Enter the Gungeon celebrated its tenth birthday this month, and developer Dodge Roll’s co-founder, Dave Crooks, along with the game’s composer, Adam “Doseone” Drucker, sat down with Polygon to reflect on its legacy. However, during the back half of the interview, the discussion strayed more toward the legacy of the roguelike genre as a whole, and Crooks doesn’t seem too impressed with how things have developed in the last decade.
“The most obvious thing that I see is a screen that pops up three choices every 45 seconds. That’s changed,” Crooks stated. “There was a time where the thought of being interrupted in the game and anything even remotely fast-paced would be seen as anathema to game design. The whole game, the way the power curve is designed is like you have to be interrupted by this serotonin blast of fanfare and three choices…It’s more relatable to a slot machine being popular.”
Crooks didn’t pull that reference to a “slot machine” out of thin air, as he believes that two games in particular are responsible for the shift in roguelikes’ mechanics: Balatro and Vampire Survivors.
“Especially on the back of Vampire Survivors and Balatro, I think that it has gone a little bit…God, I don’t want to be the person that says this, but a little cash-grabby,” Crooks continued. “Because I think that what fundamentally makes those things fun is much more like a slot machine than the experience of playing Rogue. And literally developing a game that ticks the boxes of a slot machine in those ways is just easier to do…”
For context, toward the start of the interview, Crooks references Rogue, the 1980 Unix-based title and the namesake of the roguelike genre, as well as Cellar Door Games’ Rogue Legacy and Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac, which are often credited with reigniting the genre’s popularity in the early 2010s.
In much the same way, it sounds like Crooks is attributing the gambling-focused shift in the genre in the early 2020s to both Vampire Survivors and Balatro, and it’s easy to see where he’s coming from.
Balatro’s gambling themes are pretty straightforward, as the roguelike spin on poker even temporarily led to the game receiving a PEGI 18+ rating in 2024. Likewise, Poncle’s Luca Galante has previously stated that his experience working in the gambling industry directly influenced the slot-machine-inspired animation that plays when you open a chest in Vampire Survivors.
Plenty of gambling-inspired roguelikes have spawned following the success of both Balatro and Vampire Survivors as well, such as Raccoin and CloverPit. On the one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with all four of these games, but on the other hand…Crooks is clearly onto something here.
In light of this, I’m suddenly finding myself extremely interested in seeing how Enter the Gungeon 2, which was announced back in 2025, will turn out, because it’s pretty clear the evolution of the roguelike genre is something that’s currently at the forefront of Dodge Roll’s mind.