The Problem with Reviewing Roguelikes

Roguelikes. This is a genre of games I've always been fascinated with. Today, I have a special video to discuss the unworldly phenomenon that is Roguelikes. We analyze the likes of Dead Cells, Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Noita, Binding of Isaac, and more!

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[Pseychie_DC]

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[XiLock_Alotx]

I feel like I have a “got the game” for DeadCells after 300+ hours. I am still finding that there is so much to learn through all the different builds and just little nuances the game has to offer. I absolutely adore this genre

[TillyCorbin]

i feel like new player experience is also very important, if you don't like the game for the first 10 hours (and like it after that) then that's a major issue which might just make the game not worth playing if you don't want to sink hours of your life into it

[dylanwenzel]

7:45 “All roguelikes are single player” proceeds to play the only multiplayer roguelike in his catalog

[the_great_cow]

8:14 "your not supposed to win the game" shows noita


I feel that

[oldrustyfishscalerman]

Actually in dark souls (and friends) there is a build that you just cheese everything. It’s called the pacifist build, basically you make the enemy face the final boss – gravity.

[nedreow]

While I agree that 10-20 hours is not enough to truly understand a roguelike, I do think that such a time investment is (usually) enough to judge whether a game is or isn't good. This should after all be plenty enough time to experience the core loop of a game and see if it is fun to play. This is the case for any game not just roguelikes.

A roguelike game has two layers: the base game (dungeon crawler/top down shooter/card game/city builder/anything with sufficient complexity) and the roguelike meta-game. This two layered structure is what makes roguelikes a meta-genre rather than a genre of its own*. A Roguelike is defined by randomness, a large amount of content and complexity that work together to create a long process of discovery, experimentation, exploration and mastery that is unique to roguelikes. Reviewing this upper roguelike layer is probably impossible on the relatively few hours a professional game reviewer has available for some random indie title.

Reviewing the lower layer on the other hand, is absolutely possible in such a timeframe. All the games shown in the video are great examples of their base genre and fun to play not just on the hundredth run, but also on the first. In a good roguelike game the roguelike layer interacts with the base layer to give it the depth, options and unpredictability. If the base game is not fun, acquiring mastery is a slog and no-one is going to stick around for long enough for the rogue-like part to matter.

*I'm specifically talking about the modern use of roguelike, not the Berlin Interpretation.

[BunnyWitchcraft]

Personally I said yes for every single one of these. Reviews aren't really supposed to be comprehensive analysis. As long as the reviewer is upfront with how much time they spend with something, it's fair.

[noob_jr_sjrkc]

If you spend 100 hours to "get" the game, chances are you're going to leave a very positive review because if you didn't like it you would've dropped it earlier. So the sample of reviews by people who "get" the game will always be biased. Meanwhile, a review from someone partway through the learning curve can still be an useful data point.

I think that consumers ought to see reviews as data points, no single review can be the complete source of truth for informing a purchase. Conversely, reviewers should not write like their word is the complete and unbiased source of truth about a game.

[shoco]

While I do agree with most of the points in the video, I think a lot of the points that you made can be applied to practically any game. Although more so with roguelikes than with any other genre, I think we can't just dismiss reviews just because they "didn't get the game". Its important to know how accessible a game is for the mainstream audience, and if someone didnt "get" the game 10 hours in but its a game where players only "get" it after 50+ hours, then I feel that its the developers job to create a game thats fun until you get to that point. It shouldn't feel like a slog or boring to get to the fun part of the game, and I feel it shouldnt be the responsibility of the player to go through so much to get to the part where they finally "get" the game

[explosiverift]

All reviews made in good faith are valid reviews, all reviews must be taken with a grain of salt, as all reviews are biased. A review for a roguelike from someone who's played for 10 hours is a review from someone who doesn't fully understand the game, like 99% of players, and is thus a better review than one from someone with 3000 hours for the vast majority. In addition, no one knows if they'll fall into that 1% who truly "know" the game until they play, so reviews from this group hold little value to anyone, as these reviews would only help someone in this category, which as mentioned previously, will not know if they fall into this category util they've played the game.

[LordoftheNightWolves]

A fun, up to 2 player, Rougelike called Wizard of Legend is a relatively simple Rougelike. It doesn't take long "to get" but still takes as long to master and unlock everything

[antongrahn]

I would say all the rewiews you mentioned at the begining are valid, because an "outsiders" perspective is not less valid than a "insiders" one. Its just different. So different rewiews are useful to different people.

[josephhanicak]

The reviews in the intro are valid so long as the reviewer emphasizes that this is simply their opinion. There's this extremely stupid narrative going on in the gaming world that you have to dedicate your life to a game to properly talk about it, or that criticizing a game's difficulty means that you simply suck at it. Neither of those are true. For example, I absolutely love Ninja Gaiden. It has some of the best combat of all time. But Jesus Christ are those games unfair. They're extremely difficult, but they're also unfair. Bosses can punish you for parrying them (cough cough genshin in 2), Alma just straight up phases through your attacks at random, and enemies will spam the most annoying projectiles ever. If all that is too much for you, then I understand. It's a shame, but I don't blame you, or think that you aren't good enough. It's the same with Rogue likes. Not everyone has 300 hours to sink into a game, and that's ok. The perspective of someone going in without any prior knowledge or experience with the game is vital information for consumers. As long as you recognize that you don't have the complete picture, it's ok to talk about a game you haven't mastered.

[joakkar]

I still feel like this whole video works under the premise that "roguelikes can't ever be badly designed" since any problem beating the game can always be explained by "you're not getting it", which just makes roguelikes the get out of jail free card of videogame genres and can't ever under any circumstance be bad since any and all frustration is "by design". In the end there's more that makes a game good than just whether you can get good at it and beat it or not. There are base level measures of quality (besides graphics and sound) that you can base your review on. In the end if you need to play 40 hours to unlock the one character that feels fun to play, then that's the game's fault, not yours. If you're not having fun losing over and over, that's the game's fault.

[lowbudgetracc]

'you can't cheese dark souls'. For the most part I laugh at this with my swarm of flies elden ring build, but even with mimic tear and myself both focusing down malenia with bleed (and she is literally WEAK to bleed) I still struggled for quite a while...

[coolboy]

Yes they are. Josh strife hayes is a MMORPG "reviewer" and also tackled that issue in a genre which is supposed to hold you attention for YEARS and got the same issue as you said, but ten times fold.
Even if you play a rogue like for like 5 hours and then quit it because it was too bad, or you beated it. You can still give a legit review. You just cant review the game in its entirety. You probably had to do multiple runs to kill mom, so you can feel how good the repetitiveness is.

A new player experience review is REALLY important and good to see. If the flaws of a new player experience just end up with people saying "Y-You have to play the game for 100 hours and do 200 runs" then its most of the time just a bad mechanic and design. Even if its intended.

[jonaderjona]

I think a problem is the way people tend to look at reviews. Someone giving their perspective of what a game has allowed them to experience is exactly what a review should be. The claim that someone has to have played all of a game to give a review would be baseless: Depending in its length a large Portion of the playerbase will not do so, thus the reviews are very much representative of a part of the player base.

[asittingduck]

Soul Knight, Blazing Beaks and GTTOD are also great roguelikes, that I highly recommend you.

Your vids are amazing! Thanks for making them for us!

[JoeliRavioli]

I’ve always wrestled with the concept of rating and reviewing. As much as I love to do it I think it always come back to with opinions being like butt holes. Everyone has one. On the opposite end I think to truly rating review some thing and it’s complete essence you should have some sort of experience, expertise or an eye for whatever it is you’re rating and reviewing. The newest Batman film in my mind was a masterpiece 10 out of 10. But some of my friends they held it to the Christopher Nolan standard. I had to help him understand that those things are not comparable. Yes they are both Batman but both of them try to achieve different things. They have also never read a Batman comic book in their lives or seen any other Batman films. So at the end of the day I kind of have to take what they say for the grain of salt. And I think Hades is a masterpiece. It’s one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve put 700 hours into that game. But my brother couldn’t wrap the concept around his mind. That’s resulting in him not entirely understanding preventing him from truly enjoying the mechanics experience of the game. So in his opinion after five hours the game was “meh”. That to say. It’s all opinions at the end of the day. I think everyone can find the value and beauty in everything.