I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?
Update: Y’all convinced me. I bought Binding of Isaac and am excited to start. I also tried out Dead Cells via Netflix, but feel like I’d prefer it with a controller compared to mobile. Gonna start with Isaac, and wait for a sale on Dead Cells. Thank you for all the recommendations! I’m saving this thread for future reference.
My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoiler
I was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
Alright, this has convinced me to give Noita a shot.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoiler
Learn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done.
All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation! I’ve wishlisted it and will pick it up when it goes on sale. The art is absolutely beautiful, I can see how it could get haunting and lonely.