Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

> As with other roguelikes, you can unlock persistent upgrades that smooth over repetitive parts of the game.

I think those are called rogue-lites, for the reason that real rogue-likes (e.g. nethack, DCSS) actually wipe out all your progress on each attempt.

At this point, times have shifted, and meta-progression is usually considered an aspect of modern roguelikes. There was a trend of calling them "rogue-lites" but that's faded and now games like ADOM and DCSS are "Classic roguelikes"

It's not a hard and fast rule or anything, just what I've observed in gaming discussions.

That’s a shame, because meta-progression ultimately undermines the spirit of these classic games.

Roguelikes were designed to play like arcade games in that you’d always start over from scratch and try to get a high score. Most attempts ended in failure but as you got better at the game it was reflected in your score. Even after players achieve a high degree of expertise they still find the games challenging to win and so they keep playing and enjoying them for years to come.

Meta-progression takes away the from-scratch element and just allows you to win through sheer persistence, chipping away at the problem until it’s easy enough for you to finish it in one final run. But then what? The game is no longer the same challenge it was when you first started. It’s like a mountain that keeps getting smaller every time you attempt to climb it, until it’s finally shrunk to the size of an anthill. This is not a recipe for a game you can play for many years.

Ultimately, what meta-progression does is turn a roguelike into a standard narrative RPG just like any other. This is one where the player’s goal is to reach the end of the game and that’s it, not to learn the game’s systems and reach a high level of mastery.

Eh, idk. Theres an argument to be had that meta progression tends to cap in most of these games so eventually it becomes a stable thing.

Although generally I find the meta progression of things goes too far and starts off too weak.

Yes, because the goal of the game designer who adds meta progression is to increase the number of players who actually finish the game, at least when it comes to the "true progression" style meta progression.

There is another approach based on unlocks, where the player unlocks new characters or game modes rather than having a single character get more and more powerful with each run. Some people prefer these unlocks but others don't. I saw one streamer, Jorbs, who got a brand new game and immediately looked up a save file hack to unlock everything from the beginning because he so detested unlocks.