Rogue likes usually run on a toaster. What’re people’s favorites?
I have a huge soft spot for Crawl: Stone Soup. Runs in a browser, or probably even lower requirements if you download it. The game’s design goals want to minimize tedium and gotchas, so it’s pretty respectful of your time. Auto-explore and auto-travel are real nice. So is the global search for when you’re like “is there anything in this run with resist poison?”
I’ve played a little nethack, adom, and angband, but I always go back to crawl.
I think Isaac is a great game but it’s also right around the time when one of my greatest gaming pet peeves began - merging the concept of a roguelite and a roguelike to call them all the latter.
Roguelite was such a linguistic stroke of genius as it both differentiated them from the classic genre - turnbased top-down movement, no-knowledge procedural levels, permadeath, craft fight plunder core loop - while still being self-describing as something which keeps some of those elements though being more light to digest.
…and then we just discarded the term and chose to call them all roguelike with, for me, no discernible advantage.
Isaac is a great game, but it’s also one of the most iconic examples of the subgenre with metagame progression.
Most rogue likes, each game is independent. Isaac went hard on the “unlocks for future runs” thing. That’s a fine mechanic, if a bit overused afterwards.