Why would anyone have that strong a view about what you said...? I'm not clamouring for sequels particularly for those games, though I'd love more games like them. Then again, whatever gets me more beautiful soundtracks from Darren Korb.

I strongly disagree on their roguelite "bug" being something they need to drop.

Bastion didn't land for me, so I didn't play it, but Transistor would have shined as a roguelite. Its combat system is far too complex, and has potential for so much more, than what can be explored in one or two playthroughs.

The same goes for Cloudbank as a narrative setting.

Transistor, but with Hades' gameplay loop and storytelling style would be insane. It already felt like a roguelite, but without a gameplay or narrative reason to go in for multiple runs.

Supergiant hasn't cought a roguelite bug... They've found the perfect narrative and game format to match the gameplay systems and worlds they like to create.

Bastion is an absolute stinker of a game.

It's completely pedestrian, and there are so many bad design decisions it's hard to even take it seriously.

It's a game where marketing really did its job because the game could never carry itself based on its presentation or mechanics.

To be honest, I get what you're saying here although I've played all their games. I think of the bunch I disliked Bastion the most. It felt like an empty PSX game. I liked Transistor, but the catch is that it needed to be played pretty much surrounding their pause-the-battle technique which was okay but it really kind of sucks to me whenever I have any game use this technique. I would have much rather it had been a full turn-based game. I like turn-based games though. There is some viking game that plays like a janky-table top where it's semi-turnbased and it was absolutely awful for it.

Mind you, I like Transistor due to its story. Which I think is the same reason why I liked Pyre. The setting, it was quite nice and if I could remove the mini-games from the game I would. Hades, I liked because they took characters the size of tic-tacs and turned them into three-dimensional beings. That was quite nice. They played on a lot of anime tropes. The gameplay was good, but it was a bit too challenging for me. I dropped it relatively early due to this. I pretty much sit in the same camp now. I wondered if maybe I had aged out of their target audience but I will probably never play one of their games again. It's just not my bag.

Sparse gameplay, tied together with lots and lots of implied worldbuilding in a lore book that contains most of the story. The gameplay was okay when you got to it, but there was far too much written story locked up, instead of "show, don't tell".

Also, the game wants you to finish six tournaments before you get any sort of decent ending.

Hades was really hard for me too, and I played upwards of 100+ runs before beating [redacted], and another bunch before finally turning on God mode, where I think I got up to about 20% damage reduction before it stabilized.

At this point I want to push the story forward (I'm in the epilogue) but I've already played so much I need to wait more for the battling to be fun again.

It was really groundbreaking to have the narrator react to what you were doing, in a "Half-Life feels like a real world that you inhabit" way. The way the music was woven into the game was also amazing, and the art! There's a reason it put them on the map.

I didn't like the gameplay all that much though and the world building didn't make too much sense to me. These parts have aged the most poorly. But it was way better than just marketing.

It wasn't groundbreaking, it was a bad design decision. Evidenced by the fact the biggest patch was a toggle to take the fking narrator out.

And they weren't even the first.

Have you played Binding of Isaac though? The king of roguelikes

"I wish Supergiant would get the roguelite bug out of their system and make sequels to Bastion and then Transistor finally."

Was what I typed in our group chat. The three of us are mid to late 30s with me being the oldest by 3 months.

To say it went over like a brick balloon would be an understatement. So, I wanted to see if fellow game players had thoughts on it. Am I crazy? Do you agree?