Roguelikes have gotten so popular and refined that it's rare to go a month without a new banger, let alone a whole year. 2021 gave us some of the best roguelike games of the past decade, like Inscryption, Gunfire Reborn, and Loop Hero, plus personal favorites like Skul: The Hero Slayer.
One of the stranger releases of the year was Vivid Knight, a party-building strategy roguelike where you draft and upgrade a team of heroes and augment them in auto-battler combat with cooldown-based gems. It was a bit shallow and easily solved, but it has 90% positive Steam user reviews for a reason. Developer Asobism, which has a bunch of games on mobile but only Vivid Knight on Steam, is now gearing up to release a sequel called Vivid World in Q1 2025, and its Steam Next Fest demo reveals a follow-up so dramatically improved that it's quickly become one of the most exciting upcoming indie games.
