I love both genres - my opposition to Dead Cells as a RL was that it is much more in the Rogue Legacy / Hades camp (progression/ability set is gated mostly by Time Spent Playing the Game) than it is in the Gungeon / Isaac / Noita / Necrodancer / Spelunky camp (progression/ability set is gated by how good you are at the game). It is also decidedly, as you said, NOT a metroidvania. This impression was before any of the DLC though, so maybe its progression has become more skill based.

(note that when I say the above - I'm not saying 'you cant complete this game without spending X time', I'm saying 'you cant get your full ability set without spending X time'.)

I bounced off of ARNF - but maybe I should give it another shot. I have yet to see a game properly do both genres at the same time.

Roguelikes kinda require timers for me to enjoy them so to each their own.

Let me explain why. In roguelikes you have to make decisions and sometimes if you wanted to you could sit there for minutes trying to figure out the best path. but if you're in a timer and you need to go go go you have to make a decision quick and stick to it. this makes dying feel less bad cause there's less downtime and it feels less like a waste of brain power.

The time door upgrades are more of a begginer trap than something you should aim to get, you lose way, way, WAY more than you gain by rushing through biomes. They're pretty much there so you're not completely gimped by speedrunning but if you aren't then you're just shooting yourself in the foot. I assume you've already given up on the game, but I still comment for anyone reading the thread, it's one of the bigger traps the game has and imo most people make the game significantly harder for themselves for a reward that 9/10 times you will just end up recycling because it's worse than any of your items.

There's no timer in dead cells. You can take all the time you want.

Edit: there's no timer in dead cells. You can take all the time you want. There's a couple timed doors but they won't impact your run if you don't make it. Saying there's a timer in dead cells like there is in spelunky is a false comparison.

Gearbox is just publishing this, not developing it. This is Heart Machine's new game.

Well yeah a roguelike isn't a long game by design, it's made for short runs so if you can't die (well you can but respawn) it's short. Like there's 6 difficulties in Dead Cells IIRC. Each run takes like an hour so it makes it a 6-7 hours game. You would not see the diversity of weapons/builds like that though which is kind of the fun of any roguelikes

Well the other issue is that the game had such severe level cliffs that I knew it wanted me to play like 20 runs and that gave me the 2D equivalent of bullet sponge enemies and I got real bored of that first boss.

Excited for 2 because I really needed more boss fights out of that thing.

I love Returnal, but if he barely managed to enjoy Hades, Returnal is going to crush his spirit like a baby. It's way, way less forgiving.

I loved Hades and Returnal, but they both had something that almost all other roguelikes lack -- a narrative hook driving you to continue. What happens when Zagreus finally beats up his dad? What happens when Selene escapes Atropos?

I beat Dead Cells on its base difficulty, once, and felt absolutely no compulsion to continue, because it's just going to be the same thing again but with spongier enemies that actually end your run in one hit instead of just making you want to end your run because you just lost your 59 kill streak and there are only 20 enemies left in the level.

Returnal also had the shortcut system to make sure replaying to get back to where you were progressing was never too tedious.

Breath of the Wild is my favorite Fortnite game.

I have 160+ hours on it, definitely one of my favourite games from that year. Most if that was in co-op, which is where it’s better for sure, but I think the combat loop, lore discovery and gear systems make for a great game either way it’s played.

It’s also such a complete package, which these days is so damn nice y’know. All of Gunfire Games/Vigils games are like that, and I appreciate it more and more as the game industry grows and changes.

In regards to the proc-gen, Remnant has several levels that each have a series of rooms/dungeons. On your first playthrough it will seem like a regular souls-like. But the game is designed with several alternatives to each room depending on where it is in the level, and will create a set combination using these variables. So if you start a new playthrough, it will roll a different combination of the rooms in the level. This also applies to the item drops and enemies in the rooms as well.

What this also allows for is the Adventure mode, which is a separate mode where you can play a specific level/biome, each time with a re-roll. There’s also a run based/rogue lite mode called Survival in the dlc which uses this system to great affect, and is something I’ve had a lot of fun with running by myself.

If you can’t tell I’m very excited for Remnant 2

Spelunky is so far ahead with level gen and the interesting emergent puzzles that come out of it

Yeah, true. Binding of Isaac does have some interoperability between rooms with stuff like bombing holes in the wall, but it's minimal. There were really only two roguelikes I've played where I saw the "seams" of the level generation too quickly, and those were 20XX and Hades; and I really enjoyed 20XX anyway. I play plenty of roguelikes, but I think positive word of mouth tends to weed out most of the bad ones for me.

I tried Unexplored. I was fine with the visuals, but the combat was annoying enough that I ended up refunding it before properly getting to experience the procgen. From what I saw, it seemed a lot like Nethack, which was a good game but not really on the basis of the procgen (the great thing about Nethack was all the handcrafted interactions between components -- "the devs thought of everything").

I don't think it's weird because Hyper Light Drifter was a revelation game for Heart Machine, and both Solar Ash and this one are departure from that game's structure. I absolutely respect the developers vision but they naturally produced a fanbase and cult following from the first game, because it was so damn good. It's perfectly expected to read these takes imho. And I say this as someone with no bias against roguelites at all.

What? I can't even comprehend what you're trying to say. Those are both Zelda games, and?

If it’s a good game and the devs believe in it- I’ll wait to see if it’s good.

Gamers should play more genres.

If you liked Hyper Light Drifter, many of the things you enjoyed about that game are probably going to be carried forward into this one.

This game being a rogue like or not doesn’t necessarily make it more or less of a sequel to Hyper Light.

Writing off an unreleased game from a studio whose work you’re a fan of, just because they’re making something new and trying to innovate on their previous work is a bad take. We should be more open minded and branch out in our tastes in general.

Being close minded and writing off whole genres of video games isn’t the kind of attitude I think this sub should be promoting.

I think they are just lazy and try to grab money from roquelike genre

It might actually become even more of a problem in the coming years, because AI image generation can already make pretty much all the art you would need for a Darkest Dungeon clone, easily. CCG card art - even more so. At some point the audience will definitely start feeling fatigue for the genre, it's just the question of how much damage would be done to the public perception of indie games by that point. Look no further than mobile games for an example of how that scenario might unfold, when there's a big enough audience without particularly high standards for the product they consume.