What you think of roguelike games?

I hate roguelikes that includes permadeath. Permadeath is a mechanic that should have died with arcades. The only reason it was invented was to get more coins out of kids(and their parents), but somehow it made to this day...

The only one I've liked and played extensively is Enter the Gungeon. Its humor (gun puns) and art style initially drew me in, but after getting used to the how the game works, it's become a great podcast game. It has decent progression, too, in the form of unlocking new items, guns, and merchants, but that will die down after around 120 hours.

I like them a whole lot. Fun to be played in both short and long sessions , especially when you dont feel like commiting time in a longer narrative game.

I think I secretly hate them, since the main 'die, retry' thing is something I have zero patience for. But the ones I make exceptions for and enjoy, I really love. So, uh, relationship status: it's complicated :S

it's without the feeling of any real progression, without a story,

Many roguelikes do have progression, and a story. Some also has pretty extensive world-building.
Some have progression between attempts (there's some debate on how "roguelike" these are), and the vast majority of them have progression during each attempt, it's just that your progression can be cut short if you make a mistake.

I do like roguelikes and roguelites. Not all of them, mind you, there are many stinkers out there, but as for good ones:
Dead Cells
Tales of Maj'Eyal
DoomRL (now just DRL)
Rogue Legacy

I like roguelikes where starvation is not an issue, like Dungeons of Dredmor. More time spent killing things is better than thinking about hunger mechanics.

dislike
I dont like repeatable content and randomly generated levels.

I think that I'm going to like them. The only one I've played that might fit the description is Lost Castle, which I had a lot of fun with despite the fact that I ended up playing it alone. (People say it's best experienced in co-op.) I've learned so far that I will prefer the ones that come with a sense of humor in order to offset some of the frustration.

I dislike losing all progress from one mistake/mis-play, and I really don't have time to get good enough to not ever make a mistake, because I already have a game I dump time in. Also, most roguelike/lite games I've seen don't seem to have an ending and are just played over and over again.

I find them addictive when well executed.

FTL is a masterpiece. I like Binding of Isaac and i just tried a good one for the first time tonight, Dungeon of the Endless.

seeing as I have 304 hours in the binding of isaac, and 689 in BOI:R (plus 489 in risk of rain) I guess I probably like them a little. It helps that they're easy games to jump in and out of, that you can play for a short or long time. For a long time my only gaming rig was a potato laptop so it helped that roguelikes and roguelites are generally pretty light on the requirements.
There was also a time where I was really, really depressed and the repetitive try, die, repeat nature really pulled me in during that time. I sank a lot of time into roguelikes then, but I wouldn't say that it was bad for me. At least that's not how I feel/felt on the matter. It helped that there were rules and a system behind the randomness, that if one started to learn how the game was played that you could improve, that you could get better, and eventually succeed. The old cliche of fall down 8 times, get up 9. Roguelikes were among the things that helped me keep plodding through and not give up on everything entirely. Eventually all that plodding paid off and I looked around and I wasn't standing where I was before. So yeah... that's why I like roguelikes.

It's about seeing how far you can go, how long you can survive. Some have elements of building character stats, or at least equipment. The equipment can vary widely each run and you might have to play differently depending on what you get. It can get a little frustrating at times if you keep dying on the first level or two, but once you get a better understanding you can typically get a little further and may even get all the way to the end.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a pretty good example of a more pure roguelike.
Other games with roguelike elements are still good. Things like the Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gundeon, or Nuclear Throne are largely about variability and challenge. Starting over from scratch again, can be frustrating, but once you get good it can be fun to go through the motions. Starting from scratch also provides a greater ability for one run to differ from the one you had previous. Most include some form of procedural, usually modular level generation, which is in itself a cool feature and works much better in shorter experiences than it would be in games taking many hours to complete. Heck, Spelunky is somewhat of a roguelike, maybe a roguelite, same with Isaac and Nuclear Throne. It really depends on how pure to the formula you want to draw the line for definitions...

Good roguelikes, or roguelites provide a sense of meaningful progress within the time period required to finish a run. The things you get are there to help you win the game, and to ideally make things more fun.

They provide a great deal of replayability, once you're good enough it can be fun to knock out an entire run in an hour or two.

In my opinion they're far greater experiences than simply restarting 10-20 hour experiences like Skyrim 4 or 5 different times because you just feel like making a new character only to fall into the exact same playstyle because it's just objectively the best way to play the game. And it's infinitely better and offers greater variance than a game like say... Candy Crush.

Potato em, I definitively like them but not love them. I'm too shitty with them to really commit but some of them are really really great.

I love the variety, I love the feeling of adventure, but at the same time I hate the doomed-to-fail runs because RNG and tbh I'm not even half as good with them, as much I love them.
Ziggurat was interesting, but Rogue Legacy, Dungeons of Dredmor and Enter the Gungeon are the best ones I played. Honorary mention to binding of Isaac that is... kind of problematic if you only have the old, flash version, because how much better the updated version is that I haven't bought, and not sure I will. Game is just too deep as options go, and for some reason my runs usually end up with shitty stats and lots of hearts and I die because doing no damage. Also fuck the fucking jumping spiders with their sprites in a pseudo-3D space -.-

I really like them. I'm surprised that no one talked about unreal world. It's really a good one if you can get past the oldschool graphics. In the same style of game, there is wayward. These two are nice games because they don't require a lot of skill but crafting things is made in a logical way so as they're turn based you have all your time to think about what you're doing.
There is a bit of meta-progression in wayward if you prefer games where you have an easier start every time you play but in unreal world, the only meta-progression is what you learn from your previous runs.

There are some that can be fun for a couple of hours, specially if they lean more towards an arcade-y feel like Downwell, but I don't quite get how people can dump hundreds of hours into them.
I'm also really confused by those titles that try to be rogue-lite metroidvanias, to me it seems like trying to mix water and oil, but apparently it kinda works.

I am fond of roguelikes, although didn't play a lot of titles. My first experience was ADOM (the original ASCII version), I thought it's controls are too complicated. But I showed the game to my friend and he suddenly got fascinated with it, he started to seek guides, try different race/class combinations, he asked me a lot to translate parts of the manual, so eventually I was also drawn into the game. We both didn't have Internet at home at the time, so we discussed the strategies with each other, competed on who can survive longer, used save scumming (you don't need to die if you make a save file backup).. It was hell of a game, especially since it was freeware, made by a single person and could fir into a single floppy disk. I bought ADOM on Steam to support Thomas Biskup, but didn't try to play the graphical version.

Another game I played and liked a lot was DoomRL. It felt very simple after ADOM, but the familiar setting and fun combat did the trick. I played through several iterations of DoomRL, enjoyed the graphical version with sprites made by Derek Yu, now waiting for the release of Jupiter Hell which is made by the same dev as a sort of spiritual successor.

Dwarf Fortress was another kind of beast. Dwarf Fortress is a dream game made true - it's a game where anything is possible and every detail is simulated. On the flipside, it's several times less friendly to the newcomers than your average roguelike. I've built my first dungeon using step-by-step instuctiuons in the manual, it felt too overwhelming for me, but it's still a masterpiece.

Nowadays people tend to forget what roguelike actually means, mixing up actual roguelikes and rogue-lites - games with some light elements of a roguelike game. After the success of rogue-lite Binding of Isaac indie devs started to add roguelike elements to every other game without thinking a lot on how will it enchance the game or do these elements fit here at all.

Is Risk of Rain a rogue-like or just a platformer with rogue-like elements? I spent 40 hours in it and it did not feel grindy at all.

I've enjoyed a bit of Hand of Fate, though never finished it. Binding of Isaac was a good older one. Rogue Legacy is a classic...

Recent Twin-stick I have been playing, which I'll review soon is The Walking Vegetables. Has some fun elements at play, combining several nice genres and an 80's theme... and it's pretty cliche funny... I can lose interest in them rather fast if they don't have tons of loot - or something unique that keeps me driving onwards - I like the ones that give you benefits for deaths as well - some of those have a sort of RPG-like system to upgrade to a limited capacity to make things easier. People who liked Dead Cells would probably also enjoy Tower Hunter: Erza's Trial. Stopped mid-way through many of 'em. Ziggurat is one I am kinda in limbo with, as well as Necropolis. I suppose I would consider all those sort of in that category. It's kinda broad though... Many games can have "permadeath" for instance, and be totally non-rogue-like otherwise. While others considered rogue-like, honestly do not fit the actual definition of either rogue-like/rogue-lite at all... yet maybe have one parameter, and are tagged as such on Steam, or generally accepted as such... without being a true rogue-like, originating from games like Rogue, or ... one I found interesting (yet save-scummed a bit on the small bit I did play) was SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition.

Lots seem highly imbalanced though - you can get super lucky one run and be almost unstoppable... while other times you can go on a horrendous streak where you just want to wreck your ... entire home - and then wreck the wreckage you created.

I could list a good many I've liked though. That's what popped up in my head though. Some are just too damn dubious or hard to even bother with though, so I can get frustrated or lose my patience with them easily. My attention span sucks. Once I've tried most weapons, if it doesn't seem I'm making much progress, I generally just get side-tracked with another game instead and it's normally not another rogue-like/lite.

Not my favorite genre, but it's one of the ones I have more fun with, being there are so many - with many variations, twists, turns, and the odd as hell weapons or abilities...

Loveem, Slay the Spire is a perfect blend of roguelike + card game.

well mate, you anticipated my answer.. before entering the thread I was thinking exactly "hate 'em" xD
I don't even classify them as a lone genre, I agree with this Wikipedia definition:
"Many of these games use the concepts of procedurally generated maps and permadeath, while moving away from tile-based movement and turn-based gameplay, often using another gameplay genre such as action games or platformers."
Anyways, even if there's few of them and I've got some exceptions, I have your same thoughts - they look often repetitive, without a real story and a progression, more like a grinding game..
I liked roguelike games even on Kongregate, there are exceptions, but overall I find them repetitive and lacking in story, upgrades, characters building etc.: as you said, nothing compared to real RPGs.. call them as one wants, dungeon crawlers or whatever, they can be great if they include non-roguelike elements but if they're just die-and-retry action games it's a no for me xD

Love them. My favorites so far are Slay the Spire, Don't Starve and Enter the Gungeon.

Regimen:

1. Play one game.
2. Get decently far.
3. Choked mid-late game.
4. Close game.
5. Repeat step 1 in a month or so.

I used to not like them but then I played Not The Robots, for some reason that game was just so interesting, especially with the fact that you unlock more content by playing the game, for example: the ultimate unlockable thing is a FPS mode of the game that you get after beating the game on a high enough difficulty level.
It always depends on your personal preferences, like Binding of Isaac is not that interesting for me but Enter The Gungeon seems pretty fun to play.

I do enjoy "rogue-lites" that have some sort of permanent bonuses, because you get the sense of progress and because they make following runs a little easier so you can actually get something done :)

The rogue-likes without permanent bonuses? Can't say I understand what it is that people like about them. Wasting hours without getting any closer to beating that boss or passing that level is really not my idea of fun.