Dying Light - How to Kill a Volatile

Roguelikes

I was browsing my game library to figure out what I wanted to play, when I started downloading the most recent version of a roguelike that I've poured about a hundred or so hours into already. This got me thinking: What is it about this game that keeps me coming back to it when I get tired of everything else?

A roguelike, for those of you who only use their internet for Facebook, is a game inspired by an old game called Rogue, a turn based game made before my parents even knew each other. The game focused around delving into an increasingly dangerous dungeon in search of not dying horrendously. You often failed in your quest.

In fact, failure was a routine part of Rogue, and if your character died they were gone for good. I'd argue that Rogue inspired a whole theory of game design for that reason alone. Its brutally unforgiving gameplay forced you to take every step with the utmost caution. You had to ration your special items out as thinly as possible and knowing when to use a potion or a wand was a show of skill. Failure to do anything else was enough to send you right to the start with nothing but your hard won knowledge and bruised ego to show for it.

From a modern perspective the most striking feature of Rogue was its interface. It was built entire from ASCII symbols on a grid.

Rogue is the first game to feature the smiley face as a main character.

The Unending Steam Library

I've been shuffling through my Steam library wondering what happened.

Ten years ago I would have been ecstatic to have such a huge variety of involved, long running games. Those were the days before Steam gathered its momentum, where it was still more common to buy a game at a brick and mortar store than buy one online. I'm pretty sure I still had dial-up ten years ago, too, so even those sloppy flash games were uncommon. If you bought a game back then, especially with the limited budget of a teenager, you'd better play that thing to death.

Now I look at my list of 200+ games on Steam, most of them from sales and Humble Bundles, and wonder whether or not it's possible to have too many games.

So many games,
So little time.

Young Me scoffs at the idea. Too many games? Impossible!