Steam Roguelike Sale (ending soon!)

[Wingflier]

So Steam is having a roguelike sale this weekend. It started sometime yesterday and ends Monday. So unfortunately, many members of this forum probably won't even read this thread before it's over. But for those who do, I'd like to hear your recommendations for some of the games on the list.

Roguelikes have classically been one of my favorite kinds of games, simply because of the hardcore, brutal nature of having to start over after every mistake. Some games can clearly take this too far, but that's where there's things such as difficulty and hopefully the developer designs the game in such a way that the learning curve is reasonable.

Anyway, I need to hear some opinions on the games that stand out to you guys in the sale. I haven't played most of them but I'll go through the list of games I've played in hopes that others will do the same and that we can pick out the special titles in a sea of mediocrity.

Faster-Than-Light: Basically started an entirely new genre on its own. If you haven't tried this you owe it to yourself to buy this game. Space fans everywhere rejoice.

Don't Starve: Decent game if you like survival-crafting games. Don't Starve takes this to an extreme however, being much more hardcore than say something like Minecraft or Terraria, and with a much darker, more adult themed setting. This game really shines in multiplayer with a group of friends however, which is enabled upon the purchase of the "Dont Starve Together" DLC (I think this will be included for free once it leaves beta).

Crypt of the Necrodancer: Just watch the trailer for this one. Amazing concept and decent execution. Still in beta but a nice mash-up of the musical beat destruction games (think Beat Hazard or Audiosurf) and the dungeon-crawler roguelikes.

Binding of Isaac: Genre classic.

Risk of Rain: Though having little to no single-player value, this game is hilarious, frantic, multiplayer madness that everybody should try with friends. Absolutely brutal.

Alright now tell me which ones in the list you've played so I can decide which ones to buy. I'm specifically interested Sunless Sea, even though it's the most expensive because it's already been mentioned in the forums and looks the most promising of the ones I haven't played. Also, Arcen's Bionic Dues is in the list as well.

[WingedKagouti]

Stuff I've played that you haven't mentioned:

Dungeons of Dredmor
Probably the most Rogue-like of all of the games in the sale and one of the few that truly embrace the Rogue-like gameplay. Turnbased, stuff that can instakill, tough progression, but still a fair game that just isn't open about all the rules. The main feature of the game is the weird humor, which is found in the flavor text of skills, items and enemies.

Spelunky
Quite a while since I touched this. People who like it seem to really like it, while it never clicked for me I can see the outline of why others might enjoy it.

Super House of Dead Ninjas
I've made it to floor 0 once. Haven't played it that much, but it's fun. This game is much more about your speed, reflexes and coordination than anything else. You basically start at the top of a tall tower and try to make your way to the bottom floor where you'll face off against an evil boss, every 100 levels have a lesser boss to encounter until you reach the bottom floor. The main thing is that you can't jump as high as you'd want, so you'll want to make sure you get the powerups, kill what you need and always progress downwards.

Vertical Drop Heroes
Fairly similar concept to SHoDN. Different art style and more combat focused.

Teleglitch
Haven't played much of it, but a fairly frantic experience and something I'll probably get back to at some point.

Rogue Legacy
A Metroidvania Roguelite. A solid game if you want something closer to a traditional platformer.

Tower of Guns
Only played a couple of rounds of this, but the "Pick 1 gun before starting a run and never get another weapon" thing doesn't sit too well with me. You do get to upgrade your weapon some, but it's still just one gun per playthrough. Still not a bad game overall.

Cargo Commander
I've only played this a short while, but it has some interesting concepts and I'll probably poke at it some more in the future.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Going to +1 Wingfiler's suggestions as they basically mirror my own. That said, I'll add:

Tales of Maj'Eyal - Open source roguelike that I've found to be pretty good from my initial playthroughs of it.

Super House of Dead Ninjas - Fun little distraction to play every now and again.

[Draco18s]

Risk of Rain is great, and the one thing I'll say about it is that it gets easier as you play.  The first class (commando) is actually pretty hard to play straight away.
That said, some of the other classes are not hard to unlock.  The engineer (my favorite class) is unlocked once you buy enough drones (they look like scrap heaps).  So even if you go into a game and go "drones are not worth the cost" buy at least one.  And eventually you'll have bought enough of them (40 total, across all games) to unlock the engineer.

A lot of the more interesting/powerful items also don't show up until you get their achievements as well.  Don't worry about most of them, in terms of going "ok what do I need to do to get this?" but rather just play the game: you'll eventually unlock something.  Playing with friends, helps too.

Lasty, ignore the artifacts until you can solo Monsoon difficulty.  They shake the game up, so don't even worry about it until you have the skill and available item inventory to take whatever the game throws at you.

[mrhanman]

I was excited when I heard about this sale. But then I was slightly disappointed, and a little bit proud, that I own all but 2 or 3 games on the list.  Verticle Drop Heroes is one I've played quite a bit lately, but you can't go wrong with anything there.

[Pumpkin]

Hey! Bionic dues -50%!

[Mick]

I like crypt of the necrodancer. It is not beta, it is full release now.

Sunless sea is based on fallen London, and while I love the Setting, I didn't care for the game because it spreads out the content behind a lot of slow boat travel. Game seriously needs a fast forward button.

[Misery]

Risk of Rain is pretty good, I've put what, like, 80 hours into it?  Heck if I remember.  I've only played it solo.

Dungeons of Dredmor is freaking fantastic.  Be warned though:  It's a *long* game.  Particularly with it's expansions.  Each dungeon floor is gigantic.  And of course, it still has permadeath despite this.   And there are the monster zoos.  Those are hilarious.

Binding of Isaac is just amazing.  Specifically thinking about the new version, Rebirth, here.  The amount of new content is just staggering.  Yeah, it costs a little more, but it's sooooooo worth it.

Tower of Guns I didn't get along with very well.  Just.... I dunno.  It annoys me a bit much. 

Heavy Bullets, I like this one alot.  Simple concept:  You've got one gun, a revolver.  Start with 6 bullets.  You're not going to get any other guns, and you're not going to be carrying around clips of bullets with you.  Instead, you re-use the ones you have; once fired, a bullet will sort of hover/bounce around the area where it impacted a wall/enemy/thing, waiting to be picked back up.  The game rewards precision and careful thinking because of this.  You CAN get more bullets, but you buy them individually, and you're not exactly going to want to buy a ton of them.... there's alot of other things to spend money on too.  All in all, I think this one is really good, but it's hard to give a full sense of what it's like just by explaining it.

Our Darker Purpose is a game very similar to Binding of Isaac, using the whole "randomly generated Zelda dungeons" idea.  It uses a very gothic artstyle instead of the very.... er, gross style Isaac uses.  It is harder than Isaac in my opinion;  Isaac, sooner or later, will always spit out runs where the items you get combine in such a way as to make you nearly invincible... this game, I've found does not do that.  Also, it has a much more "bullet hell" feel to it.  Enemies and bosses in particular will absolutely cover the screen in bullets/bombs/poison clouds/chairs or whatever.  Even the early ones will do this, and items generally arent going to make you all-powerful.  Also the soundtrack is freaking amazing.  Done by the same guy that did the original Isaac's music, if I recall correctly.  I find this game a bit difficult; make of that what you will.

And of course you may or may not have heard of a game by the name of Bionic Dues.   I've put alot of time into THAT one too.  Maybe too much.

[TheVampire100]

Holy shit, I have almost every game in this list! I don't know if I should feel bad or proud. I decide for a mixed feeling of both.
My two cents on some of the games:

Bionic Dues: Okay, obvious, it's an Arcen Game. I really like it and for the few that don't hve it already, buy it. Buy it now or you will regret it. It was my first game of AG ever and it brought me here.

Rogue Legacy: The name fits the game perfectly. This game draws its fun from all the deaths you receive and pass all yout stuff to the next character in line. This game is all about dying and descendants and stuff like this. It is a heavily platformer and sometimes you might get crazy at the layout of the castle ("WTF has this to do here?!") but overall it's fun with a high replay value. Also one of the hardest games ever played.

Dungeons of Dredmor: Despote all the funny and crazy appearance this is in it's core a very true rogue-like. It has all the stuff you want to have in a rogue-like. Random generated maps, turn-based gameplay, leveling, loot, mire loot and a lot of ridicoulous classes that you can mix like you want (why not try out a vegan vampire pirate?). Also a very very hard game with a lot of trial and error action. A key element in the game is that you don't know what most items do. You have to try out and a tasty looking potion could be in instead a flask of acid. Some might turn this off but you can check out all item effects in the game files if you need to.

Binding of Isaac: Not really my favorite game but a friend of mine played this like crazy and have collected almost everything that there is to collect. The game cannot hold me for that long but you can also play it for a short round of "How die I this time?"

Don't Starve: Bought this while it was in EA, have also the expansuin. When you buy it, you get also the upcoming Multiplayer version (which is a standalone game) for free. The game is a mix of sandbox and survival game bt the survival part overlaps mostly the sandbox part. You are in a strange world and have to survive there. there is soem sort o background story into it, how you got into this world and that you try to escape but you don't have to follow it. The story mode is seamless tied to the normal survival mode so you can decide if you want to follow the story or just survive as long as you can. The game itself feels a little like Amnesia meets rogue-like.

Sunless Sea: one of my favourite games. A lot of people don't like that it is so slow paced. This is true, the game advances very slow and there are sections were you sail through darkness without doing something. That's sometimes annoying. On the other hand there are sections were you have your hands deep in something and wish that you can just escape. The game is a spin-off from the Fallen London web game, an interactive story that is set in an alternate timeline of the victorian Age. London was stolen by a mysterious organization, known as the Echo Bazaar and the Masters of the Bazaar. The city was dragged down into an underworld known as the Neath were a lot of strange creatures live and physical laws have little meaning. You travel with your ship to different islands in this dark wirld, trade stuff, fight monsters and do soem quests. There are some end goals in the game but you can also try just to enjoy all the stories that are around. The game is more about interactive story telling and less about having a full flegded game experience. It IS a full game though with everything that comes with this. And, like all rogue-likes, hard a shell (which is funny because in this world there IS a hell).

[Misery]

Holy shit, I have almost every game in this list! I don't know if I should feel bad or proud. I decide for a mixed feeling of both.

Yeah, pretty much the same here.

I saw the big list of the games that were on sale there, thought "Wow, that's alot of roguelikes there!  Probably a whole bunch of things I want!" and then.... I noticed that nearly all of them were "in library" already.   So.... yeah.  I did buy a couple of things, but there wasnt much for me TO buy.

[Draco18s]

TotalBiscuit did a WTF is for Heavy Bullets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F2zdbgYU2M

It looked too infuriating for me to really want to attempt, but there are definitely people out there that like that sort of thing.

[madcow]

It's probably too late for sale feedback. But has anybody here played NeoScavenger?  Any thoughts on it?

Also I picked up crypt of the necrodancer. I was expecting to not like it to be honest, but I'm finding it pretty fantastic.

[TheVampire100]

Neo Scavenger feels a little akward. It is very old-school like. This makes also a good chunk of the appeal to it but some people might turn it off just because of that.
The interactive possibilities are great, the survival aspect is well developed and fits perfectly. And suprisingly it's easier to play as other rogue-likes. The battle system is one of the things I don't like about it.
You have a lot of describtive actions like "walk away, run away, crawl away, hide, do some other crazy stuff" and you don't really get what the difference is. Battles feel slow and confusing, you don't know who is actually winnign and running away does never really work.
The crafting system could have also been better managed. The best thing is throw everything you have in the crafting panel to find out all the recipes for the items you have at the moment. There is no encouragement to test specific item combinations because it's easier to pit everything in the crafting panel and note all the crafting recipes that are possible with your stuff.