Avoiding Frustration in Roguish Games.

I’ve only played a few Rogue-like or Rogue-lite games compared to most of the games I’ve played. Some of them I’ve really enjoyed, while others felt frustrating, at least at times. That frustration is obvious: you were on a good run, making progress, and now you’re back at the start screen with nothing to show for it.

Some games that doesn’t bother me. Games like Outer Wilds, I never felt particularly bad about starting a new run. It’s all about the design, what’s involved in a run, and what dying costs you.

In some roguish games, there’s little to accumulate, little grinding involved, and so a restart is like restarting Solitaire. A fresh deal, but you don’t really lose anything. That’s a solid model for this sort of game that keeps frustrations low.

Other games, where there’s a lot of build-up and grinding to make a push for victory, feel like major letdowns if you were getting somewhere and suddenly get restart. There was no reward for how good you were doing. At best, you can take solace that you were close: with enough repetition you’ll get victory. But not now. Now you’re back at the start.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a roguish game, and you can get sent back to the start, but you’re equally likely to hit some intermediate point first. It was a frustrating game at times, but ultimately it at least rewards progress by having semi-soft landings for failure. I think that’s a style of roguish games that deserves more exploration, where some luck and chance can make the difference between square-one and somewhere in-between.

Some of this may be personality. I like progress and feeling a sense of intermediate accomplishment. Perhaps there are those who like the high-wire act of a full-on Rogue-like. They want to have to have perfect gameplay, they want to risk a hundred-hours of grinding for victory being dashed by a single false move. Oy vey. They can keep it!

What distinguishes the Rogue-lite is some sort of tangible help as you progress, beyond simply improving your own skill. There are points that let you upgrade, or there are at least quality-of-life improvements or permanent loot or unlocks. These can be a good bridge, but the details matter. If they do this only weakly, it can still be a frustrating experience, losing. If there’s a cheat-death mechanic, but it can leave you in a run with no path to victory, that’s worse than going back to start, especially if there’s also a penalty for abandoning a run versus dying. Having some sort of progressive checkpoints is still preferred. If I made it a third of the way, start me at a quarter. If I make it to the half, start me at a third. Like that. And if I fail from there, send me back another click, like Getting Over It.

There are other ways to design away the frustration. Once the player is sufficiently skilled, they might take advantage of skips or shortcuts that would be inaccessible (either from skill or upgrades or unlocks). Once they have completed the game, let them jump to content more freely. (There are cases where that doesn’t make sense. For example, if a game depends on the full run to decide what is available or happens. Most games aren’t built that way, and so they could afford late-game shortcuts.)

Or simply making the game short. Faster than Light is a Rogue-like with short enough runs that I don’t recall much frustration. If there’s not much time lost, that’s a great recipe for a quick fun time that invites player experimentation.

It’s up to the developers, how hard-core they want their game to be. (Also how much time they have to improve quality-of-life.) But the best design rewards players for trying, as well as for winning. If a player is being meticulous or methodical, that should be rewarded differently than if they’re being brave or skillful. Some non-roguish games have variations of guns-blazing versus stealth, pacifist versus murderous. Design should account for this as well, and signal to players how they did, how they were rewarded.

What’s best about games, the high-quality feedback a player receives, is the most valuable tool developers have. The better use they make of reinforcing player behavior, the better the game will be.