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.
I like rogue type games, but soulslike stuff? I don’t have the time to play something like that these days. Roguelikes you can pick up, play a bit, and then get back to whatever is requiring your attention. I think my fondness of roguelikes is because I liked games like Rogue and NetHack back in the day.
Roguelikes/lites are good for me because I’m usually done with a run in under an hour. I have very little time for gaming these days and being able to do it in little doses is great.
FTl, Hades, Slay the Spire, Into the Breech, Heat Signature, etc work well for me.
I feel that souls like games are 100% the same. I can boot up, swing a sword at a few enemies, then log off and do whatever else. It seems a lot of people think they require your attention for long spans of time. Couldn’t be further from my experience with them.
Boss battles can take forever though and you can’t save mid battle in most of the ones I’ve played
I can’t think of a single Souls game where a Boss fight takes longer than ten minutes; in fact the overwhelming majority of bosses take less than five minutes per attempt.