As someone who really enjoys the genre, I think I can try to explain. This might be a bit rambly, though.
Roguelikes give you potentially infinite opportunities to solve encounters within the game's set of rules, while changing up the parameters of the encounter every time. It's a genre based almost entirely on the idea of improvising solutions on the fly with whatever you have on hand, which can get seriously engrossing when you start learning your toolset.
Although honestly, I think Roguelites are better than pure roguelikes, purely on the merit of either unlocking new tools for you to use, or by giving you new toys to play with to add content to the game.
The randomness is important because it changes up the encounters every time so you can't just go "Ok, new run. Right, go to that room, get the ice sword as usual, then kill those three goblins over there, then backtrack over there and ambush the kobolds about to ambush me, don't step on that trap over there..." and thus reduce each new run to a simple checklist you need to follow. By scrambling the encounters, it forces you to always be on watch and improvise.
That being said, the random factor is very important to get right. Too much randomness and it's impossible to learn the game and get better at it. Too little randomness and the game stops throwing interesting challenges at you.
As for the challenge...Well, if it's not challenging, then you don't need to think or plan to get through the encounters. You can just more or less "bleh" through them. Yeah, it's still fun because there's technically endless content to solve, but making it challenging pushes you to learn every single thing about the game that you can so you can win.
It's another thing that's super important to get right. Too easy and the game doesn't push you to learn it. Too hard and it's just frustrating.
ninja666 said:
and yet the game has the audacity to punish you by making you lose all of your progress when you don't learn from your mistakes. I'm sorry, what mistakes? The mistake of not predicting there was going to be three enemies, that weren't there before, standing behind the corner that wasn't there before?
Sounds like you've played a lot of bad ones.
Let me give you some examples.
Good: FTL - Faster Than Light.
Yatzee reviewed this one and explained why he found it fun. Basically, you start off with a single ship and need to make it to the other end of a hostile set of space sectors. As you do runs and die horribly, you start to learn the kinds of encounters you'll come up against. You'll learn that under no circumstance should you mess around with Alien Spiders. You'll learn that when those pirates board your ship, a good plan is to open all the airlocks except the medbay and hide your guys in there. You'll learn that going into Engi-Controlled space often has many favorable encoutners, and that Nebulas buy you lots of time, but make encounters more tricky and are often filled with Slugs.
Then, you start learning the different weapons and systems. You learn which weapons you like and should be trying to buy, you learn how to make do with Drones if you get a bunch, etc etc. And then you learn how to use the game's systems to their fullest like flipping power on and off from your modules as you need them, and advanced stuff like boarding parties, disabling weapons and oxygen, etc.
The first few runs of the game will see you die long before you get to the boss. But as you master the game you'll find it easier and easier to get there. Yeah, you might have the occasional bit of bad luck and not find any gear you like or get too many hard encounters at once, but you'll generally be able to improvise your way out of trouble.
And finally, the game rewards you with new ships with alternative play-styles for reaching certain milestones, giving you more variety.
FTL gives you a near-perfect mix of challenge, randomness and non-random elements that you can figure the game out and get good at it, while still being surprised every now and then, and still needing you to improvise in the face of trouble.
Good: Hand of Fate (1 and 2)
Hand of Fate takes things more bite-sized. Basically, each chapter is represented by a set of specific and unique cards that you move your character around on, each one generating an encounter. Sometimes it's a set of choices, other times, it's an action combat scene, other times it's a test of luck (with some room for the player to read the sequence) or reflexes, etc.
Because the encounter deck for each chapter remains the same, you might not know when "Horde of Ratmen" will show up or where you'll find a shop, but you'll soon realize that there is always 2 "horde of ratmen" cards and 3 shops.
You'll also learn what cards have set locations, and what each encounter does, so you can better prepare. See, you can choose your own cards to put into the chapter's deck. This one has a lot of ratmen? Load in weapons that do bonus damage to them. This chapter has a mechanic that drains your food? That "Cart of Food" encounter card will come in handy. Need lots of money or good weapons? "The Duel" is a relatively safe encounter that can give you stuff. The chapter is one giant field of cards full of nasty ones that drain your resources? Take along cards that reveal other cards so that you have a better chance at revealing potential trouble and saving you from potentially landing on them.
Then, there's the fact that lots of cards can unlock new ones if you solve their encounter in a specific way, and some of the ones that unlock after a chain of other unlocks can be hugely beneficial with little or no setback.
In this way, each chapter is about understanding what challenges await you, learning how to defuse them, and what cards you should take along to help you mitigate whatever gets hurled at you. And it also needs you to get good at the Arkham style combat, which has no luck factor. Yes, sometimes a bad run happens and you get screwed by the wrong encounters at the wrong time, but more often than not you can weasel your way out of a bad situation with the right preparation.
Good, but very niche: Risk of Rain.
Risk of Rain is a straight up no-frills action game. You have your little dude with 4 abilities facing off against an endless horde of enemies that get harder the longer the game goes on. The game randomly spawns treasure for you, and you need to make do with what you find to get an edge. Sometimes you have a choice of items (so if you know an item is one that works well with your character you can snap it up), but more often than not you have to make do with what you find.
It's pretty much a game that you play purely for enjoying a frantic struggle against hordes of enemies. What makes it really neat though is that by meeting certain challenges you will unlock new items that can show up in later runs, giving you more things to play with. Also, meeting certain challenges unlocks new characters with drastically different play-styles. This gives you an ever increasing variety of helpful stuff that the game can hurl at your face.
If replaying similar levels over and over with similar enemies and mostly random loot ticks you off, though, this game is definitely not for you. But if you want a mostly reflex based relentless action game with lots of characters, you'll enjoy it, and the random loot will be a fun extra that throw you curveballs every now and again.
Bad: Wizard of Legend.
This game does the whole "Getting stronger to improvise better" thing badly.
Unlocking new spells and stuff to take into the dungeon is useless once you have a really good set because what you can take in is so limited. That and how much money you make on each dungeon floor is so limited that the variety is severely constrained.
It's not bad as a pure action game (like risk of rain you don't need to learn your encounters much to make it), but it lacks the "ooh, neat I found a new thing, must loot level for all the neat things" that makes Risk of Rain fun.
Basically, it has all the hallmarks of a roguelite but without giving you a sense of reward and progression and where the encounters you learn are mostly very simple action.
BAD BAD TERRIBLE BAD: Hack Slash Loot.
If you ever played this, I am so sorry for you.
This game is the epitome of shit roguelikes. Your quote about "random encounters that you can't see coming" is this game personified. There's no unique skills to master to get good at the game, there's no way to learn the encounters, the entire game is literally just "Attack whatever comes at you, pray you get good loot, hope you only get one monster at a time, hope you get a Divine Weapon to boost your stats and heal you, if any of these things goes wrong, you dead". And worst of all, the only things you unlock are new classes that....Play exactly the same as each other with the only difference being "Do you attack in melee or at range?". And you unlock them by dying a lot.
Good roguelike/lite games have enough randomness to keep things interesting, but give you enough control to learn the game and get better at it. They give you more tools or toys to use the more you play, to give you more variety and paths to success. Hack Slash Loot is just a slot machine.
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Hopefully this long ramble gave you a better idea of why some of us like the genre.
TLDR:
- Infinite encounters to solve
- good ones give you the opportunity to learn the rules or encounters or tools to give yourself an edge
- good ones give you a feeling like you're unlocking new options or tools even if you fail to beat the game.
- good ones challenge you fully learn the mechanics for every advantage you can get.
