Hades

Great Gods! This game is good.

The rogue-like formula is presented wholistically in Hades, with all the tough decision-making, strategizing, and making tradeoffs between getting more powerful and staying healthy. It took me 17 runs to do my first clear, and I was immediately motivated to jump right back in to try winning with different weapons.

The world, characters, and visuals are my favourite part about this game. Greek mythology is presented very refreshingly, even though these are all characters that I have heard of and read about in the classics, it's another level when they come to life fully voice-acted in a family drama.

I ended up going with the longest range build possible, to avoid damage and kill from afar. My favorite powers were from Dionysius: inflicting stacks of 'hangover' would slowly whittle my enemy down with a poison-like effect. It felt a bit cheesy (doesn't mean executing it successfully was easy!), but the beauty of it is the decision about playstyle is entirely up to the player.

Here's my winning build! The spear's special let me keep a whole screens distance between the enemies and me. ^_^;;

Random Roguelikes

Games are really spiced up by randomness. Especially roguelikes, which put players on a ever-changing path to victory. Each step of the way, you can choose to go left or right and even try to take on harder challenges for more impressive rewards. Balancing risk and reward is an engrossing activity for the human mind. And so is pushing oneself to the limit and conquering difficult tasks.

A lot of rogue-like games that center around combat for it's obstacles. "Path of Adventure" is a text RPG where you have to fight monsters. "Hades" is an action game that has you battle the demons of hell. Dota 2's event "Aghanim's Labyrinth" repurposed it's action combat system with a rogue-like metagame.

I wonder what one would look like without combat? What sort of other skill check systems could merge well with with the rogue meta game?