I don't really know what to make of Cataclysm, which I've been playing off and on for something like seven or eight years at this point. It's engrossing and elaborate and fascinating to play, but it's also a horrendous slog full of pointless cruft, and it's cursed with a chaotic development process that I think will preclude the game ever really zeroing in on what I think is good about it.

My hottest take is that I don't think Cataclysm is a roguelike. Cata comes from that weird period, around the time FTL came out, when renewed interest in the genre led to people playing around with the boundaries and definitions of it, and I think that while at the time "roguelike" was a fair classification, the boundaries of the genre have (in my own opinion, anyway) pretty solidly coalesced around games with a distinct "run" that I think Cata lacks. It has progression, obviously, but lacking a final boss or any sort of definitive endgame scenario, it's never really aimed at anything, and as a result the only itch I ever really find it scratches is that of a more chaotic and wacky UnReal World with more inventory management.