Exploring the Key Elements that Have Helped Make 2024 the Year of Roguelikes on Steam

Each year, Steam is flooded with new releases. While many stick to the old standbys like running and gunning on CS:GO or adding traits to Sims, there are plenty to explore among the new indie releases. In 2024, the charts have been flooded with hit roguelikes.

With a combination of challenging gameplay, renewed experiences on each run, and some very creative applications of the genre, it’s not a surprise that so many roguelikes have achieved fame this year.

Some Excellent Roguelikes in 2024

So many excellent roguelikes have broken into the Top Sellers page on Steam this year, with most of them offering a unique theme or take on the format. Naturally, Hades II built on the imperious standing of the first game, while Balatro hit mainstream headlines for its superb combination of poker play and roguelike mechanics.

These two headline the class, but there are plenty of others that have deservedly risen to prominence. In the spring Buckshot Roulette and BlazBlue Entropy Effect earned stacks of positive reviews to help rank them among the best-received indie games of the year. Panicore helped to up the ante of one of the key roguelike mechanics – permadeath – with a true survival horror setting.

Pile in Halls of Torment, Rabbit and Steel, Shogun Showdown, Path Achra, Slice & Dice, Peglin, and Anomaly Agent, and 2024’s cemented as the year of great roguelikes. So, what are the core elements that help to make these crafty creations so appealing?

Randomization for a New Challenge

Randomization is one of the oldest forms of gameplay mechanics. Long before the days of home consoles, arcade games, or even many of the most popular board games of today, randomization was powering the enduring table game of roulette. You perhaps wouldn’t think that the classic gameplay loop of betting on a number, spinning the wheel, and seeing if it wins would be so long-lasting, but any glance at an online casino would show otherwise.

This isn’t to say that the wholly randomized and classic example of roulette hasn’t changed and evolved. European roulette and American roulette still underpin the experience, but now that you can play roulette with Bitcoin, online players expect even more modernization. This has led to the rise of the Fortune Wheel, Philosopher’s Roulette, Vulcano Roulette, and 500x Lucky Roulette.

Still, every play of the game produces randomized results, which keeps the playing field level on every spin and makes for a new experience each time. In roulette, this core method of randomization makes for straightforward gameplay, fairness, and a very attractive way to play, even among the most modern casino players who use Bitcoin to play. It’s a similar sensation that keeps people coming to roguelikes.

At the start of a new run, everything is randomized. In a game like Buckshot Roulette, you play three rounds against The Dealer who’s on the same playing field as you, using whatever items you can to then dare yourself to pull the trigger. When you start again, you have a chance to find different items if you know where to look, but still need to outdo The Dealer, who won’t make the mistakes of a naïve new player.

Death Matters in These Games

It’s quite common in modern games that if you push it in the open world or a boss fight and get killed, you’ll just respawn at a previous checkpoint. You may lose progress and items, but you’re mostly left unscathed and primed to give it another, better go this time. It’s a step away from the classic style of having limited lives and capping how many times you can fail in legendary platformers like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and Mario.

In roguelike games, so much of the fun and challenge is tied to the permadeath mechanic: when you die, you lose progress and go back to the start. Now, this isn’t to say that all is lost with a permadeath. Masterclass notes that randomness helps to make permadeath enjoyable rather than punishing because a death leads to a new experience. In games like Ocean Keeper, each new dive reveals new secrets and challenges to your survival skills.  

Strategic Resource Management

Everyone goes on a run, thinking that this will be the one where they beat the game. The very nature of the unexpectedness that comes with randomized zones and the potential of permadeath all makes you play more strategically. You don’t always go all-out to just brute force your way through – even with many roguelikes being hack-and-slash games – and carefully manage what are usually hard-to-get resources.

Balatro is a fine example of this. From the outset, you don’t earn very much for winning a round, but you get to go to the store after each successful blind. Yet, if the ideal Joker or pack isn’t there, many will keep their bucks. There’s also the element of missing out on bucks by skipping blinds for what could be a more beneficial bonus. The resource element and its initial scarcity lead to strategic decision-making.

Roguelikes, particularly indie roguelikes, have deservedly climbed and remained high up the game charts on Steam in 2024. With such hype around the likes of Hades II and Balatro, we might even see this trend running through to next year with even more creative games coming to the fore.