Hades – The much needed Narrative Roguelike

Sometimes, there are these games that I hear everyone talking about for weeks or months nonstop. Games that I should be desperate to get my hands on. Yet, for some reason I don’t, I sit on my hands and only pick them up much later.

It was around the time I was compiling and writing my top ten video games of 2020 list that I became very aware that I’d made a big mistake by not playing Hades. Despite having every opportunity to realise that I was missing out on something great. Because Hades is great.

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West of Dead – The Undead, Cowboy Roguelike

It’s super reductive to review a game simply by comparing it to other games, but sometimes there’s no better way to describe where a game is coming from when it feels like a certain style of game was ingrained into its DNA from the point of conception. I’ll just say this, if you played and enjoyed Dead Cells from 2017, then there is a lot of commonality between it and this game that West of Dead would be worth a look.

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Void Bastards – What is a Roguelike?

Making video games is hard, time consuming (and sometimes thankless) work. Now, more so than ever. Smaller scale, indie developers are in an especially tricky place, expected to make games of a comparable scale to AAA titles, with a fraction of a fraction of the resources. In these cases, the idea of making a “Roguelike” seems like the perfect cheat to get around this.

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