8/13/26
There’s a build your own modular difficulty system that I have seen popularized by Hades. They call it “heat”. On your roguelike run, you can choose from a menu of penalties to apply to yourself. These are all worth different amounts of “heat”. Your goal is to beat runs with X amount of heat or as much heat as you can.
I have seen similar systems in Slice & Dice’s Curse system and the Apocalypse system in The Last Spell.
I feel like Slay the Spire’s Ascension system is related to all of this stuff too. And probably Dicey Dungeons’s Episode system.
These systems all seem to emerge from run-based games wanting to give higher level players reason to replay the same content that they have otherwise bested over and over.
There’s probably some motivation to allow the base game to be easier since advanced players get to enable it themselves.
These system feels in conversation with the metaprogression unlocks and loadout systems in Mindustry and Dungeon Warfare 2. I generally prefer these sytems.
There’s the metaprogression systems in Vampire Survivors as well, that’s related here.
Secret hunting is a “re-play my run based game” mechanism that I love a lot more than all of these things above.
The Dark Souls and Spelunky of just make levels that are very hard so you have to keep replaying them is also related here. Build your character or do other in game work arounds to progress further. I do very much prefer Dark Soul’s non-run-based nature of these two.