Think of Cult of the Lamb as Animal Crossing’s morbid, roguelike cousin.

Items and item locations are usually also randomized on each play-through. If you’re playing a game set in a dungeon, for example, the rooms of each dungeon change every time you die and begin again. Procedural generation: To ensure that you never experience the same run twice, roguelikes use procedural generation, which means the game employs an algorithm to randomly generate new maps each time you play.Picking up items and upgrading your equipment and abilities over the course of a dozen failed attempts can bolster your starting character, but you also have to memorize enemy combat patterns and perfect your dodge rolls or attack timing. Hard-earned progression: Usually, success in roguelikes comes from a combination of acquired loot and practiced skill.Repeated failure is an essential part of the experience, and it often makes your character or starting loadout stronger, tempering the difficulty over time. Most roguelikes you see nowadays respawn the same character but set you back at the beginning of your journey, allowing you to keep certain perks or abilities if you reached checkpoints or saved them through an unlocking system. This is called permanent death, or permadeath the original Rogue did this. Some games don’t hold back at all and strip you of everything you earned or picked up along the way. Risk: Most roguelikes give you limited health and penalize you for dying or failing an attempt.Wirecutter’s tech team has played a slew of roguelikes, and we recommend them if you’re looking for a unique-and challenging-take on the games you may already love. Then, raise the stakes so that dying and losing a run has more punishing consequences, and you have the premise for a quintessential roguelike. changed the order of its platforms and moved the locations of the hidden stars every time you restarted, and you had no way to predict what items you would pick up or where to find them. We love roguelike games because they take familiar traits from our favorite genres and games and put a twist on the formula by randomizing certain elements. In most video games, every surprise is a surprise only once, and almost everything you see is the result of meticulous planning by the people who made it. A vibrant subgenre of video games, the roguelike, offers exactly that kind of experience. But imagine if your favorite video game-whether that’s Elden Ring, a Zelda title, or Animal Crossing: New Horizons-could still surprise you after dozens of hours of play, offering new stuff to find and a fresh experience every time you played it. Most video games are finite, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Nytimes wirecutter