damn hawken tuah dropped??

sorry for yapping i wrote this while waiting for a build to pop

CONCLUSION i think there's value in these games of course, and i certainly have a lot of fun playing them for the first few hours just, after a while i have to decide whether to keep slogging on or not. i don't think that's *inherent* to the genre, rather a design problem that isn't being solved

that's a big part of what makes me feel like i'm wasting my time with some of these games. in hades or spelunky, if i play well enough, i can win on my *first run*

REASON #4: BALANCING RNG i stopped playing balatro beause 50% of runs felt like i could not win them. and you can say "skill issue" (you'd be right), but there's so much rng in a game like that that a lot of runs are literally impossible to win. you just rolled bad and that sucks

REASON #3: WHERE DOES IT END there are a lot of games recently (balatro for one) where i have had to stop playing when ... it stops being fun. and that's kind of a bummer. if you were reading an infinitely long book, sure you can stop at the end of any chapter, but you'd never feel satisfied

i can reference Hades til the cows come home but in that game you are simultaneously improving your roguelike decision-making AND your skill at combat. runs get faster because you are better (and you get more abilities to kill enemies faster)

REASON #2: RUNS ARE TOO LONG when games like vampire survivors/balatro add speed-up modes, i start to wonder if there isn't like a fundamental problem. there's no skill-based way to improve your run time- the game requires you to play for a certain length of time to win

REASON #1: LACK OF VARIETY IN RUNS when you play a roguelike for long enough you start to work out a set of win conditions, and you naturally try to optimize towards that. if you have only one or two viable paths to victory, every run will start to feel like jumping through hoops to get there

a bad roguelike graph of tedium/time tends to look a bit like this. and there's a few reasons why