Roguelikes, Persistency, and Progression

One of the most fascinating genres in gaming, is the roguelike. The term was originally used to describe games that closely mimicked the design of the 1980 dungeon crawler Rogue - but in more recent times, it’s been commandeered to describe a whole fleet of indie titles that share two very important characteristics: The levels must be randomly generated each time you play. And the game must have permadeath, which means all progress is reset to zero whenever you die.

But that second characteristic isn’t always what it seems. In some games, like Spelunky, permadeath means permadeath. When you die, all progress through the game is reset - and you start your next run with exactly the same starting criteria as your very first. So that means you always begin with the same amount of health, bombs, and money. But in others, like Rogue Legacy, dying isn’t quite so harsh. When you mess up in this game, you can use any money you’ve found to unlock upgrades that will improve your health, magic, attack power, and so on. And those upgrades persist from run to run, and will be applied to all characters going forward.

Some have taken to calling games with no persistent upgrades, “roguelikes” And games that do carry persistent upgrades, “roguelites”. And in this video, I’m going to look at both the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches - and also look at how clever designers have tried to find ways to design around those drawbacks.

Let’s start with roguelikes - the games that don’t have persistent upgrades. I’m talking about games like Spelunky and Enter the Gungeon. The key advantage of this design, is that the games almost exclusively reward player skill. Because the game never changes from run to run, the overall difficulty level of the game - across multiple attempts, that is - is completely flat. That means the only way to smash through that barrier and win is to improve your own skill: by learning the ropes, practicing the controls, and becoming more familiar with the game’s world.

Nothing is standing between you and the final boss, except for your own ability and knowledge of the game’s systems. Other than a particularly lucky, or unlucky random roll, of course. And this means that a highly skilled player has no barrier to simply finishing the game. But the disadvantage is that a low skilled player may never finish the game. Roguelikes ask you to play through a really difficult game in one go, and offer no real way to reduce the difficulty. And so if you can’t do that, you’ll just never succeed. Ouch.

Another drawback is that because your progress through the game must be wiped clean every time you kick the bucket, every failed run can feel like a waste of time. Sure, you’re improving your skills - but with nothing tangible to show for it, you don’t get that unique dopamine rush that comes from numbers ticking up. Okay, now let’s look at roguelites- the games that do have permanent upgrades that

carry over from run to run. I’m talking about games like Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells. The key advantage of this design is that almost every run is given meaning. When you die in Rogue Legacy you don’t feel like you’ve wasted your time, because you know that you’ve earned enough money to unlock a new upgrade - and improve your chances at succeeding in future runs. Ultimately, every attempt at the game helps bring the difficulty of the game down.

And this also allows pretty much all players, regardless of skill, to finish the game eventually - they’ve just got to keep upgrading their character until they’re super powerful and the game becomes a bit of a pushover. The disadvantage is that this is actually a really weird difficulty curve - where the game is at its most challenging when you begin, and slowly gets easier and easier over time. That’s the opposite of pretty much every other type of game, where the difficulty should ramp up in sync with player skill.

And one of the most pernicious outcomes is that your success with these games is much less about your own skill - and much more dependent on the level of your character. In a game like Dead Cells, it’s easy to feel like you have no real chance of winning until you’ve purchased a few more health potions from the shop - creating this artificial barrier you’ve got to grind through until you can really start focusing on winning.

But once you finally do win one of these games - it’s ambiguous whether it was because of your improving skill level, or just the ever-decreasing difficulty of the game. Did you get better, or did the game just get easier?

So both types of game have their advantages and disadvantages. But luckily for us, clever designers have found ways to alleviate the worst drawbacks of the two design archetypes. So roguelikes can be accused of offering no sense of progression. However, lots of these games have found ways to give you a feeling of advancement - without changing the difficulty level of the game. By letting players unlock stuff that’s fun, but has no meaningful impact on their chances at finishing the game.

Take Enter the Gungeon. In this game, killing bosses nets you a special currency that you’ll hold onto - even after you die. And you can use this money in a shop in the game’s hub world: but it’s not to unlock new powers for your character like extra health or bigger ammo crates. Instead, it simply adds more weapons to the game’s already bursting selection of randomly dropped guns. Meaning next time you go to a treasure chest, there’s now a few more firearms that could pop out.

This doesn’t massively affect the balance of the game, because these items are no more powerful than the guns you could find at the beginning. It just adds extra variety to future attempts at the game. Another idea can be found in Nuclear Throne. In this roguelike shooter, you can unlock new characters - giving you more options to choose from when starting your next game. Just like before, these character aren’t any more powerful than the default ones because they have their own advantages and disadvantages to balance them out. They just provide different ways to play. It’s like the character classes in the older roguelike games, but if the devs held most of them back to be unlockable after a certain amount of play.

Another option is to simply offer players cosmetic upgrades that have zero impact on the way the game plays. The new colour options in Downwell, for example, are given out as rewards for collecting a certain number of gems across multiple runs. That gives you a small reward for continuing to play, but they have no impact on the balance of the game whatsoever. Then, go look at Hades. This one does actually have persistent upgrades, but I want to focus on something else: the way it incorporates lore and character backstories. So in this game you unlock more about each character every time you respawn, and you can find items in the game world that can be given to characters in the hub to butter them up and unlock more story content. Unlocking new narrative stuff gives you something to hold onto, even while you’re failing over and over again at the actual game.

Roguelikes can also seem impenetrable, because there’s no way to reduce the difficulty of the game. But some of these titles do have stuff to give players a helping hand - but without permanently changing the balance of the game. One of which is shortcuts, as seen in Spelunky. Here, if you do some chores for the tunnel man you can create a new door in the hub world and start your adventure in, say, the jungle, skipping the first four rooms in the mines entirely. This arguably does makes the game easier, and definitely allows new players to practice at the the harder areas in the game.

However, Spelunky makes it clear that you’ll eventually want to play through the game from the beginning to finish it properly. For one, your time won’t show up on the leaderboard if you use shortcuts. And for another, the game’s true ending - where you descend into hell - requires you to find a series of items that are hidden in every area. Meaning that if you use a shortcut to skip an early part of the game, you won’t be able to get all the stuff you need to unlock the secret entrance to the underworld.

And then there are boosts that will carry over into the next run - but don’t stick around permanently. In the tiny tactics game Into the Breach, you can keep one levelled up soldier after death, who can then be used during your next attempt. But because these characters don’t stick around forever, it’s not making a persistent change to the game’s difficulty. It just gives you a bit of a leg-up, and also an excuse for “just one more go”.

And then there’s roguelites. Here, there’s a real ambiguity over whether your successes and failures are due to the game’s difficulty level - or your own skill. But the designers of these games are often careful to introduce elements that still require a certain level of skill - and stop you from just grinding through the game forever until you eventually win. Take Rogue Legacy’s creepy doorkeeper, Charon. This dude hangs out at the front door of the castle and stops you from entering - and thus starting your next run - until you give up all of your unspent money. The idea is, you can’t save up small amounts of money over the course of multiple runs, and then spend it all at once on an expensive upgrade. You have to earn a lot of money in a single run - thus, proving your ability to stay alive long enough to fatten up your wallet.

And then in Dead Cells, you don’t actually keep your money when you die. You have to make sure that you spend your cash at one of these upgrade stations, or it will be gone for good. The idea here is that you need to actually be good enough to get through to the end of an area and bank your money - or else it will vanish into the ether. Another downfall of roguelites is this feeling that player skill isn’t as valuable as time invested. But pretty much every roguelite is made with the intention that the player can actually finish the game without buying a single upgrade - check YouTube and you’ll find players who can finish Rogue Legacy with a level zero character.

In fact, this could be turned into a meta level challenge within the game - how few levels do you need to ascend before you can finish Rogue Legacy?

So, there we have it. But, as I’ve found out, everyone’s got a different viewpoint on this. Personally, I love the purity of roguelikes. Random generation and permadeath mean you can’t memorise the level layouts, or rely on the slow accumulation of power. It’s all about your skill. Roguelites, however, do allow for that slow accumulation of power - and, if you ask me, that creates a weirdo backwards difficulty curve that brings in an unpleasant ambiguity over whether you success is down to your increasing skill, or the game’s falling difficulty level.

But what about you? Do you prefer roguelikes or roguelites - and why? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for watching. ZAGREUS: Well, time to go get killed again.