“I wish Supergiant would get the roguelite bug out of their system and make sequels to Bastion and then Transistor finally.”
Was what I typed in our group chat. The three of us are mid to late 30s with me being the oldest by 3 months.
To say it went over like a brick balloon would be an understatement. So, I wanted to see if fellow game players had thoughts on it. Am I crazy? Do you agree?
What I want Supergiant to do is… whatever the fuck they want.
I agree, but mostly because I dislike roguelikes. They get too repetitive and turn into a slog, and the success of your runs is often entirely dependent on which items you find.
I’d much rather have a tight, concise game with handmade maps. IME, roguelikes just pull the old NES/SNES trick of “well we can’t fit more data on the game cart, so just make the game harder to force players to replay it over and over again. That will artificially inflate the game length.”
Bastion and Transistor don’t need sequels, but I do wish they’d stop with the roguelikes.
Thats really not what roguelikes are. They wouldnt be one of the most popular genres ever if the base was laziness. Its more like being able to focus fully on the mechaincs/gameplay instead of spending countless hours designing worlds that either end up feeling repetitive anyway or you need to spend another few chunks of countless hours to make it feel good.
Besides, Hades is by faaaaaar their most successful game, it would be objectively stupid not to keep going with that at least for a while.
I dislike roguelikes and soulslikes. It feels like that cuts out the vast majority of indie games being made nowadays.
I strongly disagree on their roguelite “bug” being something they need to drop.
Bastion didn’t land for me, so I didn’t play it, but Transistor would have shined as a roguelite. Its combat system is far too complex, and has potential for so much more, than what can be explored in one or two playthroughs.
The same goes for Cloudbank as a narrative setting.
Transistor, but with Hades’ gameplay loop and storytelling style would be insane. It already felt like a roguelite, but without a gameplay or narrative reason to go in for multiple runs.
Supergiant hasn’t cought a roguelite bug… They’ve found the perfect narrative and game format to match the gameplay systems and worlds they like to create.
Bastion is an absolute stinker of a game.
It’s completely pedestrian, and there are so many bad design decisions it’s hard to even take it seriously.
It’s a game where marketing really did its job because the game could never carry itself based on its presentation or mechanics.
It was really groundbreaking to have the narrator react to what you were doing, in a “Half-Life feels like a real world that you inhabit” way. The way the music was woven into the game was also amazing, and the art! There’s a reason it put them on the map.
I didn’t like the gameplay all that much though and the world building didn’t make too much sense to me. These parts have aged the most poorly. But it was way better than just marketing.
It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was a bad design decision. Evidenced by the fact the biggest patch was a toggle to take the fking narrator out.
And they weren’t even the first.
Different strokes for different folks I guess. The narrator was my favorite part. That or the music.
