Roguelike with Overarching Progression

I'm curious if anyone knows of a game that sounds like the title. Something like Rogue Legacy with it's mechanics, but not a platformer (I'm terrible at them). It's weirdly specific, but that's the kind of thing I've been in the mood to play for a few days now.

Binding of Isaac is that thing, although the progression is different and sometimes a bit nebulous.

Tales of Maj Eyal (TOME) is a really good roguelike RPG (it actually plays like Rogue) and as you complete tasks you unlock more races and classes.

Sunless Sea has a limited progression system where you pass a limited amount of money or items down each generation. Personally, I didn't like it (I thought it was a slower and inferior version of the Escape Velocity series, which I personally find much more fun), but that's one possibility.

Otherwise, Darkest Dungeon is in Early Access right now, but from what I've played, that game is looking to turn out to be pretty O.K. I'd describe that as sort of an XCOM-like. The levels are random, and party members can die and need to be replaced, but town upgrades are persistent.

If you like Grim Dark Anime style stuff, Baroque might be a game you'd be interested in. With each death, parts of the story progress and open new areas in the tower where the game takes place.

ZHP was a fantastic roguelike with progressive elements. I cannot recommend it enough. It had a more recent successor called Guided Fate Paradox, but I've yet to play that so I'm not sure of its quality, but it would be worth checking into.

@sparky_buzzsaw: I really wanted to like ZHP because I love Disgaea and the Kamen Rider esque premise but man, ZHP is really fucking hard.

@lawgamer: I've played a bit of Darkest Dungeon. I couldn't really get into it. I felt like most of the "skill" in the game ended up being pure dice rolls, with less of the tactical dice rolling (if that makes any sense) of an XCOM. Though I might just be salty.

@mannymar: Baroque looks like it has the potential to be cripplingly difficult. I might check it out though.

@sparky_buzzsaw: ZHP looks super interesting. That might be the thing to get me to dust of my Vita. I really enjoyed the small amount of Disgaea I played.

Give One Way Heroics a look up on Steam. It's a top down roguelike with a semblance of persistence but lets you retry the 'level' and carry forward things to improve on subsequent games. There's plenty of upgrades and unlocks to make your future games go better as well as an upgrading bank to take items from past playthroughs.

The game itself is a tile by tile turn where you're always being pushed to the 'east', there's a variety in the level set as well as a defined goal. If you fail you can retry on the same tileset or go ahead on a new randoml level

The game is pretty cheap on Steam ($3.49 I believe) so check it out!

I'm totally going to cheat at this and mention Don't Starve.

It doesn't really have an overarching progression, but you unlock other characters the longer you are able to survive. I know it doesn't really count, I just really like that damn game. Best roguelike I've played.

@misterdunlap: If you liked what you played of Disgaea I highly recommend the Vita version of 4. It's the best game in the series and the Vita version comes with all the DLC which helps flesh out the post game and make it less of a grind.

@corevi said:

TOME is a really good suggestion. It's one of my favorites and it seems to fit your description quite well, as far as I understand it.

Another potential candidate would be Abyss Odyssey. It's quite similar to Rogue Legacy in many ways (much more so than TOME, which is very traditional by comparison) but focusses more on the fighting system and use of abilities for its challenge. Just know that there certainly are some platforming elements but they're not even in the ballpark of masochistic platformers like Spelunky and Rogue Legacy. I dislike those myself.

I really like the modern rogue-lite mix of progression and traditional rogue elements. It promotes the diversity and depth of options and the exploration that you get in a rogue, but makes even repeated failures feel like they're building to something, allowing to push a little further each time.

Shocked that no one has mentioned FTL.

FTL!

@brightside said:

One Way Heroics is fantastic. It has a strong Shiren The Wanderer vibe to it and the developer is making some sort of DLC/expansion to make the game even better (it's called One Way Heroics Plus). OP might want to check out Mystery Dungeon games in general which are a special flavor of roguelikes with RPG elements.

Maybe check out the free version of Desktop Dungeons aswell? I liked it better than the paid version.

Yeah, Darkest Dungeon can feel a bit random at times, but they are gradually fixing some of it. For example, they put in a visible turn counter in the last update, so now you have an idea of the order everything is going to act in. The devs have also at least seemed open to the idea of showing you/allowing you to learn what enemy skills are, so you know whether to push/pull them in combat.

I will also say the randomness is more of a problem at the beginning. They give you the same party combination to start, but the skills they have are random, and it's a while before you can learn new ones in town. If you get a shitty skill selection to begin with, it can be rough.

yeah, it's just the learning curve at the beginning where it seems out of control, and because characters die as a result it can seem intimidating i'm sure, but once you learn the skills and you learn how to manage stress, it's really not that difficult a game to master, once you get into the groove of it deaths, and even mishaps, become rare, and i hope they don't change much about how it plays at all, i think that early grimness is important to the mood the game creates, and i wouldn't mind if they even made the late game a bit harder.

Abyss Odyssey does not require much in the way of platforming (the worst you have to do is jump on a slow-moving panel), and has basically been my obsession this past week. The combat is fun as hell and you carry over XP and gold--the only thing that changes is the dungeon layout.

Bionic Dues is a cool game with less than stellar production values. The game play is this simplified top-down rougelike where you control a party of robots doing various objectives in small stages, while contributing to this meta goal of stopping this robot army. The enemies all have some defect and you have a wide variety of abilities, so it gets interesting when you have to deal with a mixed party of enemies. Your basically building up your robots with loot and skills by playing missions, until the final battle.

And speaking of ZHP, I played the spiritual sequel thing Guided Fate Paradox. They are basically the same game, except GFP isn't as interesting concept wise. I also found it impossible, much like ZHP. I think its sequel is coming out soon as well.

Thanks for the suggestions, going to try a few of these.

@hh: I love Fire Emblem and play those games religiously, so I'm used to characters dying. It's when they keep dying no matter what I seem to do that I get frustrated. Hence my unhappiness with Darkest Dungeon.

I've been playing Hand of Fate, which is kinda like what I described, and I've been enjoying that a lot. I think The Dealer is probably one of the most interesting characters from any game I've played in a while.

@misterdunlap: i'd say Fire Emblem is a different beast. that game benefits from a sense of risk and a sense of loss, this game benefits from a sense of hopelessness, the world is presented as bleak and doomed across the board, but without doubt the tools are there to overcome it, it just requires a little more perseverance than what we're used to, which is apt i think.

Guided Fate Paradox is a somewhat easier ZHP. Still requires a lot of grinding though.

I have the Fate Paradox game, I loved the concept and the mechanics when I first heard about it as it was a HD version of ZHP but I lost interest fast because the story didn't interest me at all, and levels consists of mostly catwalks.

Ziggurat is a pretty decent fps roguealikey

Is it? I've been eyeing it on Steam, and it's still 40% off for the next three days. Any elaboration on its systems or anything you can give?

Doesn't really fit here. You can unlock ships, but that's really it. When your playthrough fails, you're doing another run from scratch. Great game though.

Dead Rising

Uh?

Rogue Shooter looks good. There's a Quick Look up on the site.

I really like Ziggurat as well. Very fun game.

It's a fast-paced shooter in the vein of Quake or Hexen, levels are randomly generated, character progression resets upon death but you continue to unlock various upgrades (that you can select from during future level-ups) and characters that change playstyle to a surprising degree considering Ziggurat plays like an FPS. Each level has various rooms that act as combat arenas with various modifiers (changes of playstyle, graphical style, strength of monsters and yourself etc.), a secret room and a boss fight before the exit. Some special rooms are randomly appearing for more variety. There are 4 different weapon categories (magical fields equivalent to sidearm, rapid fire, short range/ utility and explosive/ AoE) with specific ammunition (mana) and managing those according to your preferences and charater build while circle-strafing like a motherfucker will make up most of the gameplay. Monsters drop things like mana, experience crystals and health which you also have to pick up in a timely fashion before they disappear.

It's difficulty design is akin to FTL in the sense that you can choose a low setting that will yield successful finishes and many unlocks swiftly and the default one that'll make you work hard for every finished level. Thematically it's a whacky fantasy parody with enemies being entertaining mash-ups of all kinds of fantasy tropes.

I would highly recommend it, personally. I played more than 20 hours and haven't quite unlocked everything though I do seem to have most things available by now.

Edit: I don't think the game got a QL but here's a WTF episode for example.

Dead Cells is pretty amazing and a direct descendant of Rogue Legacy

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Moonlighter. It’s a dungeon crawling type of rogue-lite and is a lot of fun with a really cool art style.

@haneybd87: probably because the thread is 3+ years old

Probably because the last post in this thread was over 3 years ago and Moonlighter was released 2 months ago :P

Let's not necro old threads please!

Thanks