They seem so popular, dozens of games coming out, and reviews often positive.
But
When I see “Roguelike” I imagine a game that’s too small to be a real game, so they made it so you can never win and just have to keep trying and you’ll get a decent number of hours out of it. With just enough progression each time that you start to believe it’s possible you’ll get somewhere meaningful.
When I see “Souls-like” I think of a game where the difficulty is only there to give people with too much time on their hands a sense of superiority.
I have roughly a thousand games in my various libraries and I have never played a game in either of these genres.
I feel fine being so unreasonable about this.
A few generations prior see us mashing buttons all day without any apparent effect. The rules of any game only make sense when you develop your gaming experience to accommodate them. Just like movies only make sense because we choose to believe in the mechanics of storytelling.
The best roguelite to try doesn’t appear to be a rogue-like game at all. It’s called Blue Prince.