Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

I generally have the same frustration with roguelites as you seem to: every time I start a run, it feels like I'm gambling whether I'll have any fun at all. A bad seed or start can mean losing in ways that feel unfair or boring, like in balatro if you get a bunch of bad hands and bad jokers, you struggle through rounds and hands until you either lose or get an interesting combination. I don't need that kind of gambling in my life when there's tons of games out there where I know I will have fun.

E: I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast. I'll also still try out Blue Prince because people I respect seem to like it.

One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve and generally becomes a rule once you become good enough at some of the games.

One of the key differences between rogue lites and rogue likes is meta progression. In most roguelites you're able to unlock things and get more powerful for future runs. In roguelikes you always have the same starting rng. I definitely agree with you that it's all up to the game to balance the progression through both unlocks and skill improvement so it's not entirely rng. But I also don't think many put much effort into "every run is solvable". Especially for roguelikes.

> I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast

I enjoyed Balatro for quite a few hours before I had this problem, which is more than enough for me to call it a good game.

Beyond these first few hours though, you need ridiculously high multipliers to succeed. There's way too many jokers and 90% of them are trash by this point. The ones you need have vanishingly small probabilities, and then you need to add those probabilities together to get the combo of jokers required.

I would start a run, and within the first few minutes I would know that the RNG hadn't given me what I needed, reset, start again, repeat.

I looked up some guides, and they'd recommend using specific legendary jokers, which over my entire time playing (maybe 15 hours?) I didn't encounter even once. The only way to get them would be to play hundreds or even thousands of times.

At that point, it doesn't feel like a game anymore. It feels like a gambling addiction.

For me, that's time to call it quits. But I do wonder if the same people who struggle with gambling addiction in the real world are the ones who continue playing here.

At least with Balatro there is ten hours worth of game before your reach this point.

Hades is fun because there is some skill involved with the button mashing to go with the RNG, but it feels like too many games are just dressed up gambling mechanics these days. Balatro is too naked and bare with being clever gambling, plus all the ding ding ding slot machine dopamine special effects.

I'd say it's even worse for roguelites. They tend to balanced assuming the player has done some or most of the meta-progression. Sometimes to the point where it feels the game forces you to lose to experience more of it. (I really liked inscryption up until it forced me to fail 2-3 times because I progressed too much)

With roguelikes at least you are at the intended power level every time, even if some of these games are too RNG reliant.

With real roguelikes (aka games on a grid with turn-based combat), I believe they're not designed to be fair at all. There's so much rng involved, so you will get unexpected and unfair deaths and lots of them.

Roguelike community has a saying - "losing is fun". And while I only played a few traditional rl games and finished none of them, I had great experience while constantly "losing" only a few hours into the run.

In most roguelites I play, losing isn't fun - it's frustrating. There is often very little variety in earlier stages of the game, so if you're bad (and I am) you're stuck replaying the same section for hours, only to get good RNG, go 1 level farther and immediately die to some new mechanic or difficulty spike.

One exception is The Binding Of Isaac, this is probably the best roguelite game I've ever played and nothing comes even close.

There is fair and then there is "fair". I do think most rougelikes spend at least some time on making sure the the default path is usually workable. I think roguelites fall into the trap of relying on meta-progression to push in-game progression too much. Some of the card roguelites I play feel impossible to "win" without meta progression. And in some it feels like they mostly expand complexity. It's a difficult thing to balance. I'm mostly okay with the difficulty spikes because they usually accompany power spikes that you can get with the right choices and rng. I really like the "breaking the game" aspect of roguelites like Balatro. Getting mathematical notation for high scores hits different, even though it's not necessary for beating the normal levels.

I really don't agree. When you learn the mechanics well, you can consistently win runs.

Hades relies too heavily on meta progression. You are supposed to grind before winning. The game is not balanced around your original state. I personally hate that because I view it as the game wasting my time but I can understand how it’s supposed to be enjoyable.

Balatro has a different issue for me. Despite having a lot of joker it sometimes feels very RNG reliant and limited once you reach high stakes. Plus the difficulty rises somehow artificially by withdrawing options rather than expending the challenge.

Slay the Spire remains unbeatable for me. No other game has the same level of complexity. You get all the tool to limit variance but every choice becomes very significant.

> Slay the Spire remains unbeatable for me.

is there actually something to beat in there?

I thought you rush through opponents, then hit the "collectively with all players of the world apply bajillion damage" and there's nothing more?

I don’t know how to understand your comment. The goal of Slay the Spire is to climb all the way to the heart while picking cards and beating it, preferably on A20 - all the other difficulty levels being basically a tutorial leading to the real game. There is no moment involving all the players of the world and the game is generally very slow so I’m a bit lost.

People win streak gold stake Balatro, A20H slay the spire, unfair slice and dice, and plenty of other games in this category. Nothing wrong with playing a game for 10 hours and being done with it but calling them rng fiestas just because you can’t beat the game on the hardest difficulty every time after 10 hours is a bit dismissive of the level of effort that is put in to getting these games as tightly tuned as they are.

I swear I remember that when you get to the heart, you get to see something like "you need [huge number] of total damage, damage that has been applied [medium number gets increased by your measly tiny damage]" or maybe "health left [huge non-round number gets decreased by very little]" and then your character dies

I just assumed that it's some online thing where it counts total damage from everyone to finally slay that heart "together"

There are unbeatable seeds [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/t3habp/the_fi...

Yes, but by consistent I meant like 90%, not 100

You get your score shown as damage once you beat the act 3 boss(es) and then go on to act 4 to fight the final boss if you properly collected the three keys which unlock it while climbing.

I'm not GP, but I thought I'd weigh in given I basically started this thread. I watch Balatro University who has the longest gold stake streak in Balatro, and while I respect that, I don't think that counters the point that the genre is heavily dependent on RNG. Winning isn't fun by default, and neither is losing boring. But you can win in ways that are boring (e.g. by getting a "broken" start and crushing through all stages) and lose in ways that are boring (e.g. by getting terrible rng that makes each round a slog until you finally lose.) With a rogue{like, lite} you are always at the mercy of RNG to see which of the {win, lose} x {fun, boring} combos you're in for, which when you're busy and have limited time to play games is extremely discouraging.