Genre mashups are my favorite trend in gaming right now

destructoid.com:

There are a lot of video games out there in the world. Shooters, platformers, narrative adventures, fighting games — iconic genres that have almost forty years of precedence to make them what they are today. Various developers and studios have given us some truly amazing entries in all of these genres and many more, but sometimes, I find myself wondering if there’s anything new out there that will shake up the industry. Of course, this is always a silly thought, because people are endlessly creative, especially when it comes to game design. The industry has plenty of answers for keeping things moving forward, but my absolute favorite trend in games right now is genre mashup.

That’s right, it’s as simple as taking two game genres and combining them — but the outcome is almost always effective, giving us a new perspective on some gameplay systems that might have otherwise become a bit tired. Developers have been borrowing design elements from all kinds of games pretty much forever, but it seems like in the past few years, the main conceit of “this game mixed with that game” has become more prominent than ever before.

One of my favorite examples of a genre mashup is Mega Crit’s 2017 indie darling Slay the Spire. This game has had a chokehold on me for over a year now, and in that time I’ve loaded 250 hours into it on my Switch. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a deckbuilding roguelike, which happens to be two of my favorite genres in the first place.

You completely start your deck over with each run, and getting to know the cards and how to max out your builds makes for a really fun gameplay loop. On their own, both deckbuilders and roguelikes make learning the details of the game mechanics a core part of their design,