This was recommended to my by a Steam friend and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I adore the lo-fi aspect of the game with the screenlines and adjustment waves that happen randomly as if it were being played on a CRT. The entirety of my time spent with the game was on a TV which amplified the lo-fi graphics even more. I'm most impressed with the strength scaling of the game as every playthrough I received, what I thought to be, an overpowered weapon that just tore through rooms for awhile until it didn't. Then I would find another weapon upgrade and rinse and repeat. I never felt like I had a stinker of a run and I like to think that has to do with the balancing and overall choices being fun to make and always feeling good.

My only complaint is that whenever I started to play this, I had no idea it is an Early Access title, so right when I was getting multiple wins, I was faced with two locked doors thanking me for playing and that this was the end of the current early access version 😭 Can't wait for the next update in September!

Tiny Rogues combines pretty much the best elements of many other roguelikes. Of course, it has all of the bullet hell goodness you'd expect from your Binding of Enter the Nuclear Hades, but adds onto it with the insane amount of run variety. Almost every single run you'll have will feel different one way or another. One run you'll be cleaving through enemies with a greatsword bigger than you, and in the next you'll melt off the final boss' face with DoT effects like that one scene from Indiana Jones. Almost all of the classes you can play as have specific builds they encourage, but you can pretty much build any class however you'd like if you really wanted to.

I would have given this game a good review even before the massive update it had in December but now it's even easier for me to recommend it. The fact that this game still has several updates planned for the future is ABSURD, since there's already so much content in this game.

Bought the game when it was released (Ty egg father). Kind of dropped it immediately, putting only an hour in. The dev later comes back drops one of the biggest updates I've ever seen in a game? Started playing it again on December 23, 2023, and holy moly the update did the game justice. So many syngeries, so many unique classes, a ton of easter eggs. I love the bullet hell patterns some of the bosses have (except the walrus, fuck that). I can't wait for the next update to drop, super eager to see what the dev has in store.

Tiny Rogues is excatly what its title emplies. It's a short and fast-paced action roguelike with visuals and simplicity borrowed from a long-gone era of retro gaming.

It keeps both its audiovisuals and gameplay simple while still delivering very satisfying and challenging runs. It might be simple but it offers a vast range of customization and accessibility to keep things interesting and replayable.

The game is still under development, however, it's in a very worthwhile state already. It's extremely cheap to boot so there's not much margin to complain.

possibly my favorite recent roguelike, not so much because i find it particularly innovative or interesting to think about - it is those things, in some small ways, and i don't think it has to be those things to be a good game - but because the developer's labor and the love he has for the genre bleed thick through the screen. you can see bits and pieces of every big roguelike of the last decade in here, not just direct references (although those are plentiful) but in the design decisions; you can feel hades when you level up, nuclear throne in the enemy encounters, isaac because it's always set in a little square ass room.

the core gameplay loop is very very simple even for what you'd expect out of the genre, you follow a direct line from first room through shop after tavern after boss encounter until you reach the Final Guy, it's a linear hallway full of doors where behind each door is a random room... in a way this basic formula closely resembles the NoEnd House creepypasta, or perhaps it makes more sense to say that the NoEnd House has a very video-game-like structure.

complication comes via the eight bajillion stats that your character has which can be manipulated via items and potions and shit. the amount of text presented on screen in any given menu can feel overwhelming at first, but with time i found that (like many roguelikes) you can sort of ignore half of the stats and just focus on killing things as fast as possible. the decision to give the game that sort of analog pc style feels a little more carefully considered to me than it often does in other games, obviously it makes doing the graphics much easier but it also lends the game a degree of warmth and close proximity often associated with early home computing and analog media in general (vinyl nerds have a point...)

all of these little points i've just mentioned (the obvious inspirations, the very classic linear structure, the overwhelming text, the visual style) all serve to reinforce that aforementioned feeling of love and pride which i sense coming from the developer through his internet lines underneath the ocean and around the fish and coral and up onto the shore into my computer and my eyes and thus into my brain and heart. as individual choices you could argue that a lot of these traits make the game a bit derivative or simplistic, and i wouldn't fully disagree, but it tells me that it's designed by someone who wanted to make a roguelike that he would like to play a lot of, and because of that i had a pleasant time playing a lot of it myself. this is actually the first game i've ever 100%'d on steam! this isn't a perfect game by any means (hence the 3.5 score), but it is a very sweet game.