Rogue-Like games are like playing a fresh version every time you start. The challenge of making the best of random drops as well as random maps with random mob placement is extremely fun.

Sometimes you get lucky early on with drops and luck is in your favor, other times you're having a rough time, barely scraping through, but that's just as fun because it's rewarding to overcome the challenge of being under-geared.

This type of game never really gets old and that's amazing. Sure, you may need a break once in a while, especially after you cause your own demise by making a mistake that could have been avoided, but that's all part of the experience.

I like that, especially in the case of Darkest Dungeon, it's not game over if you die. Lose one team in the dungeon? Send in another, it's really rewarding to level a team up to the max and it's devastating to lose them all to a powerful new enemy you weren't expecting.

My playtime is pretty limited these days. Most roguelikes either allow me to save anywhere or have runs that are short enough that having to quit in the middle of one isn't a big deal, so they fit my habits really well.

Also, I never managed to beat Nethack so now I need to play modern roguelikes to distract me from this childhood trauma.

I like that process of learning and discovering new tools, or new ways to use existing ones.

For me, the answer is simple. A good roguelike game can be a lifelong partner. Is like that LP by your favourite music group you never get tired of. A human-created masterpiece which can entertain you forever with endless possibilities and challenges you always come back for.

I love the replayability inherent to the system. For a good game that is gold!

The randomized gameplay keeps it interesting. For most games it's easy to find a simply and overpowered strategy that works on 99% of the game. The randomness fixes some of that. You can still have a great strategy but a bad role of the dice and you have to start thinking on your feet and scramble for a solution.

You don't need to win in order to have fun. I remember as a child playing NetHack, not really having any strategy, just going into the Dungeons of Doom with my dog at my side and seeing what happened. Usually what happened is I would start reading every scroll I came across until something terrible resulted in my death. More than once I found myself starving to death, so I did what seemed reasonable and tried to kill and eat my dog. Not a good idea, according to the Powers that Be.

Fast forward to my late teens, after I'd learned how to win at NetHack fairly often, I discovered Linley's Dungeon Crawl. Here was a game with a perverse creator who ramped up the difficulty of his game any time someone was doing too well. It wasn't meant to be won (though we did win it, the rate was low even for good players). After Linley stopped working on the project, it was taken over by a group of dedicated followers, and turned into Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Every iteration made it more fair for the players and less fun for me.

Give me chaos, give me a long streak of ignoble deaths, give me a deck of cards stacked so unfairly against me that victory seems impossible. It's still fun. But when you start handing out wins every run, that's when I lose interest.

I like the inventiveness, the ability for small studios to do something interesting, you never know what's coming next! It's kind of a new fresh genre :)

I love roguelikes because you never know what to expect. There's also the aspect that with each new game you learn something new and you keep growing and growing. There's a constant goal but it's up to you how you can reach it. It's something I don't like about new games. They're always so linear about where you can go, what build you use, what the meta is.

The best thing about rouglikes is probably the learning you never feel like a run wasn't worth it (at least if you died to something new or you got further so probably 90% of the time in early game and 5% in late game).

The accomplishment feeling when you overcome the last thing that killed you.

I just like the randomness of not knowing what you will encounter each time you play them. Items, Monsters, special levels, etc

Every failure is a new start. Also, usually players are not being handled in gloves, failure actually IS an option. In many games today one gets a feeling that it's not allowed to "lose" a game.

I love the fact that it's never the same game twice. Replayability is through the roof!