Released back in 1980, the roleplaying game Rogue popularized a set of mechanics that just won't die—ironic, considering they include permanent death. Rogue also featured systems such as randomly generated dungeons which made each playthrough unique, but the fact that death brings a definitive end to your campaign was arguably the game's biggest innovation. It forces you to start a new adventure after each failure.

In the 40 years since its release, there have been many Rogue imitators, and these roguelikes have adopted and adapted the above concepts at the dungeon crawler’s core. Many of these games are similarly set in dark fantasy worlds—featuring evil mages and dense skill trees—where you can make your hero into a beefy barbarian or wily wizard depending on what items you discover in your randomly-generated map.

Some roguelikes step far away from the original game, though. They take skill trees, randomized worlds, and permadeath and fuse them with unexpected genres to make their own unique formulas.

Below, you will find a collection of some of the stranger examples you should consider playing. As roguelike elements can make games extremely compelling, thanks to their focus on replayability, the only thing you should worry about is how much time they will absorb.
 

Against the Storm

The Scorched Queen demands tribute, and as her viceroy, it falls to you to build up resource-spewing cities to feed her demands. One of the many challenges to your duties is that the world you’re inhabiting suffers from yearly storms which rip through the land and level any settlements outside the walls of the Smoldering City.

Against the Storm is an unlikely fusion of real-time strategy city builder and roguelike. In each season of the year, you must establish a colony in the wilderness that satisfies the needs of its residents. Your people are a strange mix of fantasy creatures: humans, elves, sentient beavers, and lizard people. They demand different styles of homes and foods, excel at competing labors, and thrive in contrasting environments. For instance, Beavers are great engineers and love a log cabin, but are terrible in combat, unlike the lizardfolk, who are great hunters but want brick houses that retain the sun's warmth. If you meet enough of your peoples’ competing needs, the Scorched Queen will be pleased, letting the city stand in her honor. If you don’t make the town successful before the timer that marks her ever-shortening patience reaches zero, she will smite it from the world.

Succeed or fail, time will march on, and in the next season, you’ll start a new colony, in a new region, with a different balance of resources to satisfy your population’s needs. If your last city is a success, it will appear on your trading screen, offering a source of goods and income, making your job a little easier.

Against the Storm becomes a roguelike when the year reaches its end. A deadly tempest whips through the world, leveling your cities to the ground, leaving nothing behind. At the start of the new year, you will begin from scratch. That is, except for one settlement: the Queen’s citadel, the Smoldering City, at the heart of the map. At year’s end, your people withdraw behind its walls, bringing the coin they earned with them, and you can invest that in permanent upgrades that affect all your future cities. You can increase your villagers’ movement speed and production bonuses, and even make your queen more patient, giving you extra time to turn a settlement into a thriving city.

Failure in a strategy game can often be frustrating because each level is such a time investment; a loss can mean wiping away an hour’s play and starting again. In fusing the genre with roguelike elements, Against the Storm leans into that loss, making failure a compelling part of the game.
 

Wall World

In Wall World, you pilot a heavily-armed robotic spider to fight off swarms of insect-like aliens while scuttling up an impossibly high edifice and drilling into mineral-rich veins to pay for upgrades to your mechanical arachnid’s armaments. You know, standard stuff. 

The game is an addicting mix of Missile Command and Manic Miner. You spend half the time sitting in the spider’s gunner’s seat, using flak cannons, shotguns, and javelins to punch through the clouds of incoming enemies. The rest of the time, you’re carving your way through the rock with a mining laser, searching for resources to upgrade your robot.

Every time you die, you lose all the upgrades you paid for with the minerals you unearthed, and you start each new run with a basic spiderbot that must unlock the same equipment you earned in the game before. Wall World works as a casual game, where each run is a thrilling push to see how long you can survive against the strengthening enemy waves. However, thanks to its crunchy roguelike layer, no time in-game is wasted. Whether it has minerals or not, every rock you crack open earns you coins you can spend in the workshop on permanent upgrades to your spiderbot. You can increase its health and movement speed, or instead choose to unlock equipment like a homing missile or a laser drill that speeds up your mining expeditions.

While Wall World didn't need to have this layer, that extra roguelike seasoning makes playing one more game so easy.
 

Cursed to Golf

Cursed to Golf starts with a champion golfer on the final hole of a major contest getting struck by lightning and waking up in the underworld. Your only way back to life is to complete 18 holes of supernatural golf, defeating superpowered competitors along the way. The moment-to-moment gameplay is reminiscent of old Flash games: You golf by selecting a putter, lining up your angle, and then trying to time your power bar just right to send your ball where you want it. If you miss your timing, you'll likely overshoot your target.

Since this is literally purgatory, the golf courses you face aren’t your usual fare. Yes, they have sand bunkers and water hazards, but there's also spike traps, gravity wells, and Mario-like pipe networks that can send your ball all over the map. You’ll need to master them all if you hope to guide your golfer back to life. 

One perk of the underworld is that you also have access to tools and abilities that don’t turn up in the regular PGA Tour, such as stopping your ball in midair so it drops straight down into the hole. You activate these powers with ace cards you can buy or collect as you advance through the courses.

If you don’t manage to put your ball in the hole before your par count reaches zero, however, you’ll be sent all the way back to the bottom of purgatory, starting your journey to 18 holes all over again. And each time you start over, the order of holes you face will shuffle around, making for an additional roguelike-flavored challenge.

After playing Cursed to Golf, you may find it difficult to watch regular golf again, wishing that just once, the players would use an ace card to transform their dimpled ball into a remote-controlled missile. Just knowing that any player that exceeds their par limit would teleport to the start of infinite golf purgatory would make things a little more tense.
 

Inscryption

In some ways, Inscryption is the most expected of the roguelikes on this list—you don’t control a robotic spider, feed a hungry queen, or even play 18 holes of golf in an infernal plane. You sit down at a table, face a masked opponent, build a deck of cards, and try to defeat them in rounds of matches similar to Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering Arena. 

If you succeed in your match, your character's tabletop token will travel further through a mysterious wood toward a final boss who lives in a cabin at the heart of the forest. Fail, and you return to the start of your journey, and the path through the wood generates anew. On the surface, Inscryption looks a lot like Slay the Spire. However, when you get up from the card table, things take an unexpected turn.

Inscryption is a game within a game: You are a person in a world playing the card game, and if you explore the physical space around the table, you will find secrets you can bring with you on your journey through the woods. Solve the puzzles in the cabin where you’re playing and you will find hidden cards and items; you will learn more about your shadowy opponent, and you will—well, let’s not spoil things.

If you have a passing interest in card games, few are more rewarding than Inscryption. Put on your headphones, turn off the lights, and sink into its mysteries.