Most roguelikes misuse unlocking

written 2026-07-26

In most roguelikes I've played (Hellcard, Cobalt Core, Slay The Spire 2, Invisible, Inc., Rabbit And Steel, 20XX) you unlock stuff from playing runs. There are a few kinds:

Starting parameters: new characters or equipment you can choose to start with instead of default. These are usually sidegrades.

Loot items: adding to the pool of items that randomly appear in your runs. These are also usually sidegrades.

Permanent upgrades: 20XX lets you unlock strict upgrades to start with in future runs.

Firstly, there's a general problem with locking content:

Stop locking levels

But this article is about other things, so for it I'll assume that players just like getting new things and that that's a good reason to lock things in the first place.

Unlocking starting parameters is used well in some cases, to order things from least to most advanced. For example, in Invisible, Inc., you unlock different hacking programs. The default one spends 2 power to break 1 layer of firewall. The first one you unlock adds an "infection" to a device that breaks 1 layer of firewall per turn, and costs the number of such infections in play. This is more interesting but also more complex, so it makes sense to start people with the default and introduce this later.

Unlocking starting parameters is used badly in other cases, for example in Hellcard and Slay The Spire 2, difficulty settings are very granular (Hellcard has an achievement for winning on difficulty 20) and it only increases your max by 1 every time you win. This is pointless and very frustrating when the game's too easy and you just want to access the higher difficulties. Slay The Spire 2 even makes you unlock difficulty settings separately for each character!

What about unlocking loot items? It doesn't really provide the supposed joy of getting something new because you can't choose whether to play with them. And they're usually not more advanced than the starting item set, just different. It's even worse in Hellcard because every card has 3 upgrade options, unless you haven't unlocked some of them, then it offers you less than 3 so you see you're missing content, you're playing an incomplete version of the game.

And unlocking permanent upgrades is even worse: it's equivalent to unlocking an easy mode, which is silly. Worse, in some cases you can't choose to play without them after you unlock them!

This is cargo culting. Roguelike designers are implementing unlock systems not because they thought about it and decided it was appropriate, but because they wrongly assume every game needs unlocks.