All too often, I’ll catch a glimpse of a game in my daily Bluesky scroll that demands I stop, thumb up a few posts, and give it another view. When I examine it, the mental checklist starts to tick off in the affirmative. It’s got style, snappy combat, story beats, earworms, and all the right hooks, and then, wait, it’s a roguelike.
I’m not alone in this. I’m seeing all sorts of posts across a spectrum that ranges from fatigue to outright hostility toward the genre. While the hostility is misplaced, the fatigue at least seems backed up by the data. According to SteamDB, there’s been a steady uptick in how many games with a roguelike tag have been released since 2020, with a whopping 2,012 launched last year and already half as many this year.
If your roguelike is competing against hundreds of others of the same genre in any given month, how do you make it stand out?
Slots & Daggers, developed by Friedemann and published by Future Friends Games, initially launched in October 2025 and most recently released a console port on May 14, seems to have several answers to that question.
It’s the roguelike for those burned out on roguelikes. Taking just over four hours to complete, Slots & Daggers keeps up the initial momentum in games from the genre to keep on giving. Builds are simple, runs are quick, and the mechanics are straightforward. The generous metacurrency, coupled with some truly broken builds, makes for a breezy experience.
Its game design is modeled from a slot machine. You pull a lever and watch several reels burst to life, which slow down to indicate which item in your toolkit activates. It’s a simple, yet pleasantly chunky, pixel art washed in steely grays. Among those include various shields, magical and physical weapons, and extra coins to purchase in-run bonuses. The variety here is what you’d expect in most fantasy-adjacent games. Both you and enemies have a health bar, a shield, magic, and physical defensive stats.
Slots & Daggers makes life easier for the roguelike-adverse players by making it simple to create builds. I had a preference for any weapon that dealt poison damage in addition to physical damage. While the initial damage itself was middling, I could get behind shields and let poison accumulate to decimate enemies with the secondary damage.
I was also drawn to the poison builds because I didn’t have to improve at the mini-games that other weapons required. This decision was really not a fault of the game, but rather driven out of my own laziness. For a game that doesn’t require a whole lot of strategizing, I opted for the low road to keep that strategizing at a minimum. The bow and arrow, for example, is accompanied by a quickly rotating crosshair that passes over a target in a lopsided figure-eight pattern. Folks who want to narrow in on their timing or have a natural sense of it will likely find it simple to optimize damage with the bow and arrow.
These are just two builds to exploit. The relatively basic setup of enemies is far outnumbered by the volume of viable builds, so there’s no time wasted hunting for something that will work for you. You just need something that will wear down an enemy’s HP bar to progress, and you’ll really only be competing with enemy numbers getting higher and higher.
The game feels like a boss rush in that you’ll square off against single enemies consecutively. At the end of a level, there’s one that functions like a skill check. There are only ten levels, and they’re lined up much like classic world-level overworld maps. That means checkpoints.
These will likely be the godsend that most players burnt out on roguelikes will want to hear. While there are specific bonuses dolled out from starting at the beginning, you really don’t have to. When you’ve got a few levels unlocked, retreating back 2 or 3 levels, rather than hiking back to the starting line, is all you need to acquire the passive bonuses you’ll need to then plow forward and make substantial progress.
I love this kind of sliding scale of how far back a run needs to go to boot up another attempt. It’s another way to provide progress in a genre that often feels taxing when a restart means a reset. In Slots & Daggers, a restart retains much more of your previous work than others will likely give you. Setbacks sting much less when a run fails. As a staple in the genre, you’ll have amassed some metacurrency and will be able to purchase slight advantages for the next go-around.
Despite the easier play style and forgiving design, I couldn’t help but grow bored with the game if I spent more than ten or fifteen minutes with it at a time. For many folks, this timeframe is another selling point, since it means your lunch break or that small stretch between your bedtime and falling asleep will pass quickly. For me, I quickly lost interest as the gameplay didn’t really scratch any itch after having made notable progress. There are a whole lot of design choices here that I nodded along in agreement with. But the overall package still seemed thin for longer stretches, and the familiar monotony of roguelikes settled in.
Slots & Daggers, ironically enough, both embraces and rejects the arcade-style gameplay feature in both slot machines and the roguelike genre. Arcade and casino games have the goal to keep you in a chair for as long as possible under the impression that the odds will turn up in your favor and give you a payout greater than your investment. Slots & Daggers, on the other hand, doesn’t seek to give you a rapid exchange on payouts but on progress. Somewhere in that trade-off there’s still a bit of an imbalance. Overall the game marks steps forward in reinventing the roguelike genre, and there’s still plenty of enjoyment to be had in that journey.
