For years now I’ve usually just felt like, blankly confused almost always when someone uses the term “roguelike” in casual conversation. I know there’s been plenty of hemming and hawing over the years about what a “true” roguelike is and I don’t really care about that 
I more just want to be able to understand what people are actually saying. When I say “roguelike” I generally mean “a game that basically consists of stuff layered on top of Rogue,” but for a long time now games that advertise themselves as roguelikes don’t seem particularly much like to Rogue to me at least not at first blush. I’ve also heard terms like “roguelike mode” and I have little idea what that would be in a game that isn’t otherwise akin to Rogue already (Dwarf Fortress’s Adventure Mode maybe?). To some extent I feel like genre descriptors based on specific games always invite this kind of confusion, because any game is similar to any other game at least a little 
, but since this term still gets a lot of use it would be nice to me to understand what people intuitively think of it as conveying. (I’m sure it doesn’t help that I haven’t played a lot of even slightly recent games because of my photosensitivity—I think the last game I actually played where I was like “This is a roguelike, huh? 
” was Shiren the Wanderer for the SFC. So um, feel free to fill me in on any historical developments I might not be aware of.)
Shiren is a pretty good example. Blend that with Diablo 1+2 and you pretty much have the median game called a ‘Roguelike’ today.
Randomly generated layouts and random drops, typically. There’s a lot more in the modern genre with the name, most have some kind of persistent progression between runs and an assumption you won’t get it in the first go so you’ll get permanent advancements and buffs on each run.
Folks who like them that I know talk about ‘builds’ a lot, something I don’t really think of when I think of like, Nethack. In Nethack you’re trying to cobble together something out of the chotic resources available. In a modern roguelike, you’re optimizing for certain stats and affinities.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with being like Rogue or Nethack besides the random generation and drops.
I think sometimes folks make a distinction between “Roguelike” and “Roguelight” which…I can’t totally figure out, the latter usually referring to more action based stuff. But almost all of it is action based now.
It’s sort of a weird contradictory category that doesn’t make sense. Like most genres.
Thank you! So, I guess like, it sounds as if procedural level generation and maybe “sorta permadeath but not exactly” are the most common traits? That definitely does help—I’m used to thinking of much more specific stuff than that when I think “roguelike” I guess (I’m pretty sure every game I play that I’m used to calling a roguelike makes a curses-based interface available, for example not that I would insist on that or anything).
This is really surprising to me. I didn’t like that aspect of Shiren…I felt like it made the game grindy, whereas Rogue I don’t think of as ever grindy. In Rogue you can conceivably make it back with the amulet on your first playthrough; you almost certainly won’t, just because of dumb luck and a lack of know-how, but because of the “true permadeath” you know that you start every run on an even keel. I feel like that makes the game “arcadey” more than super-hard, like when you die you just start a new game and keep playing if you’re having fun, and you kinda focus more on the “journey” than the “destination” in that regard—Pac-Man and Galaga also have permadeath in that sense. In Shiren I found myself making runs I knew I almost certainly wouldn’t win just so I could power up a weapon for a future run or whatever, and that made the game feel more like a slog to me.
That’s interesting. Yeah, I think of your “build” in a roguelike as something you cobble together organically as you play—like, that’s part of the fun as I think of it, trying to make the best use out of whatever turns up. The kind of gameplay where you gradually accumulate special equipment and things to suit a long-term plan you have for a character is something I associate more with “regular RPGs” or Wizardry-style “dungeon crawlers.” Maybe those sorts of distinctions aren’t too salient in the contemporary scene.
Yeah I feel really unsure of what “roguelight” means, especially if “roguelike” is already kind of not that specific. If it means “action” that definitely helps, although I’ve also heard people say “action roguelike” (maybe that means the same thing? ).
to me a roguelike is a game that basically plays like the 1970s computer game rogue
like i think this is another genre that was inspired by the gameplay of tabletop roleplaying games, like the idea of representing fantasy combat / warfare scenarios thru numbers, equations, statistics, maps, turns, etc.
but is different from other videogames under the rpg umbrella in that it usually has procedurally generated dungeons and player character permadeath…
so to me a roguelite is a game that is not based on that idea of numerical and mathematical representation but does have procedurally generated levels and player character permadeath
i think spelunky was one of the first roguelite games i became aware of i think it is pretty inspired by the nes game spelunker
noita was a pretty cool roguelite—it reminded me a lot of everyone’s favorite, powder game
you can get items and character progression like extra hp (which i think might be a concept that is basically derived from rpgs but has kind of escaped their orbit) or w/e but if you game over in these games you go back to 0, like in rogue
i basically also think if you look at like, the development scenes of these 2 types of games they are radically different
roguelikes mostly seem to be commenting on each other or fixing things developers didnt like about other games or iterating on systems other games had… its a genre full of titles in convo with each other (also i think a lot of them are still getting new versions, nethack 3.6.7 came out february 2023)
roguelites seem like theyre shooting more for steam frontpage and twitch views a lot of the focus is on like exciting and responsive 2d action gameplay (not graphicsless soundless games where you dont know any of the controls and your character gets eaten in 5 minutes by a rat that you cant actually hit with any of your attacks) i dont think actually think a lot of roguelite developers have played a ton of roguelikes and mostly seem to be inspiring each other… also a lot of them are at that level of semi-indie where its not just hobbyist development but its not exactly a naughty dog production either ykwim… roguelikes as a genre seem basically driven by hobbyist development (shiren / mystery dungeon is maybe the only rogue-like roguelike series that is like commercially succesful in any sense)
im not like defending the honor of one or the other i just think they have diff vibes and audiences and dveleopers generally even if one genre is borrowing design cues and a name from the other
some random roguelikes ive played that were interesting:
i havent played this one but it sounds like it has cool ideas and i think this is a good example maybe of how the genre seems to be driven by basically weirdoes with free time:
heres a link i saw online
In most roguelike games your can perform a search action
i always differentiated -like and -lite by whether or not there’s permanent progression after death? it feels like a pretty core tenant of the roguelike that the only thing you keep between runs is knowledge
i guess that makes shiren a roguelite which doesn’t feel right. oh well lol
i do feel bad for the folks who make these roguelites with permanent “you’ll get it eventually” progression because they’ll never live on in my mind like the infinite mysteries of nethack and stone soup, games i’ve never won but have given me so many good stories of great ambitions dashed comically
I just call those “mystery dungeons” partially because I don’t like the term “Roguelite” and partially because they feel distinct enough from other roguelikes/lites to be their own subcategory. Like, I don’t feel right calling Azure Dreams a “roguelike/lite”.
@dratic_bb That’s an interesting set of games! Powder Toy(?) sounds really fun to me, maybe a bit like a mix of Incredible Machine and Max/MSP but with sand? , but I worry it could easily be blinky…on that note I paged through a video of Ultima Ratio Regum and it did not seem blinky, so I got it and gave it a bit of a try, and my first impression is that it’s like “mega elaborate filigree on Daggerfall”:
I guess it makes sense that such a thing might exist but I feel sort of gobsmacked all the same. Even the fact that it sort of makes sense is like, a bit surreal in its own right in the grand scheme of things I would say. It’s got some cute UI elements:
Reminds me a bit of Mugen no Shinzou:
So you would also say that the two major characteristics are procedural generation and permadeath? I guess like, I’ve now also gotten the impression from @AutomaticTiger that a lot of these games don’t quite have permadeath in some sense—like you do retain something between playthroughs? So maybe it’s sensible to take the “permadeath” idea a bit loosely? To some extent I still feel a bit confused there about where the line is between “semi-permadeath” and just “RPG death mechanics generally,” but I think I’m getting a better feel for it overall.
Actually, on that point, does anyone know of one of these sorts of games with death mechanics where like, there’s a chance for dead characters to be lost permanently but it’s not inevitable, like in Wizardry? For some reason I’m getting the impression that they wouldn’t go so much for that kind of “semi-permadeath,” more the kind where you “retain some things beyond death but not all” à la Shiren, but maybe that’s like, totally mistaken.
That was a really interesting read, thanks for sharing! It’s interesting to see that people were kind of uncomfortable with the term “roguelike” even from the beginning, and also that the things that people emphasized in that area of usenet then (especially curses/ASCII graphics or similar + free software) are things I strongly associate with them too, but which seem now to be almost totally out of the picture I guess.
You know, about this, there can be no confusion nor debate. Maybe the “Rouge Like” way is the way of wisdom…
God, so true. I always get mental images of my character sniffing and rummaging around on the floor everywhere and tapping on and licking all the walls, like a whipped-up badger.
Interesting…I guess this is also kind of line with the “procedural generation is a given” but “there’s some wiggle room around death mechanics” picture.
If people like them, more power to them I say, I’m glad they’re having fun…to me it does kind of seems like, you’ll clear the game eventually either way as long as you keep playing, but when there’s long term progression, I feel like it makes some runs feel like your chances are “artificially worse” (like the game is biased aginst you because you’re low on the “progression ladder” whatever it is) and makes other runs feel like your chances are “arbitrarily better” (because you’ve made it higher-up on the “progression ladder”). This can give a grindy feeling at the lower rungs and a kind of unrewarding feeling at the higher ones. Maybe some of these games have ways of addressing that though…it seems like a pretty broad genre, so you could conceivably do all sorts of things I guess.
i dont know if either procgen or permadeath are requirements for something to be a roguelike… baroque is a real-time 3d first-person game with plot progression that carries between deaths for example but certainly meets the requirement of resmbling and playing “like rogue” imo. i think it’s a vibes-based assesment to some extent like many of these things. if i were to watch someone playing idk, enter the gungeon i dont think i would see much that resembled like, nethack or shiren or rogue in there. in spite of the difference in perspective and real-time -ness of baroque it always seemed to be like… a pretty direct adaptation of classic rogue-style gameplay imo
there’s a ps2 game called rogue hearts dungeon that i have heard referred to as a remake of rogue…
i would probably be more inclined to say a game that lacked procgen and permadeath but which did to me otherwise resemble rogue is a roguelike more than a game which to me seems to more closely resemble like, smash tv was one even if it does have procgen and permadeath
in other words while i think permadeath and procgen are features of rogue and many games that it inspired i think a version of one of the canonical roguelikes like nethack for example that lacked those features would still be a roguelike imo
Well, so, okay, maybe I’m going too far in my conclusions? How much do people’s perspectives on this vary? I’ve been operating under the assumption that there’s like, a reasonably strong shared understanding among the “gaming public” so to speak about what it generally means when, like, the developers of a game refer to it as a “roguelike” or “roguelight” or “action roguelike” or having a “roguelike mode” or any such things…is that not actually the case perhaps? Like, is it possible that, if a major publisher, say, describes a new game they’re putting out as having “roguelike mechanics” we’ll say, does it seem conceivable that they might be making a game with handmade environments and persistent characters, but with other elements that they see as “roguelike”? Or would that not be so likely?
EDIT: Just to note, that’s not to say that they’re necessarily right or not in my eyes either way—I’m just trying to get a sense of like, the “cultural landscape” around this or whatnot, since even in this thread it sounds like there’s a variety of different perspectives.
Yeah I’m basing my assumption on what a contemporary person, the median gamer today, would call a roguelike. They would also call the older games rogulikes as well.
I’m centering procgen and permadeath as important because if you don’t have it it’s just another genre. Like Baroque is…an RPG. Like it’s an old school RPG, heavily influenced by Wizardy, another game that came before it. Old style roguelikes are also RPGs, systemic heavily D&D influenced games involving understanding complex systems and complex layouts. If that’s an roguelike than so is Dragon Quest and Persona 3, and P3 at least has procgen dungeons!
The distinction for the older games is typically the procgen and lack of like, saving and progression over time that Wizardry has. And even in the modern day, while you’ll get permanent bonuses, there is very much an assumption that most of your upgrades are going to be acquired during a run and lost when you die, and a new layout will be generated the next time you play.
The term very much has changed in the common parlance, though. If a random person today says roguelike, unless I know they’re a weirdo on SB (hi, I am a weirdo on SB) or similar, I will assume they are talking about the genre as I have described it. Yeah, it does kind of annoy me that a lot of them are in fact, arcade games, but we don’t have that term anymore, but it doesn’t matter because that’s not how the modern language of games media works.
The cool weirdos toiling on text based ones are neat but they never really surface in the mainstream discussion. Maybe they should! But they’re a niche of a niche of a niche. And it’s not a super useful definition if you want to understand the mainstream contemporary space.
And it’s not just procgen, but random procgen, that differs from playthroguh to playthrough. Otherwise you’re just in the big open world genre, like Elite and Midwinter and Daggerfall and their ilk.
I don’t know if I love it yet but I sure love the ideas in it. It’s just entering the phase that interests me, that all the procedural cultures and history are finally coming together to inform puzzles, that you can read in a history book that King Bob XVII’s bane was lost in the battle of Smithtown and look up those things and places and go there to find that relic or wherever it went next. Also yeah, its looks are absolutely charming.
strictly speaking, bones files would disqualify Nethack under this standard
@drastic_bb Sorry if that came off kind of weirdly drastic I was just a bit shocked in the moment, I think what you’re saying is perfectly reasonable.
I guess like, a dimension I’m also curious about come to think of it is, how much does everyone feel like their own feelings are somehow “at odds with the mainstream” on this point? Do you even perceive a mainstream exactly, or is it more like there’s a variety of camps of varying population sizes with no clear middle? I guess like, @AutomaticTiger, your narrative just now kind of paints a picture it sounds like of a broad mainstream with relatively uniform ideas, accompanied by a kind of scattered fringe with varying takes that might congregate in a place like this, overlapping somewhat with a small scene of people working on related-but-different and more niche sorts of games? @drastic_bb I guess in a way you said something similar—like that there are “roguelites…shooting more for steam frontpage and twich views” that have “responsive 2d action gameplay” which are maybe more on the mainstream side perhaps if there is such a thing, but it sounds like you personally feel that overall the “roguelike” distinction is more “vibes-based” and that anything Rogue-esque could be a roguelike conceivably. Do you feel like you’re going against the grain somewhat in your own right with that stance, or do you mean more that like, if you consider everything everyone says about roguelikes, ultimately it’s impossible to characterize what it means well overall beyond general “Rogue-like-ness” in some sense?
If you like that kind of thing, I just want to note on the side, you might also enjoy Wizardry VII and/or Dwarf Fortress’s Legends Mode in kind of different ways, if you haven’t tried them already. It’s nice to know that you’re getting into URR(?) in any case—I still don’t really feel like I have a good sense of how it feels overall to play so that’s encouraging.
ha! i didn’t think of this because all my nethacking has been on public servers where you’re most likely to run into someone else’s malevolent ghost. when demon’s souls came out with the random player invasion thing i was like “yessss someone finally stole the idea of bones levels for a new thing”
I’ve not really enjoyed many roguelikes personally so this is grain of salt territory. In their current form, they feel like they’re identified to me by their being a result of market research optimisation. They give an indie developer the highest chance of making a profit from scratch.
They have everything that will help sales and word of mouth:
- Repeatable ad nauseam
- Promises regarding limitless variation (high money cost:gameplay hour value ratio)
- Wrapping the repetitive game loop over a repetitive narrative frame (I think this is actually a good thing) - narrative thus becomes a natural part of the reward system
- Can share really unusual runs, strategies, or circumstances on social media
- You are expected to fail so I think it takes some sting out of the assumed difficulty
- Highly streamable
- Cost-effective to develop (I think why AAA is finally jumping on)
I played a LOT of Rogue on a palmpilot in highschool.
Then I played a lot of Shiren the Wanderer on DS and Fatal Labyrinth on Sega genesis.
Since then Ive just mainly thought of them as a mostly tedious game with no narrative flow that doesn’t (really) end. It seems like a game with that much repetition and randomness lets you make something really sloppy. “The game isnt busted I just had a bad run”. But thats a question I cant answer without balancing game numbers myself to see what that looks like.
The popularity of rogue-like-lite stuff is wild to me after decades of people freaking out about “back tracking”.
in an academic void i think the berlin interpretation is fine (and is kind of funny for predating spelunky’s release by 3 months)
https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Berlin_Interpretation
i like genre definitions that work with loose clusters of markers like this because they make it easier to put works in conversation with each other and avoid “gotchas.” hard taxonomies for media are kinda silly