Roguelikesfeel like one of the best genres at completely wasting your time. Progressing in an RPG or Platformer and dying still leaves you with something, but if you die in a roguelike, you usually gain nothing.
Some roguelikes push this frustration by not respecting your time in the slightest, forcing you into unlocks that can take hours and gallons of RNG, alongside major punishments for mistakes.
10 Games That Will Make You A Roguelike Fan
If you’re not a fan of roguelikes already, these games will get you on your way.
Sometimes it’s purely because of how the game is designed, making a run take far longer in a particular game than most of its peers, but other times it can be a lack of quality of life that makes it take up way more time than it should.
Every game on this list will typically feel pretty draining if you’re going for a certain goal in particular, take up hours of your life whenever you try to get one thing, and occasionally just make doing a normal run take forever.
10Spelunky
Mining Away
As one of the first big roguelikes,Spelunkydecided to push the envelope about as far as it could go, delivering a game that’s pretty much entirely decided by RNG, whether you like it or not.
you may dodge and space attacks with skill, sure, but if you’re going for an achievement that requires you to collect zero treasure throughout the whole run, you’ll quickly find you have no grip on the situation.
Every level is random, the drops you get are unpredictable, and the enemies and obstacles can make some runs far harder than others, though for a majority of the game, that isn’t a huge factor.
You can lose plenty of runs from bad luck, but counteracting that with skill can make almost any run winnable; it just takes a massive time investment to get that good and not be frustrated by exploding.
9Enter The Gungeon
Bullet’s Hell
Enter the Gungeon
Roguelikes are already pretty chaotic, so combine that with the even more chaotic Bullet Hell genre, and you’ve got a recipe for bullets flying everywhere and forcing you to be really precise or die instantly.
More often than not, you’ll playEnter the Gungeon, wind up jumping into a run, finding a gun or two that can kinda work, then getting your ass whooped by the flood of glowing red bullets that the bosses spew out.
It’s fun to dodge, but it has a massive skill ceiling, and can expect so much of you at times that you’re often going to crumble from the amount of things to do on-screen and end up a pile of ash.
Never mind the game’s challenge mode, which will throw modifiers at you, like increasing the game speed, casting the rooms in complete darkness, or having most objects fire tons of bullets right at you.
8Slay the Spire
Trick Up Your Sleeve
Slay the Spire
Card gamesare rather luck-heavyas it stands in real life, so mixing a very tactical RPG into a roguelike world where all your attacks are the random cards you find along the way is a surefire way to make some runs die instantly.
WhileSlay the Spireis undoubtedly a skill-based game most of the time, with the starting loadouts providing plenty of good cards to carry you for a long while, the luck aspect, combined with intense difficulty, can lead to a ton of time spent doing nothing.
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Let’s go gambling! Aw dang it! Aw dang it! Aw dang it!
Perhaps the biggest reason it’s on this list, though, is that every run of this game feels exceedingly slow, especially when you’re starting the game and have to think incredibly hard about synergies and strategies.
And plenty of times, I’ve gotten on a decent run that just needs a little boost to keep going, never found that, and ended up with my health slowly dwindling until I petered out right near the end and accomplished zero things.
All Over Again
Dead Cells
Dead Cellsis a pseudo-Metroidvania, and it’sreally damn difficult. Just those two things in a roguelike will automatically lead to plenty of runs completely wasting your time even trying to get off the ground.
I’ve spent dozens of runs getting through the first couple of areas, having gear get progressively weaker, but already having built around the garbage I have, making me unable to switch to something better.
It mitigates RNG quite a bit, and the more progress you make, the easier it’ll get. That is, until you activate the Boss Cells, making the game even harder than it was before, and making your life hell.
While throwing yourself into the dungeon is certainly fun, I have to say, more often than not, I end up gunning through everything and getting nowhere close to finishing the game, until I randomly get a god run with an incredible weapon.
Useless Stickers
As someone with over 150 hours in Balatro, and havingcompleted the challenge mode, this game expects you to sink so much time into finishing all the main content that it’s made me develop a relationship of combined adoration and vitriol with the game.
Every run simultaneously feels like a massive skill issue when you lose, yet also a result of pure luck that you simply rolled the dice poorly on. While runs aren’t too long, they’re just lengthy enough to hurt a little.
The shop can frequently tease you with the exact item you need while you barely have enough money to buy it, and it feels like it does that even more when it’s an item you haven’t unlocked properly yet.
Don’t even bother attempting to go for every achievement; getting Gold Stake on every Joker would take so long that you probably could have played a dozen other games in the time you spent grinding.
5Risk of Rain 2
Quite The Gamble
Risk of Rain 2
Personally, the roguelike I’ve played the absolute most isRisk of Rain 2, and with well over 350 hours, I can confirm that this game is a massive timesink, and getting all the achievements can take a year off your life.
It expectsmastering every character, getting good so you can win a run with each of them on Monsoon, getting awful achievements like Ethereal, and, god forbid, doing the Eclipse climb if you’re employed.
Everything this game does feels like it’s trying to waste your time the perfect amount so that you want to keep coming back, and when you finally get what you’re after, you feel motivated to sink even more time into it.
It feels incredible and rewarding for the first hundred hours, then every hour after that feels like desperately clawing for the opportunity to unlock something new while playing a few hundred more runs just to do so.
Mix and Match
While Spelunky gave us procedurally generated worlds that you run through in a few minutes,Noitais similar toTerraria, letting you spend as much time as you can in a massive world.
The issue is that it’s essentially in permanent hardcore mode, with a ton of extra effects and events going on the longer you stay, so it simultaneously feels like you should stay for as long as possible, while feeling terrified of losing everything.
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Risk of Rain 2 isn’t the only one, I’ll have you know.
While you can try and choose to ignore that aspect and just dive in as quickly as possible, you’ll find that to be a terrible idea, frequently ending in instant, explosive, fiery death, or the crushing feeling of the world collapsing on you.
This dichotomy often leads to me spending a ton of time exploring the world in Noita, running into a massive area filled with some brand new way to die, and ending up as a corpse on the floor, having to start all over again.
3(the) Gnorp Apologue
Idling Around
(the) Gnorp Apologue is theonly Roguelike Idle game I know, which means it is 100% designed with the intent of taking as long as it possibly can to finish, usually well over 50 hours for a single run.
The reason it’s not the highest on this list is that it doesn’t take a ton of active input. Late-game Cookie Clicker, for example, has zero respect for your time and expects you to be constantly active, but Gnorp Apologue is pretty chill.
That said, 50 hours of having the game running is still a ton of time for a single run to take, and while new game+ takes a far shorter amount of work, it’s still pretty ridiculous and near-unheard of for this genre.
Even with the amount of time you spend not playing it, you’re still spending hours setting everything up, clicking rocks, making sure to fix your broken drones, and ascending to the top, for several days straight.
2The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
I feel like any list about Roguelikes with so muchcontent that is so difficultor lengthy to obtain has to haveThe Binding of Isaac: Rebirthon it, as it notoriously has so many things to do that it’s a goliath-sized task to complete.
There are a few hundred items in this game, and every one of them has one of the vaguest descriptions known to man, forcing you to spend even more time figuring out what they even do if you don’t use a wiki.
It is also notoriously hard, often leading to runs where you enter in confused, find items that mean absolutely nothing to you, make a solid 20 minutes of progress, then die and gain absolutely nothing.
Not to mention the achievements stuff you down into RNG hell for the sin of wanting to finish things in this game. Everything here makes for something you can sink a full day into, and leave completely unsatisfied.
1A Robot Named Fight!
Far Too Much
A Robot Named Fight!
While Dead Cells was an imitation of a Metroidvania, A Robot Named Fight is a very standard, Metroid-inspired Metroidvania, just that all the rooms and items, and enemies get randomized each run.
While a Metroidvania randomizer is usually an incredibly fun experience with constant progress, A Robot Named Fight feels like you’re trudging through mud for half an hour only to die and lose all of your progress.
There’s no way to keep the world you were exploring, leading to runs often feeling immensely unsatisfying, taking hours to finish, and leaving you with nothing more than you entered with.
It’s fundamentally two different genres clashing rather than working together, despite the promising concept, leading to a game that has zero respect for your time and will happily waste it all for zero return at all.
