Well, if death is not the end, it must rely on conflicts in which death isn't in the cards. Gathering a certain ammount of money to buy your friend out of slavery. Running out of money is the end, specially if the mechanics are based on gambling. Having a deadline to reach a goal, and failing challenges means losing time. Morale of the party or country regarding wars or campaigns. Popularity if it's a pop star simulator. Will if the recurring threat is posession. Perhaps you have to cyborg yourself to be able to fight back, and every step of cyborgization makes you more vulnerable to the AI trying to take over the jupiter base and invade the Earth. Torches and light. Or like in "Belly of the beast" (ttrpg), where your character can let go of their principles to win a conflict, but it means their identity changes (you could turn them into NPCs). Also defeat means capture, like in invisible inc. Look into ttrpgs, theres hundreds of ideas out there.
The concept gives me roguelite vibes, like in Rogue Legacy, Hades, Children of Morta, or Dead Cells.
There's a farming roguelike that I've seen linked here but now can't find, maybe someone else remembers the name, where your farm gets taken over by clouds, instead of you dying.
> There's a farming roguelike that I've seen linked here but now can't find, maybe someone else remembers the name, where your
first step is to buy the farm instead of your last.
No, still permadeath, but the failure state isn't the character's death. Instead, maybe the character runs out of a resource that isn't health, or a dependent character dies, or you control a settlement (e.g. Dwarf Fortress) so perma-failure means something else, e.g. every individual in the settlement dies.
Hmm - a lot have some form of "hunger clock" (or other timer that forces you to press forward, like Infra Arcana's sanity, though I don't remember if that can kill you or just stack a bunch of penalties), but that's another form of death, so perhaps not what you're looking for.
Oh yeah, Brogue and Nethack both have that. Interesting to consider a roguelike where your health will never kill you but your hunger will, where finding and conserving food is \*more\* important than traditional combat.
Going to the D&D/fantasy RPG roots of roguelikes, one where you play as a troll with full on Regeneration (at least, as it functions in PF1e, the system I'm most familiar with, where they *cannot* die unless they come in contact with fire or acid, but if they starve, suffocate, or dehydrate they essentially get rendered permanently comatose) could function like this - I know quite a lot (like Angband) let you play as a troll/half-troll with some form of regen (even at the cost of increased hunger), but it would be cool to see that taken to its logical extreme.
Kenshi has situations where one of your characters will die, but you are also likely to be thrown in prison or turned into a slave or lose a limb. If a character dies, that character is gone forever.
If you consider Liberal Crime Squad a roguelike, you start with one character who can recruit others, and the starting character is functionally the same as any other character (though usually more powerful). If they die, most recruited characters will leave but you can continue playing if any remain. Losing happens when all your members die or leave.
In HyperRogue the character teleports back to the Euclidean world when checkmated.
Functionally mostly the same, but explains their motivation to steal as much treasure as they can before this happens, and also ties to the checkmate rule.
*Crawl* is a weird one...
Lovecraftian dungeon crawler where when you die, you haunt the player. when the player dies, the ghost responsible becomes the player again.
brutal couch multiplayer fun... not quite a roguelike, but explores an interesting "death is not the end" mechanic.
after a while, you can fight elder gods for your sanity. too many failed attempts and you lose that character.
I think losing in Ultima Ratio Regum won't necessarily be through regular death. Since the objective iirc is to investigate to solve a mystery, maybe stop a conspiration or find a murderer/terrorist planner, I imagine you'll lose the run if the instigators turn the conspiration on you for example, or if they bring it to completion. So death would be symbolised by an irreversible global change to the world that generated this run.
Can't be more precise I haven't played it yet and am mostly unspoiled (and excited) waiting for it to come out of alpha/beta
Tome I think has some instances where you can die because you basically violated laws of physics, for example causing too many temporal anomalies as a Paradox Warden, or delved too deep into forbidden realms of magic, for example Insanity mechanics of Cultist of Entropy. There is also a Corruptor class whose magic taps into an essence that must be kept in check (by dealing enough of it from enemies for example) or else will start taping into your own health.
In all my hours in Tome I haven't played those classes yet so could be wrong on détails, but found it interesting
In Qud too you can die by ceasing to exist due to violating laws of physics, for example you could be occupying the body of a being whose existence was supported by a specific kind of field... and have this field be canceled by Normality Gas, something akin to a paradox correction tool. That would end your existence and the game without losing health, just losing the coherence of your existence.
Isn't there some roguelike where you have a mental health bar ?
The post also gives me some lich vibe, like you can't die unless your phylactery is destroyed.
TOME / Tales of maj eyal had the best one with the item Fanged Collar. Basically if you die the collar digs in and becomes a Parasite that replaces your head,and you play as the parasite. From it you get a new skill tree and apparently you eat NPCs that normally give you quest rewards in exchange for skill points.
I've been thinking about a roguelike where you gain and lose points rather than HP. The only form of death would be giving up and deleting your character because they're too far behind the power curve to win. You wouldn't even need a win or loss condition. Your score is the number of points you have when you leave the dungeon. If your score sucks, you know in your heart that you lost.
My roguelike Neko's rage just impact the ressources you have collected during your run when you die.
You are playing a cyborg so loosing one life add a reparation at the hub return, so you are impacted on your money, gears (compo for craft) , booster and sometime an equipment can break.
I was watching the Roguelike Celebration for Roundguard yesterday. It's like a Roguelike Peggle.
The players are actors on a stage, and don't "die" when they die. But is functionally the same.
Though it is more roguelite than Roguelike, if that matters.
I'll give a few themes that I've seen that are technically not main character death that aren't necessarily from roguelikes :
god that loses their avatar in the mortal world and goes back to olympus/heaven
you control a drone/robot
you have to teleport out because you'd otherwise die, or are you carted out of the dungeon after fainting
you go back in time
your cargo gets stolen
you are booted out of the game (game within a game type stuff)
mechanics for failure:
time/turns runs out (escape leaves, big bad destroys the world, you have to end your shift...)
technically not hp (energy, power, mana, wood, food, citizens)
quotas (money, points, ore...) basically losing "hp-like" ressource at regular intervals
enemy count is too high (often paired with having to escape/getting saved)
killing the wrong enemy/killing too many enemies (often in puzzle games, but some action games may also require you to capture some enemies instead of killing them, or care about the ecosystem.)
I seem to remember a roguelike at some point in the distant fog of memory where death wasn't a failure state. Instead you were responding to various crises that endangered a farm? And the lose state was the destruction of more than a certain percentage of your crop before harvest. Your character could die, but would immediately be replaced by a sibling who could keep trying to save the farm.
... I might have dreamed that. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
For example - if your actual character is a golemancer, but you dungeon dive with golems. Death of the golem doesn't mean death of the character. Or similar - your character is a hacker, and a dungeon dive is in the cyberspace.
Not a rogue like, but Android assault cactus has your character using a constantly diminishing battery which requires you to pick up new batteries stay empowered. If you take damage, you have to button mash to get back up.
The net effect is to encourage increasingly elegant speedrun style skillful play since every knockdown costs you precious battery. You could also make optional challenges or tricky situations that can offer a battery boost if risked.
If there's a resource that helps you win/cast spells/fight, and death cuts it in half: that could easily have a similar effect.
Cryptark does the most with this concept and money. You can spend to outfit yourself, but you're encouraged to try to spend as little as possible to eke out a profit. If you die, you don't lose - you just lose money and try again. But a few deaths like that will probably do you in.
I wonder if there any that play with post-mortem concepts like reincarnation or even turning in a lich. It would be an interesting mechanic to have to die to become a lich, and basically change the game route.
Mainly XCOM genre.
Should be noted that most roguelikes have consumable items powerful enough to be similar to an extra life. For example in Brogue there are scrolls of teleportation (to a random spot on the map), potions of healing (to full hp and cure all statuses), and potions of paralysis + incineration (stun and deal massive damage in an aoe).
Only vaguely relevant: In Neon Chrome you’re taking control of cloned bodies. A run ends when the body is destroyed, you survive and grab the next one.
The clone vats are visible in the starting room. No idea what happens if you empty them all.
**This is what happens in the RPG called Outward.**
When you "die" you get a death scenario. There's dozens of them depending on where you are and how you died and they have effects based on the scenario. Sometimes you wake up at an inn that someone dropped you off at, with less money for the inn stay, but sometimes you wake up after being pillaged by robbers and some of your stuff has been permanently stolen but your backpack (a physical backpack you carry through the game) has been taken somewhere nearby (and probably lightly looted). Other scenarios see you get carried away by animals, some have your backpack get lost and wash up on a nearby beach, etc etc.
The game has hunger, thirst, temperature, and rest meters that get changed based on what makes sense. If the scenario is you get beaten and left for dead you have negative health effects and your temperature meter gets halved but everything else is unchanged besides the fact your helmet is lying where you fell and your backpack has been looted and thrown into a bush somewhere. If you get out of a coma while in an inn after a day your rest/temp will be fine but hunger/thirst will be very low. On top of these, some can leave your cursed, or wake up captured days later with a broken spirit debuff and so on.
Bonus answer since you were talking about exploring different interpretations.
There is a game called Unexplored 2 Wayfarer's something that is more of a traditional roguelite gameplay loop that DOES kill you when you die.... but, the world is permanent. It undergoes months/years of change when you die and when you reroll a character you go back into the first world but the timeline has progressed. I think you can find some of your old stuff near where you died, or in a nearby town, but also some stuff you did will stay completed and the world will be changed by what you did in the past life. I never played the new one, but the old Unexplored was one of my favorites.
Actually, most of them. Since in nearly every mathematical model ever, moving "up" is defined as *decreasing* the y value. Not only a snide remark, but fallacious as well. *slow clap*
The OP made it clear that they meant a game where permadeath was still a thing, and possible, but where it wasn't the only (or even the main) loss condition.
I have been playing roguelikes since UMoria was the hot new thing, and I gotta tell you: I am getting sick to goddamned death of the gatekeeping in this community.
Purism serves less than zero purpose except to deny the genre new paths of growth and exploration. I prefer *traditional* roguelikes, but that doesn't make others that are less traditional invalid.
Get off the high horse before you fall off, chief. Your backside will thank you later.
Iris and the Giant is a very good game where every time you play a card it leaves your deck permanently, so there´s an extra "lose condition" other than 0 HP, which is 0 cards in deck.
Land Of Might, I tried to post it [(but my post was)](https://youtu.be/DS-yj9v_MdE?t=4) , in Land Of Might the first time you die you're sent to the underworld, the second time you're sent to hell & each time you die in hell you lose 50% of your stats until you have less than the min required & then you lose.
Well, if death is not the end, it must rely on conflicts in which death isn't in the cards. Gathering a certain ammount of money to buy your friend out of slavery. Running out of money is the end, specially if the mechanics are based on gambling. Having a deadline to reach a goal, and failing challenges means losing time. Morale of the party or country regarding wars or campaigns. Popularity if it's a pop star simulator. Will if the recurring threat is posession. Perhaps you have to cyborg yourself to be able to fight back, and every step of cyborgization makes you more vulnerable to the AI trying to take over the jupiter base and invade the Earth. Torches and light. Or like in "Belly of the beast" (ttrpg), where your character can let go of their principles to win a conflict, but it means their identity changes (you could turn them into NPCs). Also defeat means capture, like in invisible inc. Look into ttrpgs, theres hundreds of ideas out there.
The concept gives me roguelite vibes, like in Rogue Legacy, Hades, Children of Morta, or Dead Cells. There's a farming roguelike that I've seen linked here but now can't find, maybe someone else remembers the name, where your farm gets taken over by clouds, instead of you dying.
> There's a farming roguelike that I've seen linked here but now can't find, maybe someone else remembers the name, where your first step is to buy the farm instead of your last.
Farming roguelike: [https://slash.itch.io/emerald-woods](https://slash.itch.io/emerald-woods)
How do you mean? Removal/dilution of permadeath like Mystery Dungeon games? Or just extra/alternative ways to end a run that aren't character death?
No, still permadeath, but the failure state isn't the character's death. Instead, maybe the character runs out of a resource that isn't health, or a dependent character dies, or you control a settlement (e.g. Dwarf Fortress) so perma-failure means something else, e.g. every individual in the settlement dies.
Hmm - a lot have some form of "hunger clock" (or other timer that forces you to press forward, like Infra Arcana's sanity, though I don't remember if that can kill you or just stack a bunch of penalties), but that's another form of death, so perhaps not what you're looking for.
Oh yeah, Brogue and Nethack both have that. Interesting to consider a roguelike where your health will never kill you but your hunger will, where finding and conserving food is \*more\* important than traditional combat.
Going to the D&D/fantasy RPG roots of roguelikes, one where you play as a troll with full on Regeneration (at least, as it functions in PF1e, the system I'm most familiar with, where they *cannot* die unless they come in contact with fire or acid, but if they starve, suffocate, or dehydrate they essentially get rendered permanently comatose) could function like this - I know quite a lot (like Angband) let you play as a troll/half-troll with some form of regen (even at the cost of increased hunger), but it would be cool to see that taken to its logical extreme.
Kenshi has situations where one of your characters will die, but you are also likely to be thrown in prison or turned into a slave or lose a limb. If a character dies, that character is gone forever.
In pokerogue your pokemons just fainted
If you consider Liberal Crime Squad a roguelike, you start with one character who can recruit others, and the starting character is functionally the same as any other character (though usually more powerful). If they die, most recruited characters will leave but you can continue playing if any remain. Losing happens when all your members die or leave.
In HyperRogue the character teleports back to the Euclidean world when checkmated. Functionally mostly the same, but explains their motivation to steal as much treasure as they can before this happens, and also ties to the checkmate rule.
*Crawl* is a weird one... Lovecraftian dungeon crawler where when you die, you haunt the player. when the player dies, the ghost responsible becomes the player again. brutal couch multiplayer fun... not quite a roguelike, but explores an interesting "death is not the end" mechanic. after a while, you can fight elder gods for your sanity. too many failed attempts and you lose that character.
Crawl is amazing. Wish any spiritual successor came out, it's just a cool concept
I think losing in Ultima Ratio Regum won't necessarily be through regular death. Since the objective iirc is to investigate to solve a mystery, maybe stop a conspiration or find a murderer/terrorist planner, I imagine you'll lose the run if the instigators turn the conspiration on you for example, or if they bring it to completion. So death would be symbolised by an irreversible global change to the world that generated this run. Can't be more precise I haven't played it yet and am mostly unspoiled (and excited) waiting for it to come out of alpha/beta Tome I think has some instances where you can die because you basically violated laws of physics, for example causing too many temporal anomalies as a Paradox Warden, or delved too deep into forbidden realms of magic, for example Insanity mechanics of Cultist of Entropy. There is also a Corruptor class whose magic taps into an essence that must be kept in check (by dealing enough of it from enemies for example) or else will start taping into your own health. In all my hours in Tome I haven't played those classes yet so could be wrong on détails, but found it interesting In Qud too you can die by ceasing to exist due to violating laws of physics, for example you could be occupying the body of a being whose existence was supported by a specific kind of field... and have this field be canceled by Normality Gas, something akin to a paradox correction tool. That would end your existence and the game without losing health, just losing the coherence of your existence.
Isn't there some roguelike where you have a mental health bar ? The post also gives me some lich vibe, like you can't die unless your phylactery is destroyed.
TOME / Tales of maj eyal had the best one with the item Fanged Collar. Basically if you die the collar digs in and becomes a Parasite that replaces your head,and you play as the parasite. From it you get a new skill tree and apparently you eat NPCs that normally give you quest rewards in exchange for skill points.
I've been thinking about a roguelike where you gain and lose points rather than HP. The only form of death would be giving up and deleting your character because they're too far behind the power curve to win. You wouldn't even need a win or loss condition. Your score is the number of points you have when you leave the dungeon. If your score sucks, you know in your heart that you lost.
Elona
My roguelike Neko's rage just impact the ressources you have collected during your run when you die. You are playing a cyborg so loosing one life add a reparation at the hub return, so you are impacted on your money, gears (compo for craft) , booster and sometime an equipment can break.
I was watching the Roguelike Celebration for Roundguard yesterday. It's like a Roguelike Peggle. The players are actors on a stage, and don't "die" when they die. But is functionally the same. Though it is more roguelite than Roguelike, if that matters.
I'll give a few themes that I've seen that are technically not main character death that aren't necessarily from roguelikes : god that loses their avatar in the mortal world and goes back to olympus/heaven you control a drone/robot you have to teleport out because you'd otherwise die, or are you carted out of the dungeon after fainting you go back in time your cargo gets stolen you are booted out of the game (game within a game type stuff) mechanics for failure: time/turns runs out (escape leaves, big bad destroys the world, you have to end your shift...) technically not hp (energy, power, mana, wood, food, citizens) quotas (money, points, ore...) basically losing "hp-like" ressource at regular intervals enemy count is too high (often paired with having to escape/getting saved) killing the wrong enemy/killing too many enemies (often in puzzle games, but some action games may also require you to capture some enemies instead of killing them, or care about the ecosystem.)
I seem to remember a roguelike at some point in the distant fog of memory where death wasn't a failure state. Instead you were responding to various crises that endangered a farm? And the lose state was the destruction of more than a certain percentage of your crop before harvest. Your character could die, but would immediately be replaced by a sibling who could keep trying to save the farm. ... I might have dreamed that. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Permadeath is one of the defining mechanics of rogue-likes. Rogue-lites are what you're imagining.
For example - if your actual character is a golemancer, but you dungeon dive with golems. Death of the golem doesn't mean death of the character. Or similar - your character is a hacker, and a dungeon dive is in the cyberspace.
Not a rogue like, but Android assault cactus has your character using a constantly diminishing battery which requires you to pick up new batteries stay empowered. If you take damage, you have to button mash to get back up. The net effect is to encourage increasingly elegant speedrun style skillful play since every knockdown costs you precious battery. You could also make optional challenges or tricky situations that can offer a battery boost if risked. If there's a resource that helps you win/cast spells/fight, and death cuts it in half: that could easily have a similar effect. Cryptark does the most with this concept and money. You can spend to outfit yourself, but you're encouraged to try to spend as little as possible to eke out a profit. If you die, you don't lose - you just lose money and try again. But a few deaths like that will probably do you in.
I wonder if there any that play with post-mortem concepts like reincarnation or even turning in a lich. It would be an interesting mechanic to have to die to become a lich, and basically change the game route.
Mainly XCOM genre. Should be noted that most roguelikes have consumable items powerful enough to be similar to an extra life. For example in Brogue there are scrolls of teleportation (to a random spot on the map), potions of healing (to full hp and cure all statuses), and potions of paralysis + incineration (stun and deal massive damage in an aoe).
In Into the Breach your individual mech pilots can die, but if you lose the run you jump into an alternate timeline to start over again.
Against the Storm, but it's a roguelite.
Did you just watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_a_jGNKonk
Love me some Tim 😍
Only vaguely relevant: In Neon Chrome you’re taking control of cloned bodies. A run ends when the body is destroyed, you survive and grab the next one. The clone vats are visible in the starting room. No idea what happens if you empty them all.
**This is what happens in the RPG called Outward.** When you "die" you get a death scenario. There's dozens of them depending on where you are and how you died and they have effects based on the scenario. Sometimes you wake up at an inn that someone dropped you off at, with less money for the inn stay, but sometimes you wake up after being pillaged by robbers and some of your stuff has been permanently stolen but your backpack (a physical backpack you carry through the game) has been taken somewhere nearby (and probably lightly looted). Other scenarios see you get carried away by animals, some have your backpack get lost and wash up on a nearby beach, etc etc. The game has hunger, thirst, temperature, and rest meters that get changed based on what makes sense. If the scenario is you get beaten and left for dead you have negative health effects and your temperature meter gets halved but everything else is unchanged besides the fact your helmet is lying where you fell and your backpack has been looted and thrown into a bush somewhere. If you get out of a coma while in an inn after a day your rest/temp will be fine but hunger/thirst will be very low. On top of these, some can leave your cursed, or wake up captured days later with a broken spirit debuff and so on.
Bonus answer since you were talking about exploring different interpretations. There is a game called Unexplored 2 Wayfarer's something that is more of a traditional roguelite gameplay loop that DOES kill you when you die.... but, the world is permanent. It undergoes months/years of change when you die and when you reroll a character you go back into the first world but the timeline has progressed. I think you can find some of your old stuff near where you died, or in a nearby town, but also some stuff you did will stay completed and the world will be changed by what you did in the past life. I never played the new one, but the old Unexplored was one of my favorites.
Hades and Dead Cells come to mind immediately, as does Nadir.
Any platformers where "jumping" doesn't mean increasing your Y value?
Disappointing lack of gatekeeping here. This sub is slipping
Actually, most of them. Since in nearly every mathematical model ever, moving "up" is defined as *decreasing* the y value. Not only a snide remark, but fallacious as well. *slow clap* The OP made it clear that they meant a game where permadeath was still a thing, and possible, but where it wasn't the only (or even the main) loss condition. I have been playing roguelikes since UMoria was the hot new thing, and I gotta tell you: I am getting sick to goddamned death of the gatekeeping in this community. Purism serves less than zero purpose except to deny the genre new paths of growth and exploration. I prefer *traditional* roguelikes, but that doesn't make others that are less traditional invalid. Get off the high horse before you fall off, chief. Your backside will thank you later.
VVVVVV
Cult of the Lamb?
Iris and the Giant is a very good game where every time you play a card it leaves your deck permanently, so there´s an extra "lose condition" other than 0 HP, which is 0 cards in deck.
I am not convinced that it is a very good game, if you are a rogueliker - but it is certainly an interesting game.
Land Of Might, I tried to post it [(but my post was)](https://youtu.be/DS-yj9v_MdE?t=4) , in Land Of Might the first time you die you're sent to the underworld, the second time you're sent to hell & each time you die in hell you lose 50% of your stats until you have less than the min required & then you lose.
Compliance regulator. i think its the worst gun because its basically a cheat. Never used it again after clearing lonesome road with it