The best roguelikes (and lites) to play: from Hades to Dead Cells

Roguelike gaming is having a real moment. From the smash-hit that was 2019’s Hades (a sequel to which is due to follow later this year) to the brand-new No Return mode in The Last of Us Part 2: Remastered, it’s never been easier to pick up a console and dive in.

But this genre has been around for a long time. Originally used as a way to refer to games like the 1980 classic Rogue, it’s now come to mean any game that features dungeon crawling and permadeath, often with procedurally generated enemies.

It’s even spawned its own subgenre, roguelite games. Note the one letter difference. For the uninitiated, the differences are small, but they