I know this might sound dumb, I always hear some Indie games are known as rogue-like games, But I never understood why, can someone explain this genre to me? and what does a game need to be considered rogue-like?
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There was a game long ago (and it is still going strong today) called Rogue. The game used letters and numbers and the other ascii characters as it’s graphics. You were a person exploring a dungeon, fighting monsters and finding treasure. You gained levels and got stronger. And now any game that has your character gaining levels and getting stronger is called a rogue like game.
It’s kind of complicated, and sometimes people argue about the definition of roguelike.
The simplest definition is to pick some characteristics of roguelikes. They usually have:
* Procedurally-generated maps, meaning every game is different.
* Turn-based gameplay
* “Permanent death” mechanics
* “Emergent gameplay”, meaning the game’s interactions are complex enough it is believed players tend to find solutions to problems that were not imagined by the developers.
“Permanent death” or “permadeath” is tough to define. In a lot of games it simply means when your character dies the game is over, you lose all progress, and the only choice is to start a new game. But a lot of games that qualify as roguelikes have mechanics where things that happened in previous games influence future games. For example, in Nethack players can leave “bones files” that may be loaded when a future game is played: they’ll play the same level that dead player played and even encounter the player’s corpse with treasures. Or in Hades, often considered a roguelike, you carry certain kinds of game progress through every death so each run you grow a little stronger.
It’s really hard to define this genre. Some people are big sticklers and point out the name comes from a very old game called Rogue, so if a game isn’t a grid-based dungeon crawler they don’t think it should qualify. Other people think the procedural generation is more important than that so they include games like Hades or Spelunky even though they aren’t turn-based. Some people think permadeath is key so they exclude those games and a whole genre of “Mystery Dungeon” games that started with *Shiren the Wanderer*.
I swear at one point there was some central website where people classified roguelikes and tried to make a “good” definition, but I can’t find it today. I do know there is a category called “roguelite” that was meant to try and solve this by being looser, but then it just created fights about which category games belonged to.
So it’s not satisfying but there’s not a concrete answer. Pretty much any game that makes people think of a game already known as “roguelike” is probably “roguelike” itself.
The defining main factor for roguelike games is the concept of “runs”. You have 1 chance (1 life, 1 run) to beat the game. Die, you have to try again. However, from your failed runs, you can normally save something (XP, gold etc.) that you can spend on small, permanent upgrades that affect all future runs, making the mission a bit easier. More runs = more permanent upgrade which eventually = beating the game.
The simplest, most literal answer is that a rogue-like game is a game that is like [Rogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)) (note: released in 1980).
A long time ago, there were less genres. And when a game was impactful enough to create copycats and derivatives, media would define the subsequent games as [original title]-like.
You might remember it happening with Dark Souls in the last decade, where for a time there seemed to be a ton of “the Dark Souls of [something]” and other games (including Hollow Knight to my memory) being labeled as “Dark Souls like”. Usually the genre becomes defined over time, such as “[Diablo Clone](https://www.diablowiki.net/Diablo_clone)” being redefined as “isometric action RPG with randomized loot”. This hasn’t happened with Roguelike partially because of how niche the actual game is, so much so that knowing Rogue was once a new game is sort of just a piece of trivia nowadays.
With Rogue, there’s a number of defining traits. The [wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Key_features) is a good list of them. But you hear about them so often because the features are relatively easy for a small team to make an oversized impact with (random generation creates more playtime for less programming time), so small indie teams can focus their ingenuity and creativity on other aspects, such as interesting player progression or character development or physics or art, or something else that gives the game some special charm.
The simplest answer is, it’s a game with randomly generated levels. You play through a series of levels at each run-through and potentially die on the way.
There’s are a few other elements, but that’s the main one.
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