The best roguelike games cross and combine a huge range of sub-genres of action games, shooters, 2D platformers, strategy and tactics games, and plenty of card games. As different as they can be, you'll find a shared goal at their core: making you play run after run, enduring death after death, until it's suddenly way past your bedtime and you still haven't seen the credits roll. One more run it is.
We've collected 25 of the best roguelikes you can play today with a few rules in mind. We've tried to include at least one game for every major sub-genre, from Vampire Survivors bullet heaven to whatever the heck Inscryption is, without featuring multiple games from any one series barring rare exceptions. There's a huge variety of experiences here, but roguelikes are uncountable and always evolving, so even this long list is only a small slice of the genre. But for our money, it's the sweetest slice. You can't go wrong with any of the roguelikes on this list. In fact, you'd be wrong to ignore them.
25. Inscryption
Developer: Daniel Mullins Games
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Somehow even harder to describe than Loop Hero, Inscryption is essentially three roguelike deckbuilders in a bloody trench coat trying – successfully – to sneak into a found footage horror convention. The less you know about this game going in, the more you'll enjoy it, as we learned after a deceptive first bite. As a card game-shaped entity, it plays incredibly well, and strikingly differently over time. As a pseudo-escape room, it unfolds in a fascinating cascade. And as an eclectic combination of genres that by rights should not work, it is all but unrivaled, and only partially because it's basically the only one competing in this absurd competition that it invented and then invited itself to.
24. Risk of Rain Returns
Developer: Hopoo Games
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch
We generally avoid repeat series entries for round-ups like this, but we'll make an exception for Risk of Rain Returns because it feels incredibly different from Risk of Rain 2, which came out in 2019 and can be found higher on this list. This is a fabulous remake of the original 2D side-scrolling action roguelike, and it feels even better than new. With more items, more playable characters, dramatically upgraded graphics, alternate skills that add a huge amount of replay value, and infinitely better co-op support, Risk of Rain Returns is really just Risk of Rain 1.5, modernized for a whole new audience after 10 years.
23. Gunfire Reborn
Developer: Duoyi Games
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, mobile
Gunfire Reborn combines two things we don’t often see in roguelikes: first-person gunplay and co-op. It’s an FPS RPG with traces of Borderlands in its blood, grounded in a low-poly aesthetic and a concerted focus on crawling through dungeons with friends. The unique heroes and guns do most of the heavy lifting and contribute huge variety, and playing with a buddy or two brings everything to the next level as you start coordinating resources, combos, and strategies. Understated, oddly cute, and finely tuned through early access, Gunfire Reborn is a rock-solid multiplayer shooter that trades “one more match” for “one more run.”
22. Streets of Rogue
Developer: Matt Dabrowski
Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Its name being a witty portmanteau of Streets of Rage and Rogue gives a surprisingly okay idea of what exactly Streets of Rogue gives you: the opportunity to punch bad guys with the freedom of a large top-down map. That being said, what makes Streets of Rogue so good is the way it blends so many systems together so efficiently. Like Noita, Streets of Rogue has a rather wonderful responsiveness to each action. You steal from a bin, and maybe someone reports that and security becomes higher in the area, making your main mission a little harder. You decide to break a window to distract a guard but it instead alarms everyone around, meaning you can’t poison the air system. You are given a task and must complete it in any way you see fit, and the genius thing about Streets of Rogue is that you have to live with those decisions. Each dumb decision makes you a little smarter, your situation a little harder, and your game much more fun.
21. Wizard of Legend
Developer: Contingent99
Platform(s): PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch
Wizard of Legend does something very good for a roguelike: it just lets you play. It’s rather straightforward and more or less just lets you get on with it. You play a wizard trying to overcome the Chaos Trials in order to become the next Wizard of Legend. As such, you must travel through floors defeating enemies for a chance of beating the final boss. It plays top-down and uses a variety of spells to make you feel like the badass wizard you always knew you could be. As well as some great explosions, it features nice swift movement mechanics and solid enemy design that can be manipulated and fought around in interesting ways. As you understand each enemy more, your style will change and so will your wizard. Get in there and start casting.
20. Monster Train
Developer: Shiny Shoe
Platform(s): PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch
Since the rise of titles like Hand of Fate and Slay the Spire, roguelike deckbuilders have become a staple on sSteam. Monster Train manages to fit into this mold whilst also giving some great new insights into what makes the genre tick. Monster Train has you fight off hordes of monsters over vertically layered boards on the way to hell. As you can guess from this premise, it’s pretty goofy and all the better for it. This goofiness goes hand in hand with tons of content and a huge variety of cards to play from. As you attempt to protect the burning pyre of hell from the forces of heaven, you start to pick up on the subtle little bits of storytelling Monster Train gives you as you blitz through stages. With different mutators and a bunch of free DLC, it's earned a spot in your library.
19. Crypt of the Necrodancer
Developer: Brace Yourself Games
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, mobile
Crypt of the Necrodancer turns familiar enemies and level designs into a dramatically different experience through rhythmic mechanics. The entire stage works as a musical level and all actions are done on the beat. If you fail to move on time, you don’t move. The same is not the case with enemies, who are relentless and consistent. Basically, you get good or you get dead. The formula of die, get used to the music, and get better is made much more appealing through the charming art and wonderfully catchy music, a must for a game like this. Fortunately, it nails it.
18. Noita
Developer: Nolla Games
Platform(s): PC
Noita is a fantastic little roguelike “where every pixel is physically simulated." This essentially means the entire world is incredibly malleable, cracking under the pressure of various elements and attacks. These take the form of spells you create yourself to tackle each part uniquely. These systems make Noita one of the most reactive games out there and well worth your time if you’re looking for something new.
17. Loop Hero
Developer: Four Quarters
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, mobile
Loop Hero is probably the least-deckbuilder-y deckbuilder on this list. It is, in fact, a card game, but it plays out as a fascinating blend of role-playing, idle games, and level design. Trapped in a time loop by an evil lich, you use card-based encounters and environmental features to assemble and expand levels for your heroes to navigate automatically. You aren’t fighting the battles; you’re placing the battles on a board and hoping for the best. The roguelike spice starts to tingle as you cycle through loops multiple times, piling upgrades on RPG classics like the Warrior, Rogue, and Necromancer, and praying you can assemble a hero strong enough to slay the big bad at the end. Its retro aesthetic and fixed, chunky menu invoke old-school RPGs, and Loop Hero presents a mish-mash of ideas and eras with style and care.
16. Enter the Gungeon
Developer: Dodge Roll
Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Enter the Gungeon has a wonderfully consistent tone and world which might lead you to believe it’s a gimmick, but it is so much more than that. It combines twin-stick combat with a roguelite progression system to keep you coming back. Almost everything in the world of Enter the Gungeon, from its enemies to its items, is a bullet or bullet-themed. You, a lone gungeoneer, go into the gungeon in search of loot, purpose, or perhaps something even greater. To do so, you must roll through countless bullets and fire a few thousand back in their place. From its dodge roll to pushing furniture, almost every mechanic feels carefully woven into to the base combat system. You might, upon entering a room, push over a chair for some cover on the go, or you might rush your enemies in the hope of taking them down quickly. Moment-to-moment gameplay is wickedly addictive, so after each death, you just reload and hop back in to fight another day.
15. Darkest Dungeon
Developer: Red Hook Studios
Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, mobile
It’s debatable whether or not Darkest Dungeon is a roguelike or more of an RPG. Regardless, it is so phenomenal it wouldn’t feel right to not include it. To put it simply, you manage a group of interchangeable heroes who must investigate the everchanging dungeon below a manor. Putting it simply doesn’t do justice to its unique stress mechanics, dark gothic graphics, and brutal difficulty. It utilizes this difficulty to reward you for each successful battle. You might come for its style, but you will stay for its expansive customization, haunting story, and punishing design.
14. FTL: Faster Than Light
Developer: Subset Games
Platform(s): PC, mobile
With graphics and gameplay inspired by classic board game titles, it’s hard not to love FTL: Faster Than Light. It has you control a ship in a grid-based system as you make decisions and cower in fear of what decisions might have you do. You must use terminals to jump to other parts of the galaxy in an attempt to make your way through the eight sectors available to you. You can start off with different ships and crew members making each run responsive and unique and forcing you to truly adapt to the circumstances in front of you. Feeling somewhere between Reigns, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and its own unique flair, FTL offers plenty of difficulty, challenge and replayability.
13. Rogue Legacy 2
Developer: Cellar Door Games
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
The throughline for Rogue Legacy 2 is the same as the original game's: a never-ending family of procedurally generated heroes tackle a timeless challenge, hoping their DNA will one day win out against the monsters and demons that have kept their lifespans so short on average. It’s a 2D action game with sublime platforming and combat steeped in quirky, curious takes on fantasy staples that lead to bizarre builds and head-turning enemies. The boss battles are the standout for me, but the progression systems underpinning this thing are a constant joy. Rogue Legacy 2 is more of that same goodness, now with sharper art, a steel-toed Metroidvania kick, and too many surprises to list here.
12. Balatro
Developer: LocalThunk
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
The self-proclaimed "poker roguelike" takes much of what makes Slay the Spire great and twists it into a bizarre, deckbuilder vision of gambling that looks familiar until the world starts to come apart at the seams and you find that even illegal hands like five of a kind don't cut it. And that's before getting to the 150+ Jokers that break the rules so hard that some of them could almost qualify as sequels. Endlessly replayable and unflinchingly cruel, Balatro pulls you in for run after run of bet-it-all hijinks that constantly jump between making you feel like the smartest player to ever sit at a table and the dumbest peabrain to ever be dealt a card. It's a fiendishly clever buffet of systems and strategies that wears the poker veneer like a jacket and uses it to build an utterly essential game about cheating in plain sight.
11. Dicey Dungeons
Developer: Terry Cavanagh
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, mobile
One look through Terry Cavanagh’s work will show you the slew of cult classics he’s found himself creating, from the smart VVVVV to the minimalistic Super Hexagon and finally Dicey Dungeons. Like Slay the Spire before it, Dicey Dungeons is a roguelike deck builder, but it's imbued with so much personality that comparing the two feels asinine. The entirety of Dicey Dungeons takes place in a weird meta game show where cards are played and decided by dice rolls you make. This makes it a little less strategic than Slay the Spire but arguably a whole lot more interesting.
10. Returnal
Developer: Housemarque
Platform(s): PC, PS5
A rare third-person bullet hell shooter, Returnal drops you into a time loop nightmare shorn from cosmic horror and science fiction. Survive on an alien planet as Selene, taking advantage of ancient technology and strange weapons to deal with monstrous creatures that spit out countless tracking, exploding, arcing, rotating, and sizzling projectiles. When you inevitably don’t survive plenty of times, you’ll start all over, increasingly unnerved by the bodies of your past selves that seem to be piling up. Returnal is at its best in intense combat, and even more so in the post-launch co-op, but it also presents a disturbing world that keeps you guessing right up to the end. And after the end. I still don't know what it's really about. Our Returnal review called it "Sony's most beguilingly weird blockbuster in a long time," which is bang-on.
9. Caves of Qud
Developer: Freehold Games
Platform(s): PC
After 15 years of early access-aided development, sci-fi roguelike Caves of Qud finally leaves early access in 2024. While technically unfinished, Caves of Qud has, for years, delivered more content – more possibilities, more ideas, more experiences – than most games can begin to imagine. It is an irresponsibly deep retrofuturistic world wrapped around a delightfully reactive and creative simulation that sits somewhere between a classical roguelike and a text RPG. With dozens of factions, inventive turn-based combat, functionally limitless character build paths, and multiple game modes that can feel like different games entirely, Caves of Qud is one of those roguelikes that makes immortality seem tempting just because an eternity might be enough time to fully wrap your head around this thing.
8. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Developer: Edmund McMillen, Nicalis
Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch
From the brains behind Super Meat Boy and uhh Gish came The Binding of Isaac, a wonderfully dark roguelike centered around a young boy locked in a basement fighting his way through it with tears. Yeah, it’s a bit of a weird game. This overt weirdness embodies practically every second of Isaac, which pits you against biblical monsters, moving feces, and even your own mother. It plays a clever role in analyzing the dogma of extremism and rather personally talks about creator Edmund Mcmillen’s own struggles with religion. This personality, charm, and connection to Edmund as a creator have kept us coming back a decade after its initial release.
7. Spelunky 2
Developer: Mossmouth, Blitworks
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Spelunky 2 is exactly what you’d want from a sequel to Derek Yu’s classic roguelike platformer: more stuff, with more polish, and more devious ideas under the hood. Simplistic 2D platforming in lovely tiled levels quickly becomes a rabbit hole of deliberately subtle, outright hidden, and often game-changing mechanics. Random items and characters can propel you forward or shoot you straight back to the all-too-familiar Game Over screen, and controlling the randomness becomes part of the fun. Spelunky 2 feels more balanced and dynamic than the original game, and manages to fit in many new ideas without ever feeling bogged down. It’s also not-so-secretly one of the most unforgiving games on this list – a true giant of “sounds easy, feels impossible.”
6. Into the Breach
Developer: Subset Games
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, mobile
Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game and, more importantly, the excellent follow up to Faster Than Light. It's a roguelite placing you in the eyes, or should I say suits, of mech squads fighting back against a group of monsters known as the Vek. In a similar vein to strategy titles like XCOM, you're placed on a grid and get an aerial view of the combat. You have to fight any enemies you find and keep moving in an attempt to save the world. Each attempt is met with new randomly generated levels making each run slightly different. What makes Into the Breach so distinctive is the way it blends these styles so well. Its art style is cutesy but effective at showing off everything on the battlefield with crisp retro visuals. Its sound and general game design are top-notch, offering not only a polished, whip-smart experience but also a wonderfully replayable one that turns the tiniest movements into game-winning triumphs.
5. Dead Cells
Developer: Motion Twin, Evil Empire
Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, mobile
Dead Cells takes some of the main points of Metroidvanias and roguelites but manages to create a totally fresh "Roguevania" experience. You play a mass of cells that basically puppets a corpse. You can then take that body to fight your way through each area in a vain attempt to kill the boss at the center and make your way out. You will die in Dead Cells. You will probably die a lot, but that’s what makes it so rewarding. There’s something very cyclical about the combat system; learning how weapons work and how to slowly upgrade them for subsequent runs gives a clear sense of progression that feels not only rewarding but earned. Every moment in Dead Cells is built on hard-earned progress, and that what makes it so entertaining.
4. Vampire Survivors
Developer: Poncle
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, mobile
Vampire Survivors might be the most hardcore casual game of the past decade. It's a screen-destroying, time-devouring, reverse-bullet hell roguelike about building the strongest monster killer possible by vacuuming up XP crystals and treasure chests and a zillion other things that tickle your brain giddy. It's instantly compelling, dangerously replayable, and one of the strongest "oh it's 2am games" in recent memory – so much so that it spawned a whole new subgenre of so-called bullet heaven roguelikes, or at least jump-started a towering new wave of such games. Seemingly endless collectibles, items, enemies, areas, and unlockable characters add frankly terrifying depth to an already hard-to-put-down roguelike with dead-simple controls and rewarding progression. At just $5 for the base game and $2 to $3 for the DLCs, you'd be hard-pressed to find a game that can match Vampire Survivors on dollars per hour of fun.
3. Risk of Rain 2
Developer: Hopoo Games
Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Risk of Rain 2 offered a surprising yet brilliant departure from the style set in the previous one six years prior. Instead of the side-scrolling shooter before it, it is now a fully 3D over the shoulder action game. But it's still a roguelike under the hood. You are stranded on an alien planet and challenged with finding teleporters to get to the next area. It can be played entirely in co-op and each level finish is topped off with a nice standoff against progressively harder aliens charging right at you. It just feels and looks great with plenty to do, plenty to unlock, and plenty to kill.
2. Slay the Spire
Developer: Mega Crit
Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
Slay the Spire is one of the most wonderfully unique, tightly designed games you’ll ever have the pleasure of playing. It's a roguelike (obviously enough) deckbuilding card game. You play one of four central characters, all with different builds and card types, and must make your way to the top of the spire to defeat the boss at its core. Each battle gives you new cards to choose and more gold to spend on your current run. You debate between buying potions to survive the next battle or buying a relic for the future. You might want to take on an optional boss to get better gear in return for weakening you. These small decisions often snowball in engrossing ways, forcing you to change your playstyle to prepare for the future. Somehow, it manages to express interesting ideas, has great combat, and generally engages you through the whole experience with nothing but four decks of cards that seem to support infinite playtime.
1. Hades
Developer: Supergiant Games
Platform(s): PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, mobile
We’re calling Hades the best roguelike you can play for a few reasons. Firstly, Hades 2 isn’t finished yet. Secondly, everything that made Hades our GOTY pick among the best games of 2020 is still true today. It’s a water-tight action dungeon-crawler about assembling builds from godly weapons and god-given buffs, perfectly balanced between letting you feel overpowered and regularly pummeling you into mulch. It looks, sounds, and feels incredible, and that would be enough. But Hades is also a rare intersection of mechanical and narrative excellence that uses the death-filled roguelike formula as a vehicle for one of the most engaging stories ever told in a game, elevated by a famously lovable cast of Greek gods written with humanity.
In your hands and in your heart, you can feel Hades change and ascend run over run in a way that very few roguelikes ever manage, and it does it again, and again, and again. Hades is at once a compelling and layered linear experience, and a bottomless well of challenge and variety, with every last element polished to a gilded shine. Play it for 50 hours or 500 – it will be downright heavenly from start to finish all the same.
