PAX AUS 2025 - Roguelike Genre Mashups
Hands-on Previews with Three PAX AU 2025 Demos
My love affair with clever roguelike genre mashups began at PAX Australia in 2023, at precisely the moment my gaze lingered for a moment too long upon Up to Par. It’s golf, but as soon as your stroke count is over par, your ball explodes. How many holes can you survive? Which magical items can you buy from the shop to extend your run? It’s a straightforward, elegant, and challenging experience that is immediately legible, even from across a crowded show floor.
In 2025, PAX Rising showcased more roguelikes than ever before, including obvious mashups, like Chessplus: Combine and Conquer and Middle Management, alongside a glut of deckbuilders, like Fox and Shadow, Dream Team Supreme and Davy Jones’ Deckhand. I have chosen to preview three more eminently lovable roguelike games, with free demos available now, so that you can play along at home.
(If you’re less familiar with roguelike structure, there is some assumed knowledge here, but consider games with procedurally generated elements, randomisation to force strategic thinking, and the need to survive for as long as possible. Like the original, Rogue. Also note, I’m referring to everything as ‘roguelike’ but there are ‘lite’ elements in these games too, mostly the rewards that persist between runs.)
Pinball Hero
Lazybones - New Zealand
I hesitated for exactly one heartbeat at the Pinball Hero booth before writing only ‘YES!!!’ in my notebook. I didn’t ask the developers a single question. All I needed to know (to become absolutely smitten) was that the hero (along with all of their statistics, items and abilities) is the ball. You plunge, dash and flip your hero-ball towards enemies, who they attack in various ways, and if you can keep them on the playfield long enough to collect a required number of souls, you can progress to the next pinball machine.
While playing the demo, I became interested in which kind of player would be stronger: a pinball player, or someone who can thoughtfully manage their character’s (plentiful) stats and gear. There can be a fair amount of watching the hero-ball bounce around, which highlights the importance of the latter approach, but the sudden moments when you need to smack them back into play with a flipper are so tense. If you screw it up, even the most carefully built character is in trouble. You may be able to fall from the level a few times, but every (potentially respawnable) enemy still in play will deal damage to your hitpoints.
I achieved decent runs with both the warrior and the ranger (two of several unlockable classes, and was pleasantly surprised by how different they felt. Although the warrior can level strength and harvest souls fast, the ranger can shoot enemies in passing (from a safer, and less precise distance). I combined my ranger with a cool throwing axe that can be kept in play with the flippers, as a kind of additional weapon-multiball. As well as all of this, shops sell a range of useful gear, which you can arrange into a limited, Tetris-style backpack. I am completely hooked.
Trivia Deal
Fluent Pixel - Australia
Given the roguelike structure was such a convincing multiplier for my (generally small) enjoyment of golf (in Up to Par), I knew not to pass Trivia Deal by, just because ‘trivia’ also isn’t usually my bag. Unsurprisingly, playing this game is (by far) the most I’ve ever enjoyed testing my knowledge against categories of incrementally more difficult questions. And, as the roguelike danger and stress compounded, my family began to lurk nearby. Soon enough, everyone was yelling answers at me within tight time limits (which are just slightly too short for yelling questions into Siri) and I was going with the loudest.
And so, we (collectively) beat the demo, but only after making observations and devising strategies to manage ‘intelligence’ and to ‘cheat’ more effectively. If your intelligence reaches zero, because an incorrect answer locks a column and you need to unlock it with intelligence (3-5), you die. You can increase your intelligence, based on a question’s numerical difficulty (1-3), by correctly answering it. And so, it is important to choose cards in a sensible order, based on your current intelligence score, how close it is to the cap, and how confidently you can answer any given difficulty and category.
Further, if you think you can’t answer a question on a ‘3 difficulty literature’ card, for example, you can swap in a card from the deck you’re building, like a ‘1 difficulty Minecraft’ card (there are heaps of game, tech and computer related categories) or use a consumable token, like to double the time limit, or remove an incorrect answer. So much strategy. So much fun. And you know what? I’m not sure I really like trivia OR pinball, but I played Pinball Hero without even thinking about it until now … Roguelike structure makes everything fun. I love Trivia Deal. Imagine how much you will love it if you actually love trivia!
OGORA
Oolcay Hitsay - Australia
Trivia Deal has its element of managing cards, yet OGORA is the most convincing ‘deckbuilder’ in this collection. You are ‘enchanted furniture’, who fights curiosities; teapots, ‘War Drobes’, nightmares, and so on. I played the demo several times to explore divergent decks. Certainly, strategic approaches can vary significantly. I especially appreciated how legitimate a defensive deck can be. For example, the ‘bulk’ card allows you to become incrementally stronger if you can collect and use blocking cards to survive the initial rounds of combat. Enemies who become intensely dangerous when low on hit points are not so scary if you can fend them off, then kill them in one shot.
Like most roguelike overworld maps, you choose your way through branching routes that are either ‘safer’ or ‘higher risk and reward’, but OGORA also presents quirkier interactions. At one point, I was being filtered towards a scary boss, and so I threw a bomb to cut through the magical garden’s bushes and joined back up with an easier route. You can also travel through ‘question marks’ which offer binary story choices, like exploring swamps, voids or mountains, each with their (sometimes extremely powerful) cards to collect. And you can buy ‘omens’, like the ‘blessing’ (upgrading) of a random card. The game is full of secrets and treats to discover.
Most ‘scripted’ roguelike games only let you glimpse a final boss when you have just enough insight to know that you’re cooked. (I’ll never forget that moment in Ring of Pain, a game I fell in love with at PAX in 2019, when the roguelike genre was somewhat rarer.) In OGORA, I have a rough idea of what an ultimately winning deck might be, but I’m now watching my son play and learning more again (mostly because he’s focusing on drawing as many cards as possible to bolster his attack). He tells me he’s leaning into what he’s learned from Hades; that you, “need to be flexible enough to adapt to the hand you’re being dealt”.
Really, that’s a great way to summarise the spirit of PAX Australia’s roguelike collection, in 2025. If Australian and New Zealand developers are inviting us to explore unexpected genre mashups, the kind of engaging experiences you want to share with friends and family, then we are entirely lucky to have rolled so many wonderful games again this year.
