the other games on this list, Plate Up isn’t a very violent game. You and your partner are just trying to run a restaurant and keep up with the demands of customers. However, its lack of violence doesn’t mean it isn’t stressful. As any person who’s worked in a restaurant can tell you, the food business can be a chaotic mess of keeping up with orders and finishing chores. That juggling act is perfectly emulated in Plate Up!.
While it’s not your traditional roguelike, the procedurally generated levels, and unlocks that occur once you die make each run a new experience. But this game encourages open (and frequent) communication with your partner about everything going on - what jobs need to be handled, what you’re doing, what you need help with, and what you need them to do right now. Balancing the needs of your partner and what jobs you need to complete are the keys to success in Plate Up! and that’s what makes its co-op so challenging but also so much fun to play.
The Best Gift Ideas For People Who Love Roguelikes
Not sure what to get your favorite roguelike-addicted loved one or for yourself? Here are the best gifts you’ll be running in loops for.
