Where a lot of roguelikes fail
I was oblivious to the roguelike genre until I was staying at my bestie's one night and saw her playing Slay The Spire. I then stayed up til 4am playing it on her switch, got STS and have played many MANY roguelike games since then looking for similar fun.
Most of these games start off really strong. A lot of them have a unique mechanic they introduce. There's a set of cards and/or relics and/or enemies and you do a few playthroughs getting to know how the game works and figuring out how to win.
During this time, you're contemplating strategies and making interesting decisions, not sure which option is going to end up better for you. But it takes only a few hours, maybe 2-5 and you basically have the game solved. It offers different characters with unique abilities or unique relics and unlocks more dice/cards/etc.
This process is really fun, discovering new things and figuring out strategies, and making interesting decisions. But most games fall apart after the initial discovery period. There is little replayability. You figure out a dominant strategy and you rarely ever have to make meaningful adjustments to it.
Or another problem. Consider Decktamer. In an odd way it is one of my all time favorites but also one of my biggest letdowns and I'm not sure I even like playing it.
Decktamer is a deckbuilder type of game, but all of the cards are creatures with different abilities. You fight and kill or "tame" enemy creatures to bring them onto your team. The core concept is awesome, and the early rounds are pretty fun. The later rounds less so. But the real problem, and the one other games share is is it's lack of a meaningful progression system.
Slay The Spire has four distinct characters, and each has its own distinct set of cards. Every single one is extremely well-balanced, leaning toward high difficulty. So progressing from one character to the next is meaningful, opening up completely different playstyles, even though every character sees the same monsters, events, and mostly the same relics. It helps that each characer has several sub-playstyles to choose from, like The Silent who can be Poison or Shivs, a range in-between, or genuinely focusing on neither of her most distinctive features.
And then Slay also has TWENTY ascension levels for every single character. It is arguably too many. But the difficulty increases on each ascension are felt, and manageable. Ascension 20 is a beast, though. I have over 700 hours in Slay The Spire to beat every character on Ascension 20 without savescumming. Its nuts. I did it WITH savescumming after about 600 hours lol.
At least 90% of the time when losing a Slay run, I can point to several instances where I made a wrong choice that led me to my demise. You do get utterly fucked by RNG every once in awhile, but even then there's still usually something you could have theoretically done better.
Decktamer ... ugh ... When I first got it, there were like 5 difficulty levels. You had to beat Normal to get Hard & Hard to get Expert, etc. That was cool - not every game needs 20 freaking difficulties lol. So I'm working on Normal when they drop an update, add a bunch of "half" difficulties (like 4.5) and now we have like 8 difficulties. But they're all available all the time.
So any difficulty progression now has to be self-imposed. I want my games to give me challenges to beat. If you give me all the difficulties, the only challenge is beat the hardest difficulty, so I have one and only one thing to do, so I either give up when it's too hard or I beat it and don't wanna play any more because all the good challenges are done.
And no, I can't just start on a lower difficulty & work my way up - it just doesn't feel the same.
A lot of games (including Decktamer, maybe?) have other challenges available, in a 'Challenges' menu. And for some reason they always fall flat for me. They just don't generally seem interesting, and I think it's because they call for basically the same playstyle as the normal difficulties, or they just don't make decision-making more interesting.
So yeah, I like ascending up the difficulty ladder.
Decktamer also fails to provide different characters. There are no characters. Different starting creatures do give a very different feel to a run, but there is no progression, no new challenges, just options.
It is a remarkable and disappointing the number of roguelikes that have these basic problems. Not every game can or should be Slay The Spire. Some games are cheapo little $5-$10 games that you play for 3 or 4 hours, have some fun, and walk away feeling good.
But there are a great deal of roguelike games that seemingly aim to be Slay The Spire with a unique twist. They do an extremely good job with the core concept, have excellent gameplay mechanics, and clearly took a lot of work and love.
But then they fail to tie everything together in a meaningful way. They slap on different "characters". They throw in a ton of relics, or make other shallow changes, leaving me wanting meaningful challenges.