What's the point of roguelikes?

Maybe its time to try Elona again but it never clicked for me. For past couple of years, my favorites are Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and Dwarf Fortress.

CDDA is a survival horror zombie game with a lot of focus on the survival part with lots of crafting and building and item dismantling. It is however still quite buggy and has some very weak parts like NPCs and tends to struggle with balance but some of that is part of the fun. I love the concepts in the crafting system for survival and the game does have a broader story arc that emerges later but again is incomplete but its hard to survive that long.

DF is very hard to get into and adventure mode is still quite incomplete but incredibly detailed in the strangest places (you can grapple with the 4th right upper tooth of a bear).