Steam is hosting the Going Rogue Fest, highlighting the many roguelike games on the platform that are currently on sale. And also roguelites, and.. soulslikes and Metroidvania games as well, apparently.
It’s a nice collection of sales highlighting some big titles as well as new hot indie releases like the roguelite Rogue Legacy 2 (which we reviewed recently here) and Peglin (a roguelike RPG with a hint of Peggle, which sounds awesome on paper).
Going Rogue: A Festival of Persistence, to give the fest its full name, has a good post on the Steam page about why they feature all four of these subgenre, features varying degrees of overlap. And this involves a quick history lesson.
The roguelike name came from the 1980 game Rogue, a dungeon crawler featuring random maps and permadeath. These later become the core tenet of games like Rogue, hence why it’s called the roguelike: random maps and permadeath.
The developers that attended the International Roguelike Development Conference in 2008 had come up with a strict definition of what constitutes a roguelike, dubbed The Berlin Interpretation after which the conference was held.
So, some serious discussions about the sub-genre have taken place. Though any game with at least random maps and permadeath can be considered to be a roguelike, or have roguelike elements.
Meanwhile, rougelites are roguelikes but play by the rules fast and loose. So you get games that have permadeath but with persistent unlocks, for example.
Now here’s the weirder part. Soulslikes borrow the same naming convention, as it is for games that are like Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls series, in this case, action RPGs where deaths are aplenty and you have to start over into the last checkpoint with almost all enemies respawning in place again. But it also has persistent unlocks (like levelling up and increasing stats).
And lastly, there’s Metroidvanias, games that are like the Metroidvania and Castelvania series. Also known as search action games, these games generally don’t involve permadeath, as it’s more about learning the usually static map as well as unlocking progression.
So why it’s here in this discourse and festival other than it being a subgenre also being named after other games, then? The big Venn Diagram intersection, the common thread between these subgenres, are about rewarding persistence in play. Which the Going Rogue Fest is all about.
Anyways, these are the games on sale featured in the Going Rogue Fest:
- Rogue Legacy 2 – RM35.20 (20%)
- Peglin – RM35.10 (10%)
- Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order – RM39.75 (75%)
- Nioh 2 – RM135.85 (35%)
- Hollow Knight – RM12.40 (60%)
- Dead Cells – RM26.40 (40%)
- Noita – RM19.50 (50%)
- Wildermyth – RM33 (25%)
- Death’s Door – RM29.40 (40%)
- Bloodstained – Ritual Of The Night – RM65.20 (60%)
- Mortal Shell – RM65.20 (50%)
You can find more sales, as well as featured roguelikes, rougelites, soulslikes and Metroidvanias, including upcoming titles, on the Going Rogue Fest page here. The sale ends on May 9, 10 AM Pacific (May 10, 1 AM Malaysia Time, +8 GMT).