I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.
First thing’s first: Luciole is right. Making hardline categories doesn’t work and you’re better off coming up with properties games could have. But if we’re gonna go down this route:
Dwarf Fortress adventure mode is one among a few games (Stoneshard being another?) that go for… an open-world with fairly traditional rogueish mechanics?
Hardcore Diablo, alongside other ARPGs and stuff like Tales of Maj’Eyal and Rift Wizard, I’d call “skill rogues”? If we’re not gonna care whether they’re turn-based or not. Games where you have a bunch of skills to unlock with cooldowns and very little importance placed on map loot.
Calling everything that isn’t turn-based an “action rogue” seems wrong. Like, Barony? Sure it’s real-time, but it’s seriously the classic Roguelike experience, except in first-person and co-op now. It’s rad as hell.
Something you’re missing IMO is… sandbox-ness? Like the “skill rogues” don’t have a lot of systems that can interact in weird unexpected ways. Nethack is the quintessential systemic sandbox. More modern examples would include Spelunky and to a much greater extent Noita. There’s a lot of overlap with totally different genres here- Immersive sims inherit some of Nethack’s sauce, and so does Dwarf Fortress (as in Fortress Mode).
What the heck even are DoomRL and Jupiter Hell? They’re turn-based but built to almost feel like they’re not. I feel like they’re their own special thing in a way.
As much as I love obsidian, I’ve been moving on to Emacs org-mode! I like that Obsidian notes are just text files but with org-mode I get that and it’s Emacs which is open-source, thirty years old and literally never going to die. I can export org-mode files to PDFs or even turn them into HTML pages.
For anything that you really can’t get on Linux:
People have probably told you that Wine is the way to use it anyways, but maybe no one’s mentioned Bottles which makes using Wine dead easy. Most of the time you can sort of just open up Bottles, run the installer for the software through there, make sure Bottles knows where the .exe is for the actual program is and you’re good to go.
You’re missing the point.
If I strip all the DRM BS from my software (not just games, it’s a big problem with ebooks, music, etc. as well) I actually own this stuff. I can hoard it away on a hard drive, use it without anything like Steam or any online service, I don’t need to ask someone for permission to use this thing that I bought and actually physically have with me any more. Or in the case of ebooks, I can actually use this file I’ve got sitting around on whatever device I wish, because I bought the book. It’s mine. They don’t get to tell me what I can do with it.
…And frankly, while I don’t “pirate” software because I agree that people deserve to be paid for their work, the single greatest advancement of modern technology is that things can be freely copied. We went from copying books by hand, to printing presses, to now being able to distribute them at no cost whatsoever beyond the infrastructure of the internet. If that makes a lot of typical business practices untenable, I think we should let them be untenable and figure out how to respond to that rather than nerfing the single greatest invention of the modern era just to make sure some capitalists stay happy.
Emacs literally calls it’s Vim emulation Evil mode :)
In all seriousness though, I say Emacs mostly because being a Lisp machine, it’s turing-complete. There’s web browsers in Emacs, PDF readers, email clients, EXWM is literally Emacs as your window manager.
Also what I’ve realized recently is… Vim keybindings aren’t even that great beyond being modal, anyways. Some dude made an Emacs plugin called Xah-Fly-Keys that makes it modal, but works off of what commands are used often rather than how Vim does stuff like making the “go to the end of the line” key $ for some reason. With Emacs being something you can sort of just live in, I can bring my workflow into it rather than praying that what I’m using has vim key support.
(Fuck I’m participating in the editor wars, fuck my life)
I just wish people weren’t so adamant about the whole “no spoilers” thing with it. It sort of soured my time with it when I finished the intro and was kinda just like… oh, it’s the Majora’s Mask thing. That’s the big mind-blowing twist people are talking about.
I guess what I’m saying is thanks for just talking about what actually makes it so unique / impressive.
Does Cogmind count? Because even when I see people discussing games like it, which are already pretty niche, it never comes up. That’s tragic, because oh my god, just read some of these articles. This developer is obsessive and even if you don’t get too deep into Cogmind it’s an incredible toy to just screw around with and just see what happens.
Honestly, the game I like the most that deserves the praise the most is so obsessively discussed by it’s own developer that I think they should speak for themselves: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/index.html
It’s really, truly underrated. No one talks about it, even when traditional Roguelikes come up, despite the absurd amount of effort poured into it.
Specifically the article about designing “information warfare” into the game way back in 2014 (it’s still being developed) is a great example of how much is going on in this little ASCII game: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/11/information-warfare/
I guess what I could add is that surprisingly enough Cogmind actually has a story, a pretty dang extensive one, and the fact that it’s sort of just hiding away in places you might never see blew my mind.
Also, that despite having as much depth as Dwarf Fortress (just more focused depth), the interface and controls aren’t completely inscrutable. because thank god, it actually has mouse support.
I actually wrote a Steam guide for Patho 2’s intro, because just to warn you, it’s so obtuse that people bounce off of it: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2847019516
…Ok, not gonna lie, the basic premise of Xenoblade 3 comes across to me like to warring societies of Souls Hollows, and while that’s almost certainly wrong it sounds rad as hell. Armies fighting because they literally need the life of their enemies to live, never stopping to consider that by not allowing themselves to die they doom the world itself, eventually no one’s left. Or something along those lines. In any case it feels like it’s setting itself up to actually say something significant about the world.
“I have looked into the genre of roguelikes, however the basic premise of these games are that they start all over again from each session, which is what I am trying to avoid.”
…Except this isn’t true of what we’d traditionally call rogue-lites, which is really most roguelikes these days. The vast, vast majority have a lot of meta progression systems to the point where people actually expect it these days.
…I mean, it’s more like the web browser makes it easy to use the Tor network. The network is the slow part. Your requests are getting ping-ponged all over the world intentionally taking the long way around.