games

Don't get me wrong. I've played roguelikes. I've enjoyed roguelikes. But I think I can safely say that for every single roguelike I've played, I would've had a lot more fun if it kept the basic mechanics but were something other than a roguelike.

To me, at least, random chance + limiting the player's information + permadeath is one of the most horrid combinations of mechanics imaginable. The sky-high difficulty of most roguelikes all but demands the player make near-perfect decisions at all times... except, with the limitation of the player's ability to see e.g. what's in the next room, the player can make an educated guess at best. "Do you pick the room that has a 70% chance of being the best choice or the one that has a 30% chance of being the best choice?" The 70% room is objectively the correct choice, but even if the player knows the game well enough to know which room is the 70% room and pick it every time, they're still eating shit an average of 30% of the time, and that's generally enough to cost a run.

Of course, that's not even the worst way the RNG can fuck over the player. A run may very well be doomed before it starts. I remember reading that for one old roguelike - ADOM, I think it was - the very best players in the world could manage about a 50% win rate. Think about that. Even at the absolute peak of human skill, half of all runs are total wastes. The outcome was already decided. There was no point in even starting the game. The whole thing was an exercise in futility that you were roped into with the carrot that maybe it would actually be winnable. That's more akin to an elaborate joke than a legitimate game.

It's even worse in roguelike deckbuilders, I think. Obviously, you need good deck synergy to win. It's not usually difficult to figure out which cards work well together. The issue, though, is finding those cards. Early in the game, you'll hit a point where you're committed to whatever deck theme you decided to go with - switching would be so costly that it would essentially guarantee a loss. What happens when the game suddenly decides to stop giving you the cards you need? You lose. How do you know which kinds of card you'll be getting? You can't. So, pick a theme. There are right and wrong answers, but the game won't give you any indication as to which is which. You'll get your answer when you're staring at an imminent loss and realizing that every ingame choice you made in the last half hour was made completely irrelevant by what you did in the ten minutes prior to that.