The Best Roguelikes, Ranked

Dying is the plot, which nobody had pulled off this well before Supergiant released the 1.0 on 17 September 2020. Zagreus fails, the House fills with people who have opinions about how he failed, and the story moves forward a notch. The Mirror of Night is the trap — one more run, because Death Defiance is always another handful of Darkness away.

Card removal is the whole thing, and it took me fifty runs to believe it. Your starting deck is mostly Strikes and Defends, and the winning runs are the ones where you spent gold at the merchant deleting them rather than buying something shiny. Mega Crit released the 1.0 on 23 January 2019 and every deckbuilder since has been arguing with it.

Brimstone turns your tears into a red laser and rewrites a run in one pickup; two synergies later you are deleting bosses and cackling, and then you find Cursed Eye and it all falls apart. Nicalis rebuilt Edmund McMillen's Flash original and shipped this version on 4 November 2014, which is why people have four-figure hour counts.

Motion Twin shipped the 1.0 on 7 August 2018, and the moment it clicks is parrying an elite with the Ice Shield and freezing the whole room — combat stops being twitchy and starts being deliberate. Cells buy permanent unlocks between runs, purists hate that, and the game is better for it, because every death funds the next attempt.

LocalThunk built it alone and Playstack published it on 20 February 2024. Poker hands are the vocabulary and jokers are the grammar; the run where Blueprint lands next to a scaling joker is where the numbers stop meaning anything and you start playing with exponents. I lost a whole evening to an ante-nine flush build without once checking the clock.

Venting a hull section to suffocate a boarding party while your pilot bleeds out is a decision you make in about four seconds. Subset Games released it on 14 September 2012 and nothing since has made a spreadsheet this tense. The Rebel fleet creeping across the sector map is the clock, and it has ended more of my runs than any boss.

Nothing here is random noise. Shoot a shopkeeper with a stray bomb and he will hunt you across four more levels and kill you at the exit, which is a grudge no other roguelike bothers to model. Mossmouth and BlitWorks put the sequel on PlayStation 4 on 15 September 2020 and on Windows a fortnight later, and learning to leave shopkeepers alone costs about sixty deaths.

Freehold Games built it and Kitfox published the 1.0 on 5 December 2024, which makes the oldest-feeling game here one of the newest releases. Choosing a mutant over a true kin at character creation forks everything after it, because mutations compound in ways nothing bothers to explain. My best run ended when a fire I started spread into a village I needed alive.

Time is the difficulty curve, so looting carefully is itself a mistake — the longer you take, the nastier the spawns. Hopoo Games moved the series into 3D and Gearbox published the 1.0 on 11 August 2020. Stacking a dozen Soldier's Syringes behind a Brilliant Behemoth until Engineer turrets clear a whole screen is the dumbest fun in the genre.

Wand editing is where the thing turns on you: I welded a chainsaw trigger to a homing spark bolt and vaporised myself in a single frame. Nolla Games released the 1.0 on 15 October 2020, and every pixel is simulated — sand falls, oil burns, water carries lightning straight back to whoever cast it. Deaths are nearly always self-inflicted.

Supergiant's sequel reached 1.0 on 25 September 2025, and it is denser, longer and a little less disciplined than the first. Spending Magick to hold a cast rather than dashing clear changes the rhythm of every fight, because witchcraft rewards standing still where the first game punished it. Routes above the Underworld as well as below mean more to see and a longer wait before a run feels tight.

Open-source since 1987 and still maintained by the NetHack DevTeam, this is the ancestor the rest of the list descends from; the Steam product is FrozenCrate's 2018 remaster of that free original rather than a new game. Praying to your god while Weak from hunger saves you roughly as often as it doesn't, and one cockatrice corpse ends everything.

Stress is the antagonist, not the monsters. Douse the torch for better loot and the resolve checks get worse; a hero at a hundred stress can turn Abusive and spend the fight screaming at the healer instead of swinging at anything. Red Hook Studios released it on 19 January 2016. I lost a fully levelled Vestal to a heart attack two rooms from the exit.

Brace Yourself Games released it on 23 April 2015 with Danny Baranowsky on the soundtrack, and the rule is that you move on the beat or you lose the coin multiplier. Greed and timing become the same resource, which is a cruel idea. The shopkeeper sings along in key with whatever track is playing, and that is the detail everybody remembers.

Dodge Roll made it and Devolver Digital published it on 5 April 2016. Rolling through a bullet costs nothing if you time it, and rolling over a table flips that table into cover, so movement is offence and defence on the same button. Gun puns wear thin around hour forty; the run where the shop sells you a Black Hole Gun does not.

poncle released the 1.0 on 20 October 2022 and started a subgenre in which you barely press anything. You move, the weapons fire themselves, and twenty minutes later the screen is a solid wall of garlic and lightning with a boss somewhere inside it. Ranked here for what it began rather than what it asks of you, and I still played forty hours.

Selene crashes on Atropos and starts the loop again. Housemarque shipped it for PlayStation 5 on 30 April 2021, and the PC version reached Steam on 15 February 2023, which is why a PlayStation roguelike can sit on a Steam-linked list at all. Suspend Cycle, the mid-run save added in an October 2021 update, exists because one cycle can eat two hours. Losing one to a bad landing still stings.