I have tried a couple of roguelikes lately, so it is time to bring this thread back!
The first one is Dead Cells. I thought they oversell the "metroidvania" part of the game. You unlock the mobility abilities relatively fast, they persist across runs, and for the most part none of them change the way you approach combat, which is the main draw of the game.
The combat itself is pretty good though, and the variety of weapons with their movesets, combos, and critical conditions is remarkable. While some are just slight variations on one another (e.g. slightly slower but stronger weapon, or changing the critical condition from attacking enemies with this or that status effect), some drastically change the way you approach combat (e.g. a sword that teleports you to the other side of the enemy you attack, or sandals that deal massive damage when you push enemies against a wall, and that's before looking into ranged weapons or skills). It really puts other ARPGs to shame in that department. An interesting thing it does is that the game drops weapons with higher stats as the run goes on, so you have to choose whether you would rather keep the weapon you already have, whose moveset you might prefer or that comboes with the rest of your equipment, or the new stronger weapon.
I am not a huge fan of the artstyle, but that might be because I am playing on the Swith in handheld mode. The artstyle is just not very clear, which is bad in a game that is balanced around the player never getting hit. They try to fix that by putting a giant exclamation mark on top of enemies right before they attack, but it's not an ideal solution either.
A couple more interesting things they do is that you have a lot of control over which biomes you visit on your way to the final boss. You can even choose the bosses you fight on your way there, although they are tied to the biomes you visit. That means you can avoid areas when your gear just isn't adapted to the enemies there. This is not something modern roguelikes do very often, it changes the way you approach the game. On the other hand, you unlock new equipment for future runs as drops from specific enemies, so you are still encouraged to visit all biomes regularly.
Another interesting concept is that the game rewards you for clearing areas quickly. This works great to give players an incentive not to comb every inch of every level, so the game keeps running at a brisk pace... or would, if it weren't because the rewards for combing every level are stat increases which boost your damage exponentially with each one you find, while the reward for clearing levels quickly is equipment which will likely be obsolete by the time you reach the final boss. It's a shame they didn't commit to the concept a bit more fully.
Has anyone tried Noita yet? It sounds interesting, I can't justify buying it yet but it's on my radar.
Tried Noita. It's... interesting. It's the least roguelike-feeling roguelike I have ever tried. I think they came up with the systems first, and the gameloop after. As I said in my earlier comment, the spell-crafting is fundamentally broken, so the only way to keep the player "honest" is by killing them often, so they are forced to make-do with new spells.
The reason why I say it feels un-roguelike is because of how... unfair (?) it feels. Stuff will kill you from the edge of the screen, explosives are sometimes hard to tell from the background, and there is a general chaotic energy to the whole proceedings that makes it so that your death is not always really your fault. You will rarely get one-shot (except for some moments where the devs are clearly trolling you), but situations in which you lose 30-50% of your health without much you can do about it are frequent. Especially when you are going straight down into unknown territory - your horizontal mobility is pretty bad, so it is hard to dodge enemies shooting at you from below. Or maybe I am just bad, I don't know.
That being said, trying to make OP spells is fun, the spell variety is astonishing, and there is a genuine sense of exploration to the game that I haven't seen in any other roguelike. I would recommend going in as blind as possible for that reason, although some mechanics are not explained very well, if at all. I just wish it took less time in every run to reach the point where you start having enough spell components and good enough wands to really start spellcrafting. The first 3 biomes or so, in which your spell options are rather limited, are fairly repetitive, and it makes experimenting with the many spells that come with "side effects" a much less appealing proposition when you're risking losing an hour or more of progress from some unexpectedly lethal combination of effects.
