This article is part of Run, Die, Repeat, Polygon’s week-long series exploring roguelikes.
For the past week, Polygon has been devoting coverage to the wide world of roguelikes. It’s a pretty broad remit, as even the roguelike subgenre has subgenres unto itself.
Just so we’re on the same page: Broadly speaking, a roguelike is a game with permadeath, procedural levels, and turn-based, grid-based gameplay, closely modeled after the original Rogue. Released in 1980, Rogue is a turn-based dungeon crawler where each level is randomly generated and death is permanent, forcing you to start over from the beginning. You explore grid-based floors, manage limited resources, and battle enemies using simple ASCII graphics, aiming to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and escape. A roguelite keeps some of those elements but adds permanent upgrades or progression between runs, making it a bit more accessible.
The problem for me is: I’ve never played either in my life. I went down the Wikipedia list of every game made between both subgenres, and besides Balatro (of which I’ve greatly expressed my love for elsewhere on the site), I’ve never played any of the games listed. One Polygon editor suggested someone play the granddaddy of all roguelikes and roguelites, aptly titled Rogue, and I couldn’t think of a better candidate than myself.
I had no idea what I was in for.
When I first booted up the game via Steam, I was initially taken aback by how archaic it looked. It reminded me of Pong, with graphics from the movie Wargames. The game prompts players to make a name, and then it just drops you into the action without telling you anything, classic of the era (and of certain modern-day games, like Soulslikes or Fallouts).
Rogue drops you in without explaining controls, iconography, or any plot details beyond the fact you need to look for the Amulet of Yendov. I didn’t even know what stairs were, which ended up being the green symbol I kept coming across. And even if I did know they were stairs, I didn’t know the command to use them. I went into the game with as little information as possible. I didn’t even watch the Steam trailer until much later! Instead, I left myself to discover things on the fly, which made everything all the more hectic, especially when I couldn’t find a way to the next level.
Eventually, after dispatching some baddies, I caved and had to do some research. Still adamant not to spoil too much for myself, I watched a YouTube video just to confirm the green icon was, in fact, my way to the next level, and indeed it was. I leaned on the keyboard until I found the correct key to use the stairs. After 20 minutes, I was on Level 2.
I began to stumble across different weapons and armors with different Armour Classes (AC) that I instantly wanted to try on, especially since enemies like ice monsters and hobgoblins started to hurt me more. But I had no clue how to try them on — which led me to finding the game’s original instruction manual on GitHub as a PDF. This document was illuminating — it even informed me that I could see the command list and learn what each icon meant by using F1 and F2, respectively.
It was an overwhelmingly large amount of information to soak in by the time I closed it and resumed my session. After a while, I realized no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any stairs to advance to the next level. The only things I found were a trap that kept shooting darts at my shoulder and various respawned monsters. I got a “hungry” status on my quest for a pair of stairs, but likely I had some food to remove the status ailment. Eventually, I grew tired of the search and saved my game for another day.
Regrettably, upon my return, I still couldn’t find a way out, so I restarted my game at Level 5 to begin again. It was only afterwards that I looked it up and found a Reddit post telling someone they could use “S” to search, an input OP and I both gleaned over on the list of commands. Their reply of “oh,” were my exact sentiments.
Then came the dreaded death loop, in which I kept dying over and over (and over and over). Once, a lousy hobgoblin took me out on Level 1; another time, Level 2 dropped me into a cramped room packed with every enemy I’d encountered so far. I tried to make a run for it, but an ice monster froze me solid, something that had never slowed me down this much before, just in time for the whole mob to gang up on me while I stood there helpless.
After looking over the command list and getting a better grasp of the mechanics, I went in again and immediately found a lightning (tungsten) wand and remembered I could zap baddies with it. I thought I would have to equip it like I would a mace or dagger. But it turns out, I could use both in tandem. Pretty sweet! Now in a pretty good groove, I made it to Level 10, the farthest level I’d reached up to that point (and without needing to look for secret doors!) and became a Warrior class.
I fought a few new enemies I had never encountered before, including one that stole my short bow from me upon defeat. I found some armor and immediately went to see if it was stronger and had a higher armor class than the 5 I had equipped. But unlike other pieces of armor, it doesn’t tell you in the name, and you have to equip it to find out the class (unless I missed yet another mechanic), so I put it on. However, I realized I couldn’t take it off now because it was cursed — frustrating, but also kind of cool and spontaneous.
My run ended when I came up on a slew of centaurs, enemy types that hit very hard. When you walk, you recover health, so I started pacing around in an empty room after getting wrecked. But another centaur came into the room I was in and hurt me even worse. Although I already found the exit, I couldn’t help but to keep exploring. I kept encountering more centaurs until I finished plundering and made an immediate run for the stairs. But a centaur and a rattlesnake cornered me before I could reach the stairs. RIP.
During each play session, I kept finding myself going back and taking notes of what I’d just encountered in my adventure. I made notes of which enemies were fluff (bats and hobgoblins) and which hit like a truck (ice monsters and centaurs). I kept imagining the monsters as these old school medieval designs you’d only see on traditional tattoos these days. I imagined the maze as an old castle, filled with monsters and this ancient amulet I’ve been quested to find. This must be what it feels like to be a Dungeons and Dragons fan back in the ‘80s, I thought, utilizing your imagination instead of relying on contemporary graphics and logging your adventure manually like a journal.
It harkened back to a simpler, more involved time in gaming. One that balances difficulty with imagination that is rarely seen today; games usually lean in one way or the other. It made me appreciate permadeath far more than I do in JRPGs like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where I’d just reset the game upon losing a party member, simply because I refuse to lose them. I could see how games like this lead to a gaming sphere like today, where one’s imagination can come to life with high-fidelity graphics and expansive narratives. But there’s something undeniably charming about rudimentary visuals, brutal consequences, and the kind of games that made you fill in the gaps with your own creativity, which is rare to find these days.