The teleology of roguelikes

[falafel]

I posted in the Switch thread very briefly about Hades and how much I'm enjoying it. I'm not too familiar with the genre and picked it up because I enjoyed Bastion and Transistor so much a few years back. It's a real joy to play and just constantly keeps throwing different abilities and mods at you, every run has me working through the development of a different build at super fast speed room-by-foom, trading skills off against each other and having skills interact in really interesting ways. Great design and aesthetics too, the only thing it suffers from is Americans doing terrible accents so the voice is turned all the way to zero.

The thing is, I'm starting to ask myself, when does it end? From what I can gather, even when you escape Hades it isn't really over - so it really is designed to be perpetual, despite the narrative element that keeps unfolding. This unsettles me, in the same way things like Destiny do. And I think it's a philosophical question. If there's a story, I want it to end. I'm happy to start again, but I need that feeling of an ending from a story. So I don't know now whether I want to carry on, because although the game is great to play I am also being pulled in by the narrative and have a terrible feeling it will all play out like threads unspooling, rather than tightening onto a conclusion. If that makes sense. In storytelling general I know that a single arc can unfold itself in manifold directions but I think one of the things that allows that to happen is the contraint of a necessary ending, in the purest sense of the story exhausting itself rather than in terms of narrative convention.

So if this is about the meditative experience of pure flow, why have a narrative that hints at a telos and the feeling of progress?

Lots of people here seem to love Binding of Isaac etc so just want to see what makes people happy to have put hundreds of hours in.

[ImmaculateClump]

It sounds like they've added procedural generation to the narrative, just look at it like one of those choose your own adventure books.
There'll be a beginning, a middle and an end to a full run, I'd imagine, just they'll be different each time you play. There's probably world building story in between runs and stuff too, and I don't know how well they've handled all that, so that might be why it's seeming a bit messy.
One option would be just to skip all the narrative shit. It's an arcady game, it's all about the combat, if the story is slowing things down and taking away from your experience rather than adding to it, just mash the button until the idiots stop talking.

These games are designed so that the core gameplay loop is so satisfying and the skill ceiling is so high that you'd be more than happy to play it for hundreds of hours, learning and honing your skills, and the procedural generation is there to keep things fresh.
Rather than a linear game where memorisation is half the battle, you have to learn the game inside out, learn the mechanics and systems to the point where you can adapt to anything the game throws at you.
If you've ever played a ten hour game and thought "Aw man, I loved playing this so much, I wish the campaign lasted for another 500 hours" then roguelites are for you.
If you've ever played a ten hour game and thought "Man, I wish this was shorter, thank god it's over and I got closure on the story. Reet, what's next?" then they might not be for you.

I adore roguelikes and roguelites, but I don't like supergiant, I haven't gotten on with any of their games, and I bounced off Hades pretty hard at the start of early access.
I suppose I should go back and give it another chance now that it's fully fleshed out, but I think I'd seen more than enough by that point, I can't imagine the core fundamentals will have changed.

I remember getting to the last bit of some map and spending five minutes strafing around a room, slowly chipping away at these two enemies who were chucking bombs at me.
I thought "either I've got to do this every run or it's progression based and I've got to slowly grind away until I can eventually one shot these pricks. Either way, I'm not having fun, I'm out."

Reminded me a lot of a bargain bin Leap of Fate.
Leap of Fate with "bullet sponge" enemies and console style brawler combat. Leap of fate but slowed down and boring.
I can see why people are digging it, but it didn't excite me at all.