Rogue-li?e : the ultimate time loop

Disclaimer: This article contains slight spoilers for the games
mentioned.

This paper was first published on Point’n Think’s Substack on September 04, 2024. It was part of a month-long series on the theme of time. That’s why you’ll find references at the beginning and end to other articles outside the site’s chronology.

On this december the 15th, I’m honoured to be the first to take over from Kippo for this latest newsletter from the Point’n Think team. We’re always chasing time, often to the point of exhaustion, without ever really grasping it. Time is the transposition of the cycle of nature, punctuated by the revolution of the Moon and the Earth. On top of that, human beings have tried to take control of it by subdividing it into somewhat abstract notions. Beyond minutes and precious seconds, the time of a coffee or the blinking of an eyelid is well anchored in the collective unconscious without really being able to quantify it. In the medium that interests us, video games, everything is a cycle. Gameplay loops, whether micro or macro, are the very essence of what makes a game enjoyable. Each iteration brings its own reward, and the reward brings the desire to do it all over again. The most palpable cycle is that of death, which brings you back to life to try to surpass what led you to your demise as many times as necessary. There is one sub-genre that lends itself infinitely better to this than the others. The roguelike or lite – here the finesse doesn’t matter to us – sublimates this endless cycle as long as we have faith in our abilities. Replayability taken to the extreme, where each attempt makes you stronger, in-game or IRL. All it took was one spark for our beloved development teams to merge these two vicious circles, in which we are the true masters, like the primordial Big Bang. So let’s set off in search of that infernal clattering at the heart of our piles of pixels. Take a seat! Our time machine will guide us through worlds where death is just an excuse to increase the pleasure tenfold.

Once upon a time

Before we take a look at the different games and find out what we’re talking about, the first stop is the holy origins of the roguelike. Let’s go back to the basics: a roguelike is a game in which you set off on an assault on a dungeon filled with opponents (yes, I know, there are variations, but I’m the one who tells it! Nah!) and treasure. Items allow you to improve your stats to progress from level to level and to defeat the bosses who stand in your way from time to time. What sets it apart from the traditional RPG is the permadeath: whenever your life points drop to zero, the game starts again from the beginning, leaving your precious equipment in the iteration you’ve just left. And so you start again, more or less, as you did the first time.

The adam of the genre was undoubtedly Beneath Apple Manor (1978) on the Apple II, which introduced codes such as procedural generation, no two iterations being alike, and customisation of the hero’s skills. Two years later, Rogue (1980) arrived on UNIX terminals. The game, made by two students, gave its name to the sub-genre we are about to discuss. Its success led other developers to create their own versions [Hack (1982), Moria (1983)].

It’s all about time

We’re not here to retrace all the history that led to the plethora of modern games. What we’re interested in this month is time and how it infuses our favourite corpse factories. In my approach, I’ve divided the treatment of time in rogue-li?e into three categories: gameplay, personification and lore. I’ll use two games from each category as examples to illustrate my point. To do this, I’m going to have to spoil a bit by quoting some end bosses or story elements without spoiling any potential twists. We’ll see that the notion of time is very present. As I said in the introduction, it’s quite logical to play with this principle when the gameplay is centred on a loop system. What’s more, I’m going to try and link these different treatments of time to humanity’s relationship with it.

Faster, Harder, Stronger

Let’s start with the most technical part, the impact of time directly on gameplay. To do this, we’re going to look at The Binding Of Isaac and Dead Cells. In both of these titles, time moves backwards. The aim is clearly to speed up the game to push the player into error, and these games do this in two different but terribly effective ways.

In The Binding of Isaac, a game best known for the large number of secrets that can be unlocked, certain sections of the game are only accessible if you manage to complete an action within an allotted time. For example, to have a chance of completing the famous Boss Rush, a sequence of fifteen waves each consisting of two bosses, you have to manage to defeat Mom (a boss) in less than twenty minutes. In Dead Cells, the famous French title, the timer doesn’t give you access to extra content. This time, you have to complete a level within the allotted time in order to gain access to a bonus room in between levels, which gives you extra strength for the rest of the game. We’ll also note the presence of a level on the theme of time, a symbol that it occupies an important place in the minds of the developers.

As I said earlier, the aim here is to increase the pace of the game so that players don’t have the luxury of proceeding cautiously. Only by knowing the game and its mechanics can you achieve these objectives. So it’s an incentive to master the game, and therefore to make more runs, which is the lifeblood of an effective rogue-li?e. You know that irrepressible urge to restart the game after each death – it’s one of the most important game design points in eliminating the frustration of death.

We can easily link this mechanism to our frantic race not to waste time. As the sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa points out in his book “Accélération: une critique sociale du temps“, our modern society has led to an acceleration of time. The more we master it, the more we miss time, while we are told, irrationally, that it’s our lack of organisation that’s the problem. We’re just a rabbit chasing an impalpable concept that we’ll never catch up with.

Show me time

It’s human nature to want to give concrete form to abstract concepts. When it comes to time, I’m not going to talk about clocks, sundials or any other measuring device. Instead, we’re going to look at divinities and other figures that represent time.

Let’s start with Hades II, still in early access as I write these lines, this roguelike invites you to kill off a host of characters from Greek mythology. Greek mythology, of course, has its own master of time, the titan Chronos, father of Hades. I’m not going to start the Chronos versus Kronos battle, let’s just go with the developers’ vision. The titan is their representation of time.

Have a nice death, in which we take on the role of a burnt-out death who is trying to regain control of his industry of souls, time in his own office, and we’ll have to strike him down if we don’t want to be sent back and start all over again. Here, we have the more modern representation of the old man with the beard worthy of Father Fouras, who won’t let himself be pushed around.

So, two personifications, quite distant in the history of humanity, but which show quite clearly that every period has its iconography of time. This is proof of the fascination that human beings have had with it ever since they were able to grasp the concept. If we turn to the Fleurs du Mal by our beloved Baudelaire, we find several poems in which the author gives his vision of the battle against time. In his view, man is devoured and eventually succumbs. The same struggle against death can be found in video games, except that there is no good ending in Baudelaire’s work.

Tell me about time

In this third and final category, we’re going to talk about lore. The narrative aspect is increasingly present in Rogue-li?e. With the genre in vogue, its universe is a way of standing out from the crowd. So we’re seeing more and more games emphasising this aspect even before talking about gameplay, even going so far as to disseminate keys to understanding the game as you go along.

Such is the case with Rogue Legacy, which takes a rather original approach to the cycle of life. As the title suggests, it’s all about legacy. Every time your character passes away, it’s his or her descendant who takes over the quest and the family castle (permanent upgrade). Each hero has a class as well as random liabilities, making them all different and forcing you to adapt your way of playing. It’s this mechanic, which justifies permanent death in the storyline, that exploits the supreme human time cycle that is life.

For the last game in this issue, and without doubt the one whose universe is most intimately linked to time, I cited The Rogue Prince of Persia. The latest addition to this saga, whose eldest was released in 1989, has long exploited time in its gameplay. This time, the Prince of Persia does not possess the famous sands of time that once enabled him to avoid death by going back in time by a few seconds. In this game, also in early access, the protagonist possesses a magic pendant which, once his life points have fallen to zero, takes him back to the beginning of the adventure. However, the memories of his past lives will have followed him on this unusual journey (Outer Wilds!).

All artists have their own vision of time, and there are countless works that talk about it. In the cinema, we’ve all seen films in which this notion plays an important role, whether it’s The Time Machine, Tennet or Interstellar, each story in its own way intertwines with this concept that haunts everyone’s thoughts.

Back to the futur

Time can be exploited in many ways, and the ones mentioned here are just a small sample of the ideas that can germinate in the mind of a creative team at a video game studio. It is undeniable that this concept is very present in the collective mind. Proof of this is its omnipresence in all art forms. But is time really what has preoccupied us so much since we first conceptualised it? I think there are much deeper issues to explore. Time is often a reflection of the fear, or at least curiosity, associated with death. This funereal destiny is at the heart of rogue-li?e design, so it’s inevitable that the two notions are linked in many ways. The aim of each of these games is to reach the end of the last boss in order to break this seemingly infinite loop. There is the symbolism of victory over death, which is always an object of fascination for human beings. To explore the passing of time is to give ourselves the opportunity to thwart what we have been heading towards since birth, even before we are aware of it. That’s a whole other subject that I’d advise you to explore on your own, as it’s not the one we’re interested in here.

You have to think big in life! If you’re going to travel through time at the wheel of a car, you might as well choose one that looks good !

It’s time for me to leave you with these words, which I wanted to include as a wink. Next week Myton (aka Clément) will be talking about ellipses in video games to continue this month’s theme of time.

To find out more :

https://impactcampus.ca/le-mag/pourchassant-temps-vie-sechappe/
https://www.superprof.fr/ressources/francais/francais-terminale/fleurs-du-mal-baudelaire.html
https://www.lesinrocks.com/cinema/neuf-manieres-de-jouer-avec-la-notion-de-temps-au-cinema-179220-03-09-2020/