games im not interested in
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nah to be less snarky though: games with procedurally generated dungeons levels or floors, random drops, melee and ranged combat often in action-rpg style, 2d field of play, focus on “runs” and maybe “score”, and yeah I think “builds” or equipment are a key part of it - otherwise it’s just arcade like was mentioned
like uh, binding of isaac or whatever. i don’t like these games because they expose the Skinner box a little too much for me to feel good about.i never played rogue and nethack and so on but i agree my concept of those games is very different from the modern ‘roguelike’
i think ‘roguelite’ is when you have some permanent unlocks or progression… like hades maybe
In their current form, they feel like they’re identified to me by their being a result of market research optimisation.
yea
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Noita is the closest that one of these has gotten to the spirit of nethack and rogue without being a turn based dungeon crawler:
- lots of unidentified items
- extremely dangerous monsters
- unlocks don’t make you more powerful, they make the game more complicated
- easy to kill yourself
- incredibly arcane interactions
- deep knowledge helps more than skill
- generally mysterious
- victory relies a lot on luck and circumstance
- randomness is like shuffling a deck of 1000 cards and only drawing 50-100, rather than seeing everything in every run
- floors are exponentially more dangerous the deeper you go and the game starts to outpace your growth
- however, it is possible to entirely break the power curve with cleverness, caution, and knowledge
i think this list is basically my definition of what makes something “like rogue” without being a “roguelike” ie a true descendant, but more true than a “roguelite”.
i burned out on procgen games for the most part since it was clear they were just a treadmill, but Noita holds a very special place in my heart. it is a truly excellent game and one of the few inheritors of the rogue and nethack spirit.
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yeah i think noita is my fav example of the kind of game it is
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This has been a very interesting conversation for me so far! Thanks everyone ^^
I’ve been kind of hesitant to actually say much of anything about what I normally think of as “roguelikes” because I haven’t wanted to make anyone feel nervous or hesitant to speak their own mind, since more than anything I just want to understand what everyone else thinks of these days when they hear terms like “roguelike” or “roguelite” or whatnot so that I can get more in the loop. At this point it seems like the thread is really going on its own though, so I think maybe it will be more just entertaining and wacky than threatening if I do say, since it appears I’m extremely in some kind of tiny minority I guess. 
I wasn’t really expecting a lot of what people have said in this thread so far—it’s been very educational and very surprising.
Out of all the games I know of already, I’m accustomed to thinking of maybe 6-ish of them as roguelikes off the top of my head, just to tell the honest truth (and not to pick a fight with anyone 
):
- Rogue,
- Moria/Angband,
- Hack/Nethack,
- DCSS,
- ADoM, and
- Brogue.
Out of these I’ve played Brogue a lot, and Nethack and Rogue a small but not insignificant amount. The rest I know as roguelikes just through word of mouth. I imagine there are other games I would put on the list too if I’d heard enough about them to think of them offhand.
I think of these games as having very particular sorts of things in common that tie them together (word of mouth aside):
- Unix-y—supports vi keys, you can play over ssh with curses, frequently written in C, etc.,
- whether you play using curses or not, the graphics are text-based or similar (it may be possible to play graphically using a small set of abstract tiles in lieu of actual text characters, in which case there probably still is a curses mode you can use instead),
- typically FOSS, often maintained by a rotating group of volunteers, likely to be found in a Linux distro’s package repository,
- continuously developed, maybe for decades,
- turn-based,
- top-down perspective,
- supports keypad movement,
- procedurally-generated dungeon which the programmers often use to show off,
- traditionally you can win by leaving the dungeon with the Amulet of Yendor, and if there is such an amulet, it’s probably on floor 26,
- even if not, probably you win by just walking to certain places, speaking abstractly,
- the most straightforward way to lose is by having your HP drop to 0,
- the main thing that stops you from just walking to the end goal are “enemies,” which are modeled similarly to your own character in the game’s code (like there’s one uniform set of stats and/or pool of equipment and/or w/e) but they act autonomously and are hostile,
- you may also be able to get companions or pets that are the same but friendly to you instead and can help you in battle,
- aside from enemies you can also die to environmental hazards like traps or pools of acid or lava or w/e,
- there is some kind of progression within a single run, either through gaining XP from defeating enemies or building up skill points through using skills or enchanting your equipment repeatedly with consumables or w/e the game might have, often with a fair amount of choice or flexibility allowed to the player in how their character progresses, but also with some constraints that vary between runs,
- you have to eat regularly to avoid starvation which generally leads quickly to death somehow, forcing you to keep moving (often called the “food clock”),
- there is a conceptual distinction between “physical melee,” “physical ranged,” and “magic” modes of attack,
- you perform a basic melee attack by walking into things (“bump combat”),
- typical categories of items include melee and ranged weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, rings, wands, and staves,
- many items can have “positive” or “negative” enchantments that you have to identify, either by using or equipping them or by using a “scroll of identify” or that sort of thing,
- it does make sense to just use items directly in order to ID them sometimes (especially potions, maybe not other things as much; sometimes called “use-IDing,” often forms a whole subpart of the strategy of play),
- stealth/awareness mechanics are common and sometimes you might be able to win largely through stealth,
- generally the mechanics are very intricate and take hundreds or thousands of playthroughs to learn well, there’s a huge sprawling fan wiki, different people may have very different playstyles, saying what the best thing to do is in a given situation can be very subtle, etc.,
- commonly if you do beat the game it only takes maybe 6 or so hours for a typical run, although there may be unusual playstyles or ways of winning that take much longer,
- each playthrough is “self contained”/“with a new character”/“its own story”—there’s no “progression across runs” or anything like that, although the game may keep a list of high-scoring runs or otherwise save some kind of record of past attempts,
- every playthrough is highly unique, and the game is entertaining whether or not you win; you play just for the fun of it all, even if it is very satisfying to win, and
- there’s amazing “replay value”—if you really like the game you may be able to play it regularly for years and years without it losing its appeal.
EDIT: I realize in my sleepiness I actually forgot a few things even:
- as LaurelSoup alluded to, there are tons of secret doors and passageways as well as concealed traps and things which you ferret out by using a “search” action (and maybe certain magical means if you have them at your disposal),
- your HP refills a bit each turn under normal circumstances, and
- you can “rest” for one or more turns which allows you to recover health in a relatively safe place, but this lets the “food clock” wind down since you’re just standing there and not finding more food (this is actually the main reason why there is a food clock, since otherwise you could just cheese the game by resting in a safe place every time you got hurt).
This is kind of a loose set of criteria and I know there’s a few exceptions here and there, but overall I think these games do largely have most of these traits in common, and since it’s such a specific set and they almost all stem directly from Rogue, hopefully it kind of helps suggest why I’m used to thinking of these kinds of games as “of a part together” away from everything else. I wouldn’t rate any of these traits as more prominent to me than any of the others exactly for what I think of when I think “roguelike”; they all work in concert to create the overall atmosphere I have in mind. Even things like the tile/text-based graphics imply important things about the overall design space as I’m used to thinking of it, like how much it’s practical to represent—because the graphics are abstract and low-effort you don’t have to worry so much about unique graphics for the hundreds of different objects and creatures you want the engine to support or w/e, so that gives you a certain amount of design latitude and so on. The games (typically) being FOSS means that you can always turn to the source code to answer your questions about them when nothing else will suffice, which puts pressure on the developers to design them so that they’re fun and challenging no matter how much the player knows about them. Etc. etc.
Anyway, when I first learned about the idea of roguelikes, kind of gradually between 2006–2015 or so maybe, I don’t feel like this was that unusual of a perspective? Maybe I’m totally wrong but like, every time I’ve actually talked with someone in person about roguelikes it’s always been one or more of those particular games, I think. You can probably see why I would be kind of shocked hearing the things everyone’s been saying in this thread, since I really didn’t realize how far away this perspective is from what most people seem to think of now—either I was just around really specific people back then and missed out on what the “larger gaming world” was doing with the term “roguelike” years and years ago, or the conversation has radically changed since I last spoke to anyone other than Lily about it face-to-face (which is definitely possible since it’s been the better part of a decade probably). It does really help me understand what people mean these days when they say “roguelike” (although I do feel kind of sad that apparently if I try to say that word to anyone now they probably won’t really think of the same sort of stuff I’m used to thinking of 
that’s life though I guess…).
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Yeah I haven’t said much because I don’t play these games and don’t care to but I also think of the word “roguelike” as not describing a genre but rather describing an extremely small and specific set of games that are, uh. Really very much like Rogue. If I were to call something a “doomlike” I wouldn’t be saying it was just a first-person shooter, I would be implying that it hewed so closely to Doom’s design principles it was something like an unofficial sequel. Heretic is a doomlike.
In fact I thought the whole point of the invention of the term “roguelite” was to distinguish the huge swathe of “procgen, permadeath, run-based” games from the tiny and strict group of roguelikes. But it’s impossible for words this closely related not to escape containment and cross-contaminate.
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Resurrection of thread
I feel like Rogue Like got split into 3 categories with varying degrees of messiness.
Classic Roguelike are turn based with proc gen and permadeath and simple graphics: Stone Soup, Nethack, caves of qud, shiren, Elona. Not commercially viable stuff generally speaking.
Then we have the Modern Roguelike which is quintessentially The Binding of Isaac which becomes more popular than those other games and so takes up more of the cultural real estate than the games which inspired it. But Binding of Isaac is a blend of 3 genres: it has the runs, proc gen, permadeath and random items and secrets of classic Roguelikes but it swaps out the turn based combat by turning each floor into a new Zelda Dungeon and each room into a Smash TV Twin stick arena.
These are 2 different genres that are sharing a name just because the macro structure was implemented onto different gameplay mechanics. This opens the door for just that run-based macro structure to be the key association for the genre. So now Don’t Starve, Synthetik, Spelunky, Noita and Dead Cells are all sitting under the same supposed genre despite being wildly different games.
Third category is Roguelite which still has the focus on runs but softens on all the other hard rules. Generally progression follows across runs and the player powers up by attempting more runs. I always associate Rogue Legacy with Roguelite. It’s basically just the flavor of using runs in an otherwise standard RPG progression format. Roguelite just means “this game uses runs for the gameplay loop”.
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Just sticking my head it to say as a former regular poster on rec.games.roguelikes and more notably rec.games.roguelikes.angband that I use “roguelikes” to mean the games directly descended from Rogue. Caves of Qud and DF Adventure mode may not even qualify for this technically; I’ll grandfather them in though. Everything else is a “roguelite”.
The evolution of the canonical roguelikes is interesting because I feel like the more recent titles (DC:SS, Brogue) have basically completely obviated the need to play the older games aside from historical curiosity or a true obsession with the genre. They’re made for a different time, when it could be expected that they were pretty much the only games that were available to you, and that the tedium/weird progression-blocking mechanics (for Angband/Nethack respectively) were an expected part of the challenge and experience.
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This is “emo” all over again.
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Investigating the original roguelikes is also interesting because you can see how certain mechanical concepts crossed over from one game to another as the creators of these games were playing the other ones, or had players that played both, and made suggestions to the creators (since the communities were pretty small, you could have 1:1 conversations pretty easily with “the maintainers” as late as the late 90s on Usenet).
One of the “forgotten” roguelikes was Larn. Even a relatively unknown and niche roguelike, because of the open source nature of the code (mostly notably not the case with Nethack, which was maintained by a mysteriously anonymous council for most of its existence) could lead to a fairly complex family tree:
Amusingly, because of the history of Larn’s stated copyright from its creator and his having used some GNU code in the original implementation means that the licensing agreements involved are actually inherently in conflict with each other, which means that a lot of the subsequent Larnalikes, rather than being true variants, are actually rewritten entirely, both for the convenience of using more modern languages, and for side-stepping the whole licensing issue.
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I’m a fan of both the classics and the Binding of Isaac style macro structure.
I’ve ascended in stone soup roughly a dozen times over probably more than a thousand runs. I would play the game as a background task when I would do dedicated music listening since it was both turn based and didn’t have sound effects.
I also got the first endings of Spelunky 1 & 2, noita, synthetik, Nuclear Throne, risk of rain 1 & 2, Neon Chrome.
I think something about the format really appeals to me, the sense that I will inevitably learn enough to make the perfect run and ascend and I gradually get closer and closer to it. But then I’ve done it and I generally put the game away for good and move on.
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I always liked Larn. I gotta try Larn HD.
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Find it interesting how Binding Of Isaac is considered the only “modern” one when I distinctly remember Dungeons Of Dredmor having way more attention on it in the years around the original Flash Isaac’s release.
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maybe if anyone made it to the end of dredmor without the game bugging out we’d still be talking about it
i WAS quite charmed by its whole deal at the time though you’re right
99% means nothing
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roguelike today is just used as an infallible progression system. it’s a way to make sure everything you do in every given play session is quantified in a way that marks it as objective progress, so that you don’t feel bad about not making progress. instead of being about failing as a possibility space, it’s a structure you can tack on to a game to make failure impossible.
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We’re not against rap
We’re not against rappers
But we are against those rogues
“meta-progression” games doesn’t really roll off the tongue in the same way.
Rogue-like, like souls-like, is a term to speak to others that sort of understand the video game domain in broad strokes but falls short if you’re immersed in the games that tend to be labelled as such. Sort of like how trying to categorize music into genres like “rap” or “indie” falls apart when you start experiencing songs that exist in the peripheries of these nebulous terms. You can certainly try to differentiate it by saying oh it’s shoegaze or it’s mumble rap but eventually the taxonomy is so overloaded with terms that mean slightly different things to many other people as to be meaningless to someone outside of the domain.
Rogue-like is a very much “in the moment” social construct, glommed on by marketing to make a game seem to have more depth and thus, more hours to spend. After all, if there’s meta-progression it means you’re going to be playing more rounds than a single continuous playthrough, right? Sounds real good to publishers eyeing the GaaS trend and wanting that piece of the pie but not the exhausting amount of time and money to build the community and infrastructure to dethrone Fortnite. Why not a smaller, iterative time waster that could see some after-publishing updates and then called complete when the long tail of sales drops below a threshold?
Rogue-like is an ironic term, like metroidvania. It’s origin is lost to time (there was a game called Rogue? People PLAYED on terminals with ASCII?!) and only blurry echos of the platonic object, if it ever existed, remain. A term so divorced from most people who play games they have only the echos to draw from. The Berlin Interpretation was one such attempt to map commonly-agreed upon attributes but even the thirteen are very generalized as to be applied to many outside the genre or would be disputed by those that came afterward. Now anything could be rogue-like if you really wanted it to be. Pacman is a rogue-like. Latest gacha game? Rogue-like Bioshock Infinite? Rogue-like. Rogue? Rogue-like.
(Although I’m very tickled by the origin of the term coming from it being several years after several games like Rogue existed and the people on usenet wanted an umbrella term to post under for cross-pollination. They settled on “roguelike” after three weeks because it was the “least of all available evils”).
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NetHack bones files were the original “meta-progression”.
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