Streets of Rogue 2 announced and now it's an open-world Stardew with trucks?

A screenshot of Streets of Rogue 2 showing people milling around a car park and a small shop
(Image credit: tinyBuild)

Streets of Rogue, 2019's many-layered roguelite/immersive sim hybrid that we rather enjoyed, is getting a sequel. Streets of Rogue 2 has a Steam page, an early access release window of 2023, and a prominently displayed gif of someone ploughing a truck through a farmyard. Looks good to me: put it out now, I say.

Developer Matt Dabrowski packs a lot of new features into the sequel's announcement post, but chief among them is probably the move to a "huge, persistent and seamless open world". The original game saw you take elevators from level to procedurally-generated level, but flattening all those out into one big, contiguous land mass makes sense. Streets of Rogue is one of those games that's at its best when the AI and systems are given room to careen off one another. There's no better way to do that than shoving them all into one map.

Apart from the open-world switch, Streets of Rogue 2 will also see the addition of building, farming, and animals. Stardew stuff, in other words, but with the bewitching possibility that someone might steamroll your crops in a freight vehicle while you sleep.

You'll probably see it coming, at least: the final significant addition—at least as far as I'm concerned—is the inclusion of a faction and reputation system. Streets of Rogue 2's open world will be dotted with cities, outposts, and other communities that you can woo with good deeds (or terrorise mercilessly). You've got to assume that, if you annoy a community sufficiently, they'll eventually turn up at your doorstep like the angry mob in Frankenstein.

We'll find out in 2023. I'm pretty excited for this one: the original Streets of Rogue's design philosophy was very much my jam. It's a game that truly didn't care what you got up to, and was content to let you amass limitless power or die in the gutter depending on your skill, creativity, and the procedural whims of its artificial denizens. Plus you could play as a gorilla. That was great too.

Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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