Finding myself with less time to play games these days, I tend to hop into ones I can pick up and put down relatively easy. Roguelikes are a genre that scratch this quick itch. Although lately, I’ve been hooked on the randomizer mod for Kingdom Hearts 2 and noticed is that randomizer runs can work on this same design. Both roguelikes and randomizers involve playing through familiar areas with different builds and tools for a given challenge
Roguelikes
The roguelikes genre has seen a boom over the last few years, driven by Indies like Spelunky and Binding of Isaac in the early twenty-teens. Their origin goes back to the namesake, Rogue. A procedurally generated adventure game created in 1980, its core gameplay elements still used in the genre today.
The gameplay loop of a roguelike involves a single life or session in which failure results in a permanent loss of any progression made. Though some ‘roguelites” include an overall progression on top of the single run gameplay. Throughout this single life, players gain loot, levels or other power ups to take on harder challenges
Ravenswatch is a fairy tale inspired roguelike that can be played with up to a group of four. The game was a big hit with my group of friends, many of which are also fans of the Supergiant’s latest release Hades II and the poker roguelike Balatro. The on-the-fly nature of build crafting paired with solid moment to moment gameplay offers an excellent experience, and it’s even better with friends.
Handling Hardcore
What about games in which perma-death or a single run isn’t part of the core design? Could introducing the thrill of risk offer a new experience for longtime players.
MMOs typically rely on a general build up of levels and gear so that more challenging content can be explored. To lose progress is almost antithetical to the progression driven gameplay that a MMO thrives on.
Before the OSRS bug bit me, I was a long time on and off World of Warcraft player. I first started playing in middle school and it was my first real MMO experience. With years of playing on and off, it was with the release of the Hardcore game mode that from a few years ago that brought me back for what is now the last time.
Hardcore mode was the kind of shake up that WoW’s Classic player base needed to breath some like into the now more-or-less mastered game. Dying and losing it all after months of playing with hundreds of hours on the line gave each encounter real stakes. It could be an epic battle during a raid or as simple as not respecting fall damage. Death was always around the corner.
Hardcore modes are nothing new. Blizzard Entertainment’s own Diablo series had a hardcore mode as far back as the second entry. Permadeath was the fundamental way of playing early videogames both in the arcade and at home. More recently, Hollow Knight offered Steel Soul mode and Baldur’s Gate 3 included Honor Mode.
Even in MMOs, Old School Runescape introduced it’s hardcore Ironman mode back in 2016 as an addition to it’s other Ironman challenge modes. I think OSRS’s handling of perma-death modes is one I prefer. Once a hardcore Ironman dies, their current level, boss kills and other stats are locked into the high scores, but the character is still playable with all gear, levels, etc. but simply as a normal Ironman.
Mods and Self Made Challenges
Sometimes games don’t offer built in challenges like perma-death modes, but this hasn’t stopped gamers from making their own fun in unofficial ways.
Speed running has existed since as long as games have. Records and high scores are all targets for any kind of game. This approach to a game is almost like a roguelike or hardcore experience. Countless runs are cut short after a mistake cost too much time, and ending the run is the best course of action. Even in success, that progress is reset the next time the timer starts.
Beyond speed running, fans and players of a wide range of game have experimented with both challenge runs within games’ exiting rules and beyond them. The explosion of randomizer mods in the last decade is a subject I can possibly do a thorough deep dive on. I’ve recently had the joy of setting up the Kingdom Hearts 2 randomizer, and it is an absolute blast.
Randomizers are modifications to the game that take a game’s typical rewards and shuffles them throughout the entirety of the experience. For example, in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, the Fairy Bow is found in a specific chest in the Forest Temple, typically the fourth dungeon a player would enter on a normal playthrough. A randomizer might place the bow in a chest in the starting area of the game. Different games have a different range of settings and options, all of which take the original gameplay experience and shake it up enough that even veteran players may have a difficult time.
The Kingdom Hearts 2 randomizer has been a fun way to change up a play through from the typical start to finish. Having different abilities, items and options for taking on a given boss forces me to get better at understanding how all the elements of the game come together. This with only a few runs of randomizing the bosses themselves, which has it’s own challenges and comedy to the mix – who would have thought Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean could become the leader of the Organization!
Returning to the hardcore concept and the Zelda series, recent game mode added to The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time randomizers brings the permadeath risk to the games. A new “gloom mode” which permanently removes Link’s hearts after every hit. This combines another set of community challenge runs of “no hit” or one-hit KO runs into the randomizer directly.
Any game offers permadeath by simply quitting a file or playthrough. For the brief period I streamed on Twitch, a number of my nights were spent playing Skyrim with permadeath for each character. The creator Joov has made a number of videos exploring different games with permadeath in mind.
Just as I finished my final draft on this post, I stumbled on this video by 360chrism in which over 500 players randomized 500 games’ items into one giant cooperative playthrough. Across these games, over 140 unique games were included. From Super Mario 64 to MS Paint. This is a simple showcase of how customizable randomizers have become.
I could continue on and on with different games and how permadeath adds to the experience, but my recent affixation on randomizers and roguelikes was a particular topic I wanted to reflect on.
Trying Out Before Buying In 