GROGPOD Roguelike Podcast

Death to Chronos! This week we brew up an incantation to summon the sequel of one of our top 5 roguelites of the podcast: Hades 2! The famed house of the Underworld has been captured by the Titan of Time and it’s up to you: Melinoë, the sister of Zagreus hidden away by the Halloween hat touting goddess of the Crossroads Hecate. The only way to restore your family is to destroy time itself by delvi...

C-c-c-combo maker! This week we hunt through the forests of new roguelite releases and encounter Combolands: the town-building, deck-building, point-building game that takes its inspiration from the greats like Balatro and Luck Be A Landlord. Choose two of seven guilds to harness the power of natural resources, trade goods, sand fighting pits, and bees to clear a point goal every milestone. Grow y...

Rakanishu! We have quite a treasure in the Horadric podcast this week by summoning the remaster of one of the highest rated procedural generation games of all time: Diablo 2 Resurrected! The first action-RPG to feature a permadeath option, Diablo 2 was nothing if not foundational for its particular genre what with selling at least 25 million copies. The remaster brings a fresh new lighting system,...

At PAX West this year I had a great time interviewing Angel Polanco: the solo dev behind the incredibly well-rated bullet hell roguelite The Void Rains Upon Her Heart! An incredibly interesting game from mechanics, boss designs, art, story, I couldn’t wait until our usual end-of-year PAX interview episode to publish. It was a great conversation where we talked in depth about the designs and motiva...

It’s time to put the BOOM back into boomer shooters as we fire up the hottest graphics of 1996* with Strafe! Another entry in our Devolver Digital review catalogue, the self-described “ worlds bloodiest roguelike first-person shooter” will put our pixel-perfect aim to the test fighting aliens, mutants, and … human experiments? Custom RSS Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Music Transcript 01:02 - Game...

It’s Christmas in August as we unload the sooty petro-rocks from our stockings and crack open the clean-burning Coal LLC! The quick action mining-themed roguelite version of Motherload, you are tasked to fill your quota of coal before time runs out. Hire employees to help dig, collect, and fly your mantle-shattering progress. Fulfill the quests of NPCs like Fiona Frog, Pippa Penguin, and Tabitha t...

Roguelites belong to the Nords! This week we return to tower defense rogue land with Nordhold: the vaguely Viking-themed tower defense roguelite featuring tower synergy systems, work placement econometrics, and decisions about whether or not to sacrifice them to demonic gods. If careful optimization of numbers and slowly checking off metaprogression boxes is your thing, then Nordhold has got it in...

A dark presence surrounds you, whispering promises of stolen power! Our episode 100 mega special concludes with a mega special game in the traditional roguelike sphere: Brogue! Developed by a lawyer, Brian Walker sought to rewrite the state of roguelikes in 2009 from bloated checkbox-ticking, weeks-long RPG length games and bring the genre back to its coffee break length roots. Careful streamlinin...

What is this new devilry? Part 2 of the GROGPOD100 extravaganza continues, this time with a focus on the first ever rogue-like games ever made! Following the part 1 format, Scott does a brief historical deep dive of the games with some community correspondence, followed by our in-person live first experiences playing these games. We’ll experience why Gandalf had no memory of dungeon floors in Mori...

The road to Rogue was paved with ascii, teletype, thousand-pound mainframes, and a hacker spirit only highschoolers and college kids and eminate. For our big 100th episode, we have for you a 3-part deep dive into the games that inspired Rogue, the first TRUE roguelikes, and the crown jewel of ascii games: Brogue. This being part 1, we focus on the biggest computer games of the 1970s and how those...

Ball don’t lie! This week we’re dropping into the chasm filled with Arkanoid-inspired enemies in BALL x PIT! The fabled city of Ballbylon has fallen and evil monsters have dragged the metropolis into, you guessed it, a pit! Your quest is to rebuild the city by taking a ramshackle elevator down into the depths, huck balls at the rampaging hordes, and escape with resources you can use to restore the...

Moon and Sun! Caves of Qud returns for our summer music episode, as I grabbed some time with the composer Craig Hamilton! Since Qud is a dramaturgical triad, we couldn’t NOT do a third episode talking with the creative mind behind the creative sounds of the game. We’re talking Digital Audio Workstations, sci-fi literature, flamethrowers, traditional roguelikes, and so much more! The torsion of an...

“You don’t have the cards!” This week we deep dive the cyberpunk productivity app roguelike deckbuilder hybrid that our very own co-host Will has been developing since 2018! A unique spin on gamification apps, Hard Reset asks the ever-important question of: “what if we made the game part actually fun?” The capitalist oligarchs have taken over and you must stop them by upgrading your cybernetics as...

It’s a special bonus episode this week! With Rift Wizard 3 launching in June 2026, I sat down with developer Dylan White to talk about the third game’s evolution, how its distinguished itself from Rift Wizard 2, and what it takes to make a traditional roguelike game stand out in the ever evolving morass of games being released on Steam these days. Come for the discussion on PyGame, stay for the di...

He’s a bad bad kitty! We’re snapping our fingers and fighting through the alleways this week with Mewgenics! The long-awaited game by Binding of Isaac creator and roguelite genre legend Edmund McMillen, fans have been wating something like 15 years to experience the cat breeding tactical combat RPG. You are a crazy cat lady, reanimated from the dead by a mad scientist and your goal is to breed cat...

Emperor guide thy aim! Roguelikes and -lites span a spectrum, especially when they come as added game modes to big budget titles that aren’t roguey themselves. This week we explore Warhammer 40K Darktide: the action RPG featuring two … sort of … rogue-ish (heavy squinting) game modes: Expeditions and the Mortis Trials. From the moment I understood the weakness of game genre definitions, they disgu...

Play forever! It’s time to climb one of the most ambitious game releases in recent memory by dusting off UFO 50: the collection of games from the fictional LX Systems console of the 1980s. With some titles being very small, and others being very huge, we focus on just 7 that are the most rogue-ish: Bug Hunter, Velgress, Planet Zoldath, Waldorf’s Journey, Party House, Overbold, and Campanella 2! Wi...

(Hacker voice) I’m in. We’re pentesting the mainfraime this week with 868-HACK! A small-scope puzzle-y rogue-y game by one Michael Brough: multi award-nominated IGF game designer of other similarly overlooked titles like Imbroglio, Cinco Paus, and Zaga-33. Michael’s games were originally designed for iOS mobile devices back in the hallowed days of the early 2010s, in that bubbling time when roguel...

It’s not a bug, its a feature! This week we crack open the most meme-filled game of 2025 with Megabonk: the first game by (very likely) youtuber game developer Danidev in over 4 years. Is your Megachad’s aura farming going to crash out or is your drip fire enough to hit different? Just how long can a skateboarding skeleton with sunglasses last against Anubruh or … sigh … Scorpionussy? We can alway...

Rise… champion… again! The Spire returns to be slain once more, in the biggest roguelike launch of all time! Our top rated game of the podcast now has a sequel, but how will its early access evaluation period hold up? How sly will our ratings of the new characters be? Will we DEMAND to visit a more exciting planet? Will our souls be eternally bound to a tooth-filled grimoire? What about Osty? Is h...

This Is Part Of! … the roguelike pantheon of short games! A beloved mobile game classic, we hop in to Hoplite this week: the Greek underworld dungeon crawling chess tactics inspired puzzle game of spear-chucking, shield-bashing, and hoppin! Featuring at seemingly simple 16-floor dungeon that can go on infinitely should you so desire, the game also boasts a seemingly bottomless pit of bespoke puzzl...

Brains! Brains! This week in “yes we know it’s not a roguelike”, we venture into the heart of Kentucky for some country-fried human flesh with Project Zomboid. The zeds have spread and you have one goal: survive as long as possible. Do you loot the local school for backpacks and safety scissors, or the police station for pistols and shotguns? Do you dare risk alerting the manic hordes with your ca...

Muscle up your game buddy! This week we dust off the 500 year old robot action FPS Roboquest: something like a “Doom Eternal for kids”, the electrobeats of synthwave send you hungering for more and more of those delicious green health orbs. Infiltrate a gigantic city of bad robots, rescuing good robots along the way, and unlock all sorts of wacky movement gadgets, character classes, and more hidde...

Angels and demons all over the world, join hands and start a Monster Train sequel! One of our highest rated deckbuilder rogues arrives at GROGPOD station once again, featuring some interesting twists on the established formula. As we’ll explore more in this season, we’ll be looking closely at what makes for a good sequel while trying to make as many obnoxious monster moaning sounds at turbo speed...

Yoom-taah! To kick off season 4 of the podcast, we choose you: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue Rescue Team! Joined again by our expert guest on the sub-genre with Helen, we revisit nostalgia and fresh experiences for a 20+ year old spinoff roguelike…lite…game? Hopefully the listeners don’t also brand us as fugitives, focing us to traverse the Great Canyon of JRPG menu systems to the high peaks of Fri...