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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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.
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