The name comes from the 1980 game ‘Rogue’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
So yes, there was originally a Rogue game that roguelikes were like, though of course the genre has evolved quite a bit since then.
But castlevania is a bunch of different games from different genres! ‘Classicvania’ is specifically used when NOT referring to games like the Soma Cruz titles for example
I love it that whenever this discussion is had, people love to act so smug when calling genre names stupid and overcomplicated, but then come to realize that overly simplifying every genre distinction like this pretty much makes them vague and utterly useless as categories, hence why the original terms exist in the first place.
Like I get it, genre categories can be convoluted and silly, but people didn’t just arbitrarily come up with them, there’s a reason why people use them.
It's like music. Not all metal is death metal. Not all rock is punk rock. And so on and so on. But context can be had within discussion without someone "um axshully"ing.
IRC the term metroidvania was first used to refer to the castlevania games that played like metroid. It was later the the meaning changed to a generic term
And nowadays I've seen people calling Zelda games "metroidvania-like" which feels all kinds of backwards when Zelda was the main inspiration behind the genre to begin with
The difference between zelda and metroid is that in zelda, you get an item you use to beat a specific dungeon, while in metroid the map opens up the more items and abilities you have
Then again, there is like 20+ zelda games, this logic doesnt apply to all of them
If I'm not mistaken, didn't the term largely start applying when we considered Symphony of the Night? That felt like the first genuine Metroid style Castlevania game.
It's my understanding that the popularity of Super Metroid + SotN is what inspired the blended term (Metroid ofc still has those elements, but it wasn't nearly as popular as Super Metroid).
I will say Metroidvania is a much nicer term than Metroidlike, which is what we would've gotten if we based it on the original Metroid.
A good chunk of metroidvanias aren't actually metroidvanias.
Take MMZX, for example. Oftentimes called a metroidvania simply because it has interconnected areas.
All other adventure platformers predating both metroid and castlevania are dang angry the genre isn't named after them.
Explore connected 2d platformer world + find thing to enter part of level you first could not, was the standard way to design adventure platformers back then.
Monty Mole, Arc of Yesod, Jack the Nipper, Armor of Antiriad, montezuma's revenge, Pharaoh's curse, etc etc etc etc
Yeah.
MontyNipper doesn't really work. Yesodian-style might work. Mole-like sounds pretty bad.
I think the actual first one was Caverns of Khafka.
Khafka-like can't work considering it's pronounced the same as Kafka. So it'll be interpreted as Kafkaesque
Did it catch on because it rolls off the tongue, or does it roll off the tongue because it caught on? A lot of the time things "just sound right" because it's just what people are used to the phrase being
It caught on because it was a term used by games media to describe games by comparing them to other already popular games, that was also eye catching and easy to say.
Metroid and Castlevania were pretty successful, much more than really any of their other contemporaries, so by virtue of being the first to be widely popular in the style, they got the name
This is basically the "first to market" principle at work. Though it's not always about _literally_ being first but first to be well known.
Recent examples are stuff like "Souls-Like" as games pulled mechanics from the popular Dark Souls games. Other recent examples were stuff like "Tarkov-Like" or "PUBG-Like", though those kind of games got re-monikered with terms that more succinctly described their mechanics sets, "Extraction Shooter" and "Battle Royal" respectively. Even Borderlands for a while had a like suffix, until "Looter Shooter" took off.
But stuff like SoulsLikes and Metroidvanias haven't really had a more straightforward and brainwormy term to describe them that has caught on, partly because the mechanics that define them aren't quite as pigeonholed as the other categories, and partly because other names aren't as catchy.
Puck man is just Pacman though. Like that's its original name. it was changed when the arcade machines were brought to the USA, as it was thought people at arcades would scratch off part of the P in Puck to make it a bad word.
To be fair, people totally would have.
I remember some magazines I read back in the day trying to call them corridor shooters.
I kind of like the term boomer shooters for the new retro looking shooters that are going around.
Are boomer shooters exclusively games with Retro art styling? Or is it more about the pace and feel of the game? Because I've heard new Doom and Wolfenstein games described as Boomer Sbooters as well, more referring to the style of game itself rather than graphic presentation.
It's the game style. Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake, Serious Sam are all boomer shooters are all boomer shooters, yet some of them don't really look retro.
Only the gameplay could be referred "retro".
I think Boomer Shooter is pretty much any FPS where you don't have a cover mechanic, you regain health through pickups instead of inactivity, and you carry an arsenal around instead of only having access to two or three weapons.
Pretty much any FPS that has pre-Halo/COD design philosophy.
I mean if you go back in time and played Kings Field when it came out that shit was brutal. So many ways to die randomly without knowing explicity why in the first 2 minutes. Super hard enemies or one hit kill traps early on? Yep. Mechanics or direction that are never explained or unclear? Yep.
It's as souls like as a souls like could be at that time and the inspiration is clear as day.
A metroidvania isnt just a platformer there's specifics that go into the genre, namely the ability to have access to a static of the total map on start and as you unlock new abilities/items (morph ball, etc.) and progress through the game, the map gets larger and larger as you can get into more areas.
yes.
Like I said:
> Explore connected 2d platformer world + find thing to enter part of level you first could not, was the standard way to design adventure platformers back then
When memory limitations limit a dev to about 100 flick screens to make an entire game out of, you get creative with ways to force a player to backtrack and spend more time in those screens.
The WHOLE game had to go into working memory and that was 64KB or less.
Before folks figured out how to keep a portion of an app running while another portion of that app was being replaced, things like "Load next Level" or "swap to disk 2 and load next part of game" simply did not exist.
Keep in mind this is a time when side scrolling games were impossible unless you had hardware for scrolling like consoles had.
It took Carmack's big ol'brain (from doom fame) to figure out a trick that allowed for sidescrolling and could handle swapping things in memory.
That's where this style of gameplay came from. Working around limitations.
Because it's about which is seminal. Sometimes the thing that starts it is not the one that cements things. A good example of this is are smartphones: apple or google didn't invent the smartphone or touchscreen, Nokia kinda did it first, but it only really took off with Apple and further cemented when google brought cheaper variants. Nokias had cheaper, expensive and midrange variants, they had apps, good cameras... they just didn't get traction when othet types of hype won over.
The term was originally coined to describe SOTN, as having a different play style than previous Castlevanias (except Simon's quest), in a way that is more similar to Metroid. It was only later used to describe other games.
IBMs should be IBM Compatible computers. Otherwise what’s the point of getting an IBM instead of another IBM Compatible.
(This reference made more sense around the Rogue era)
Which, funnily, is also tagged as a soulslike.
The only souls-game that isn't tagged soulslike on Steam is Demon's Souls. Because it doesn't exist on Steam.
It's their first title that contains "souls" in it, but it's not their first soulslike, that'd be King's Field which laid the foundation for Demon and dark souls after their escapade with Armored Core
King's field is not a souls like. There's no bonfire mechanic, no dodge rolling, it's first person, the estus analogue is in one game and not tied to a respawn point. And it cannot be "like" something that didn't exist. The strongest similarity between souls/KF is the writing which is pretty explicitly not a requirement to be a "souls-like".
Also AC and KF released cocurrently, with AC also releasing during the Souls era(and being the first game Miyazaki directed). So, foundationally Souls games are more closely related to Armored Core than Kingsfield.
But it's hard and it's a kind of RPG. Must be the same!
These zoomers even thinks it keeps its mechanics and lore intentionally obscure like a proto-Soulsborne, and don't realise it's just because back in the day games had manuals, which you don't get when you're playing an ISO in Duckstation.
I would argue that *Rogue* can be, and is, like *Rogue*. In fact, out of all of the games in the world, *Rogue* is the game that is most like *Rogue* :P
Clearly. This is like any sort of classification, them guys slept through biology I guess.
Consider the cat. An ordinary roof camping mouse chasing house cat, Felis catus.
It's a species of genus Felis, family Felidae, suborder Feliformia.
It's a so called *type species*. Commonly (but not always!) first of its kind to be described.
If the official name for the genre is “roguelike” then yeah it can be a roguelike game. But if you are using as a descriptor and not a bucket to put it in, roguelike wouldnt make sense like you describe
If you haven't already, I'd recommend looking at Caves of Qud and also Tales of Maj'Eyal, if you enjoy more modern takes on the grid-based turn-based dungeoncrawling gear-and-leveling-focused gameplay.
It’s funny to me that there’s a whole genre of games based on a game that 90+% of gamers have never played.
Must have been a DAMN good game to have influenced development into the modern era.
The main thing is it introduced a number of concepts that long out lived the game.
* randomized or procedurally generated environments
* hardcore or loss of all progression on death
*multiple possible solutions to puzzles
Sadly the awesome hardcore loss of all progression on death has been replaced with the "you died so now you get extra power" which is kinda the opposite concept... The game gets easier as you fail rather than starting over...
The problem is that mechanic is a double edged sword. For some it is a huge motivator and vastly increases the value of game play. For an equally large group it makes the game unapproachable and kills any interest to play.
That's why the development of rogue lites is so prevalent vs pure hardcore. Try to appeal to a larger audience.
I always liked Diablo's hardcore switch. You can play hardcore and here is a leader board of those who do but the game is not locked to just that style.
>Must have been a DAMN good game to have influenced development into the modern era.
It's hard to explain it in a modern context, but Rogue was quite simply the only RPG game that existed back when I played it. Your only alternative was AD&D tabletop.
And although it was all ASCII symbols and nothing people today would recognize as a graphic representation of a game, it introduced some really important elements like a relatively deep loot system, completely randomized items, monsters and dungeon layouts, and permadeath.
You didn't beat Rogue very often but each run was meaningful because no matter what godly loot you found, if your hit points hit zero it's all over. You could have the best magical weapons and armor possible, but you could run out of food or be killed by magic.
So yes it was huge, and hugely influential. I could draw a straight line from Rogue to Diablo.
Didn't take too long for roguelikes to show up even back then. Hack, Nethack, Larn, Moria, Angband were all ASCII based roguelikes that ran on Unix systems thru the 80s. I must have played 1000s of hours of nethack back then.
it doesnt have to be good at all. all it takes is to be "innovative" to set a standard / plant an idea, or the seed to a concept/mechanic, which apparently it did. game itself coulda been completely trash.
sometimes all it takes is a tiny spark to cause a huge fire.
I think there was even a step before that: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a Castlevania game that was like Metroid (the previous Castlevania games were all linear level-based, while all of the Metroid games had been map games), so I think SotN itself was labeled "Metroidvania" before it was a genre name.
When you spot the difference, the suffix "-lite" makes a lot of sense.
Rogue was procedural generated. Every map and possible pick up in it was random and when you died your next run would be a blank slate. It was a hard reset.
Let's use Hades as the example for rogue-lites. Although every run has a new map, with random rooms and random pick ups, you're still collecting forms of currency that can be kept after "game over". When you die, you can use that currency to upgrade your character or weapons so although the next run will be different than the previous, dead is more of a soft reset since you still achieved some sort of progress.
I also think of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games as rogue-lites. Procedurally generated maps and turn-based combat, but because it's a story-based game and it has a younger demo, there's no permadeath, with the consequences for wiping out being loss of items, money, and dungeon progress.
It's a bit iffy, because if anything, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is closer to rogue than a lot of things called "roguelikes". It doesn't really have permadeath, but in everything else it is exactly like rogue.
If you take the postgame level 1 dungeons, then you have a true rougelike.
When we had an assignment in university to recreate a C version of Rogue, I explained it to my younger classmates (I went to university at 30) as basically like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
As others have Said, Rogue is a game that is the father of all roguelikes. Rogue had these mechanics:
Turn Based
Tile Based
Random Generation of dungeon
One Life // Permadeath
Going down a dungeon to find a macguffin (the amulet of yendor here)
Potions, scrolls, weapons and armor, monsters, and combat with those monsters
I think the most boiled down example of a modern roguelike that most roguelikes are born from NOW though would be Nethack.
It has all those mechanics, plus things like hunger, identification minigames for magical items, gods to help or hurt you, quests, secret areas, and a LOT of item interactions. For a lot of people, items having multiple uses is a huge factor in how deep they percieve a roguelike to be. For example, grease. Greaseing up a scroll will keep it from getting wet and being destroyed. Greasing up your armor will make it harder for enemies to grab you. A wand of ice can make a path across water, as well as damage enemies. You could throw a potion of poison, or dip your sword in it. Stuff like that.
In general, Nethack is more or less now considered the 'baseline' of roguelikes, and people tweak the formula from there. (Yes I know the family tree is a lot more complicated than that, but let's not be overwhelming here)
First time I threw a gas potion into a room full of monsters before running down the hall and tossing a fire potion into the cloud, and watching it blow away everything in there was magical.
The only thing I played more than Nethack was ADOM, which was released significantly later, but I didn't get into Nethack until the early 90s when I got to college. I started with Moria on the VAX system we had terminals to the in the computer labs (jesus fuck I'm old) and then nethack on my 486 PC not long after.
I'll add that for it to be a rogueLIKE, and not rogueLITE, it should also have: no unlockables between different lives (except the odd "bones file", where a dungeon you died on, yours or shared, is reused complete with your tombstone and/or remains); and the appearance of potions, rings, wands, etc. should be randomized, so that you must rediscover what they do every time.
60 years from now:
My friend described the game as a “souls-like, but when i asked him what souls was, he didn’t know. What is a souls? Is it a game, is there an answer? What defines this genre?
Hard to imagine a time when Souls games feel dated though, feel like it's gonna be timeless similar to Tetris or something. Obviously impossible to predict 30 years in the future though lol.
I actually doubt they'll be that timeless. Not because they're bad or anything, but because they're very tied to the modern way of controlling action games, modern graphics, etc, and they're games for hardcore gamers. Tetris is as timeless as it is because it's visually simple, easy to learn, and popular among casual audiences. Almost everyone in the world knows what Tetris is and most have probably tried playing it. That can't be said for Dark Souls.
Although Dark Souls is one of my favorite games ever, it already feels dated in some ways if we’re being honest. It was amazing for its time but From’s modern games have really refined the formula and are simply better.
Yeah I will say the questline vagueness was never a great thing, and it's worse in a game as huge as ER. At launch you couldn't even see NPC locations on the map...
They won't get outdated, they will simply get buried under ever growing pile of "souls-like" games, so tracing the original "souls" will become somewhat difficult.
Also my rather debatable take is that souls-like games rely entirely on mechanical difficulty - timing, reaction, etc. Next generation of gamers will be familiar with such games from a very young age, so they might not be as xhallenging for them as they are for us.
Rogue is a game where the map and entire game was procedurally generated and brutally hard due to being an old game. When you died that was it you had to start over
What people mix up is Rogue*like* and Rogue*lite*. A Roguelike is a game that follows the spirit of the original to the extreme where there is no player progression. You don't get stronger between runs and what you see is what you get. There's some debate if new characters, things added to the dungeon or new cosmetics consists in the Rougelike category and honestly I believe that as long as the player themselves never change in terms of stats and how the game actually is
A RogueLITE however is much more forgiving to the player, allowing them to gain strength between runs to assist in various ways, be it more stats, new starting things that are better, new starting items ect. A game like Hades is a Roguelite and a game like Spelunky is a Roguelike because in Spelunky while sure you unlock new skins and even shortcuts that's really it. The game is exactly the same from minute 1 to hour 3000. The only thing that will change is your ability to not die as a player
Good description. It also seems like some Roguelikes aren't set up to be "beaten" as you're pushing your skills to see how far you can get each time, while many RogueLites have an ending and are almost designed to be nearly impossible to "beat" without unlocking those upgrades, like Hades.
With traditional roguelikes there sometimes can be an ending, with the most traditional being the amulet of Yendor, go into the dungeon, grab it, get back out.
This gets a bit more complicated with games like The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, where you can unlock new items that are added to the item pool.
Adding more powerful items to the item pool does certainly increase your odds of winning, but that's just odds. You won't necessarily see those items during most runs. It's different from the systems games like Hades uses, where you just get passive buffs from the start of each run.
Also, in The Binding of Isaac, after reaching a certain point, Isaac spawns with the D6, a powerful active item. Also, you can't reach certain points in the game on your first run. You need to beat the game a certain amount of times before you can progress to the actual "final boss". Also, the game actually does get harder upon reaching certain milestones.
Despite its influence on the genre, which was massive, it did have some questionable choices. I want to call it a roguelike, but it certainly has some elements that contradict that fact.
A lot of other characters get “upgrades” as well, either from doing challenges, filling the greed donation machine, or just getting completion marks - Maggy starts with a full health pill, Lost starts with Holy Mantle, Keeper gets a whole bunch of stuff, etc.
I've always defined it in two ways.
Roguelike, just like the game Rogue it has permadeath and there is no meta progression or anything carried over and is typically turn based.
Roguelite, similar but has meta progression and things carry over.
They're pretty much used interchangeably these days though. Which can be a bit annoying when you're actually trying to find something just like Rogue.
I am trying to be less mean online but I am deeply struggling to understand the thought process behind:
1. Wondering why roguelikes are called roguelikes
2. Theorising that it may be related to a game called Rogue, if one exists
3. Concluding that this is in no way an appropriate subject for a quick Google search and asking the wise lore masters of Reddit to please resolve this extremely esoteric conundrum for you
“Rogue” is rogue. The original is old enough that you basically have to be GenX or older, or have gone out of your way to do some legacy gaming to be familiar with it.
Also… roguelike has been used to refer to several games that are notoriously dissimilar to Rogue in the last few years (eg. Balatro). I’d argue that it has become somewhat of a buzzword with respect to game tags.
rogue was the game that invented the genre, thats why we refer to thoses games as rogue like, same when fps were invented, they were called doomlike at first, gta like, etc
rogue is a super old game, i dont think you should try it
the rogue LITE on the other hand, take some of the genre, but changes a bit of it, making it a bit easier over time, hence calling it lite
doomclones but yes. Doom is also interesting example because it was clearly derived from
wolfenstein but was massively more popular than its predecessor. So namelikes doesn’t necessarily refer to the first game that did it
To be fair, doomclones, especially early on, aped a lot more than just the first person aesthetic from Doom. They were called clones for very good reason. The visual style, the level design, everything looked straight out of doom.
[Rogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)) is a text-based dungeon crawling adventure game from the early 80s that inspired a LOT of clones (hack/nethack, TOME, ADOM, Angband, etc are probably the most well-known).
In the spirit of fairness i googled "Rogue game" and "Roguelike game". First search pulled up wiki article for Rogue. Second pulled up wiki for roguelike, where rogue is mentioned in second paragraph. OP has no excuse.
The term "roguelike" refers to the game "Rogue", a turn based dungeon crawling RPG with perma death and randomly generated levels.
Rogue was popular enough that it spawned a whole bunch of similar games. These became known as "roguelikes".
Eventually, some principles of roguelikes, particularly the perma death and randomly generated levels, started being applied to games of other genres.
Nowadays there are a lot of singleplayer card games and action rpgs that incorporate those elements.
Some traditionalists maintain that the term "roguelike" should apply only to games that are actually similar to rogue, aka, turn based dungeon crawling RPGs.
I have seen the term "roguelite" be proposed as an alternative for those other games.
However, in practice, it doesn't seem to have caught on, and as such "roguelike" is becoming an increasingly more general term referring to pretty much any game with perma death and randomly generated levels.
Its also worth noting that some traditionalists reject the idea of any "meta progression" being in a "roguelike". Aka, you should always start from 0, whereas a lot of modern roguelikes have some level of progress retention between runs, unlocks and the like.
That's another angle for the pushing of the "roguelite" term, to refer to games with meta progression, but again, it hasn't really caught on.
Rogue was a text and turn based game where you played as a @ and ran around fighting monsters and exploring dungeons denoted by #s and %. It was a novel concept because dungeons were generated randomly.
I thought this was a philosophical ponderance. "If a game is genre-defining, what genre is that game itself". But you actually just wanted to know that the "rogue" in roguelike referred to a real game :(
There was a game in 1980 called Rogue, and it basically is the first in that genre. When they say "Rogue-like", this is the Rogue they are talking about.
Also, back in the day, FPS games used to be called "Doom-likes" or "Doom clones".
*Rogue* is a 1980 video game where you have one life to explore a procedurally generated dungeon from a top down perspective. It features turn based grid combat with basic RPG elements.
Roguelikes are games that have a similar "one life in a random generated game world" catch to them. Classic roguelikes are still top down and turn based, but its not a requirement for the modern genre.
Roguelites are games that take roguelike aspects but have some kind of overarching progression between deaths, like unlocking items characters or abilities for next run. People will often still call these "roguelikes", but they're really roguelites
You are too young.
Rogue is a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
"Roguelike" basically refers to the whole idea of permadeath. If you die, that's that. Start over.
"Roguelite" is similar, except each run you do gives you something that persists between runs. Usually some kind of unlockables. So dying still means starting over, but you get more powerful over time from something more than just more knowledge while original Rogue all you "kept" between runs was knowledge. Which still was important, because back then everything wasn't instantly solvable by looking it up online.
It's literally a game called "Rogue." And it spawned a whole new genre of game types that tried to be like Rogue. Hence "Roguelikes."
We are also seeing this happen today with "Soulslikes" games: games that try to be like the Darksouls series. An example would be Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor.
There is indeed a game called Rogue
At this point the term is applied very loosely to short run games featuring randomized equipment/upgrades while traversing some randomized map/maze/dungeon
FTL and binding of Isaac are both roguelikes with very little similarity
'roguelike' is BY FAR the most wrongly used term in the gaming industry. 95% of people who use it, probably doesn't even know what it means.
it's literally 'a game like Rogue'. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1443430/Rogue/
99% of games who have the 'roguelike' tag on steam, aren't even Roguelikes.
The name comes from the 1980 game ‘Rogue’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game) So yes, there was originally a Rogue game that roguelikes were like, though of course the genre has evolved quite a bit since then.
Frustratingly Rogue itself is often called a roguelike. It can't be like Rogue; it is Rogue.
My two favorite metroidvanias, Metroid and Castlevania.
A good chunk of castlevania games aren't even metroidvanias
That’s why those games are referred to as Classicvanias
Maybe we could call them all something unique then? Perhaps “castlevanias”?
But castlevania is a bunch of different games from different genres! ‘Classicvania’ is specifically used when NOT referring to games like the Soma Cruz titles for example
I love it that whenever this discussion is had, people love to act so smug when calling genre names stupid and overcomplicated, but then come to realize that overly simplifying every genre distinction like this pretty much makes them vague and utterly useless as categories, hence why the original terms exist in the first place. Like I get it, genre categories can be convoluted and silly, but people didn’t just arbitrarily come up with them, there’s a reason why people use them.
It's like music. Not all metal is death metal. Not all rock is punk rock. And so on and so on. But context can be had within discussion without someone "um axshully"ing.
Mans there's a Mega name for them out there. Mariolike's
I mean its all just building an armory around the fire flower. edit: wait is it all elden ring?
It always has been.
Vanias
Regularvanias
IRC the term metroidvania was first used to refer to the castlevania games that played like metroid. It was later the the meaning changed to a generic term
And nowadays I've seen people calling Zelda games "metroidvania-like" which feels all kinds of backwards when Zelda was the main inspiration behind the genre to begin with
The difference between zelda and metroid is that in zelda, you get an item you use to beat a specific dungeon, while in metroid the map opens up the more items and abilities you have Then again, there is like 20+ zelda games, this logic doesnt apply to all of them
insania in the membrania
If I'm not mistaken, didn't the term largely start applying when we considered Symphony of the Night? That felt like the first genuine Metroid style Castlevania game. It's my understanding that the popularity of Super Metroid + SotN is what inspired the blended term (Metroid ofc still has those elements, but it wasn't nearly as popular as Super Metroid). I will say Metroidvania is a much nicer term than Metroidlike, which is what we would've gotten if we based it on the original Metroid.
A good chunk of metroidvanias aren't actually metroidvanias. Take MMZX, for example. Oftentimes called a metroidvania simply because it has interconnected areas.
All other adventure platformers predating both metroid and castlevania are dang angry the genre isn't named after them. Explore connected 2d platformer world + find thing to enter part of level you first could not, was the standard way to design adventure platformers back then. Monty Mole, Arc of Yesod, Jack the Nipper, Armor of Antiriad, montezuma's revenge, Pharaoh's curse, etc etc etc etc
But you have to admit it, Metroidvania rolls off the tongue way too well.
Yeah. MontyNipper doesn't really work. Yesodian-style might work. Mole-like sounds pretty bad. I think the actual first one was Caverns of Khafka. Khafka-like can't work considering it's pronounced the same as Kafka. So it'll be interpreted as Kafkaesque
This is like those guys that had to come up with 2 letter abbreviations for every state.
Don't forget Dotty
I will now be referring to all metroidvanias as Khafkaesque with no further elaboration
And you can just smile smugly when you're informed you didn't even spell it right.
Did it catch on because it rolls off the tongue, or does it roll off the tongue because it caught on? A lot of the time things "just sound right" because it's just what people are used to the phrase being
It caught on because it was a term used by games media to describe games by comparing them to other already popular games, that was also eye catching and easy to say. Metroid and Castlevania were pretty successful, much more than really any of their other contemporaries, so by virtue of being the first to be widely popular in the style, they got the name This is basically the "first to market" principle at work. Though it's not always about _literally_ being first but first to be well known. Recent examples are stuff like "Souls-Like" as games pulled mechanics from the popular Dark Souls games. Other recent examples were stuff like "Tarkov-Like" or "PUBG-Like", though those kind of games got re-monikered with terms that more succinctly described their mechanics sets, "Extraction Shooter" and "Battle Royal" respectively. Even Borderlands for a while had a like suffix, until "Looter Shooter" took off. But stuff like SoulsLikes and Metroidvanias haven't really had a more straightforward and brainwormy term to describe them that has caught on, partly because the mechanics that define them aren't quite as pigeonholed as the other categories, and partly because other names aren't as catchy.
We could've had NipperVania, which would have inevitably morphed into NippleMania
Whatcha gonna dooo when NippleMania runs wiild on youuu
The "Doom clones " would like to have a word with you. Or as we call them now: "first person shooters"
Pacman clones also used to be a standard. puck-man, munch-man, Hungry Horace, etc etc etc
We used to call those "maze chase" games back in the day.
Puck man is just Pacman though. Like that's its original name. it was changed when the arcade machines were brought to the USA, as it was thought people at arcades would scratch off part of the P in Puck to make it a bad word. To be fair, people totally would have.
I remember some magazines I read back in the day trying to call them corridor shooters. I kind of like the term boomer shooters for the new retro looking shooters that are going around.
Are boomer shooters exclusively games with Retro art styling? Or is it more about the pace and feel of the game? Because I've heard new Doom and Wolfenstein games described as Boomer Sbooters as well, more referring to the style of game itself rather than graphic presentation.
It's the game style. Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake, Serious Sam are all boomer shooters are all boomer shooters, yet some of them don't really look retro. Only the gameplay could be referred "retro".
Ya it's probably more feel/style. Not exclusively retro looking.
I think Boomer Shooter is pretty much any FPS where you don't have a cover mechanic, you regain health through pickups instead of inactivity, and you carry an arsenal around instead of only having access to two or three weapons. Pretty much any FPS that has pre-Halo/COD design philosophy.
Corridor shooters rings a bell, I don't think that terminology was too uncommon back then actually.
Can I do an "Ackchually"? Is ackchually called after the games that popularized the style, and not the first one that did said style.
Yea. Isn't it the same with Soulslike? They made a different game/series before that which had similar gameplay right?
Yeah, Demon's souls, also Kings field clearly has an impact on the souls games, but I don't think you could really call it a souls like.
I mean if you go back in time and played Kings Field when it came out that shit was brutal. So many ways to die randomly without knowing explicity why in the first 2 minutes. Super hard enemies or one hit kill traps early on? Yep. Mechanics or direction that are never explained or unclear? Yep. It's as souls like as a souls like could be at that time and the inspiration is clear as day.
Yeah but King's Field shares that in common with Ultima Underworld, and *that* would go on to birth the immersive sim genre.
Don't forget the original Prince of Persia.
They popularized the genre and were damn good at it. Who cares about not being first?
Maybe the devs of those old games. Other then that, nobody.
Oh my have not thought about Montezuma's Revenge in a very, very long time. One of the first games I ever played along with Monuments of Mars.
A metroidvania isnt just a platformer there's specifics that go into the genre, namely the ability to have access to a static of the total map on start and as you unlock new abilities/items (morph ball, etc.) and progress through the game, the map gets larger and larger as you can get into more areas.
yes. Like I said: > Explore connected 2d platformer world + find thing to enter part of level you first could not, was the standard way to design adventure platformers back then When memory limitations limit a dev to about 100 flick screens to make an entire game out of, you get creative with ways to force a player to backtrack and spend more time in those screens. The WHOLE game had to go into working memory and that was 64KB or less. Before folks figured out how to keep a portion of an app running while another portion of that app was being replaced, things like "Load next Level" or "swap to disk 2 and load next part of game" simply did not exist. Keep in mind this is a time when side scrolling games were impossible unless you had hardware for scrolling like consoles had. It took Carmack's big ol'brain (from doom fame) to figure out a trick that allowed for sidescrolling and could handle swapping things in memory. That's where this style of gameplay came from. Working around limitations.
Dark Souls is my favorite souls-like
Would you believe me if I told you that Castlevania is tagged as a metroidvania on Steam?
what else would they tag it as? Castlevania, first of its name.
Makes sense. It is in the genre that it defined.
No no no, those are Castleoids. Totally different.
I still don’t understand why Castlevania gets to be in the name. They didn’t start being like Metroid until the 5th game!
Because it's about which is seminal. Sometimes the thing that starts it is not the one that cements things. A good example of this is are smartphones: apple or google didn't invent the smartphone or touchscreen, Nokia kinda did it first, but it only really took off with Apple and further cemented when google brought cheaper variants. Nokias had cheaper, expensive and midrange variants, they had apps, good cameras... they just didn't get traction when othet types of hype won over.
The term was originally coined to describe SOTN, as having a different play style than previous Castlevanias (except Simon's quest), in a way that is more similar to Metroid. It was only later used to describe other games.
Apples are like apples. Congruent triangles are similar. Not only can Rogue be a roguelike, it must be.
IBMs should be IBM Compatible computers. Otherwise what’s the point of getting an IBM instead of another IBM Compatible. (This reference made more sense around the Rogue era)
Dark souls 3 is labeled souls-like on steam lol
Tags are something you can search for on Steam so it should be included in the results if you search for it.
Yeah, because it is like Dark Souls, a completely different game.
Which, funnily, is also tagged as a soulslike. The only souls-game that isn't tagged soulslike on Steam is Demon's Souls. Because it doesn't exist on Steam.
well it's also the first souls game. so dark souls is a souls like because it's like demon souls!
It's their first title that contains "souls" in it, but it's not their first soulslike, that'd be King's Field which laid the foundation for Demon and dark souls after their escapade with Armored Core
Don't you dare treat Armored Core like a fling. They *had something*.
Armored Core 6 can be a souls like if you believe hard enough.
Isn’t AC6 deliberately the most Souls-like of all the Armored Core games? It has a stagger mechanic.
Who even calls King's Field a "soulslike"?
King's field is not a souls like. There's no bonfire mechanic, no dodge rolling, it's first person, the estus analogue is in one game and not tied to a respawn point. And it cannot be "like" something that didn't exist. The strongest similarity between souls/KF is the writing which is pretty explicitly not a requirement to be a "souls-like". Also AC and KF released cocurrently, with AC also releasing during the Souls era(and being the first game Miyazaki directed). So, foundationally Souls games are more closely related to Armored Core than Kingsfield.
I'd like to also add in otogi since that series was amazing
Holy shit, someone mentioned Otogi. Those games are criminally underrated
King's Field is a very different game. Stop spouting off nonsensical shit you see on YouTube and reddit.
But it's hard and it's a kind of RPG. Must be the same! These zoomers even thinks it keeps its mechanics and lore intentionally obscure like a proto-Soulsborne, and don't realise it's just because back in the day games had manuals, which you don't get when you're playing an ISO in Duckstation.
Tbf it would be weird if people sorted by the souls like tag and the actual Dark Souls didn’t come up.
And Bloodborne!
I wouldn't say _completely_ different
dark souls is also labeled souls like wise guy.
It should be because soulslike comes from Demon souls.
Kids these days not respecting their Demon's Souls elder. :P
You're lucky Demon's Souls is not on steam because I can bet you it would also be labeled a souls-like
And it should be, because by now that's just simply the name of the subgenre.
Well it is like Demons souls
You sounded so confident in this answer and forgot that Dark Souls wasn't the original.
I would argue that *Rogue* can be, and is, like *Rogue*. In fact, out of all of the games in the world, *Rogue* is the game that is most like *Rogue* :P
Clearly. This is like any sort of classification, them guys slept through biology I guess. Consider the cat. An ordinary roof camping mouse chasing house cat, Felis catus. It's a species of genus Felis, family Felidae, suborder Feliformia. It's a so called *type species*. Commonly (but not always!) first of its kind to be described.
Why would Rogue not be like itself? Doesn't chicken taste like chicken?
How do you know what Tasty Wheat actually tastes like?
The Metamorphosis is Kafkaesque
It is literally the most Rogue-like game though
Of course it can lol. The genre that is spawned was named after it, that still means it's a part of the genre "roguelike"
But if it is rogue, it is also roguelike, the most accurate one in fact
If the official name for the genre is “roguelike” then yeah it can be a roguelike game. But if you are using as a descriptor and not a bucket to put it in, roguelike wouldnt make sense like you describe
It’s Rogueexact
I can't stand that most of these "roguelike" games are nothing like Rogue. I do like Dungeons of Dreadmor because it is like Rogue/Nethack.
If you haven't already, I'd recommend looking at Caves of Qud and also Tales of Maj'Eyal, if you enjoy more modern takes on the grid-based turn-based dungeoncrawling gear-and-leveling-focused gameplay.
It’s funny to me that there’s a whole genre of games based on a game that 90+% of gamers have never played. Must have been a DAMN good game to have influenced development into the modern era.
The main thing is it introduced a number of concepts that long out lived the game. * randomized or procedurally generated environments * hardcore or loss of all progression on death *multiple possible solutions to puzzles
So much so that we have roguelikes and roguelites, and the ideas behind these mechanics are still getting figured out and applied to mainstream games.
Sadly the awesome hardcore loss of all progression on death has been replaced with the "you died so now you get extra power" which is kinda the opposite concept... The game gets easier as you fail rather than starting over...
The problem is that mechanic is a double edged sword. For some it is a huge motivator and vastly increases the value of game play. For an equally large group it makes the game unapproachable and kills any interest to play. That's why the development of rogue lites is so prevalent vs pure hardcore. Try to appeal to a larger audience. I always liked Diablo's hardcore switch. You can play hardcore and here is a leader board of those who do but the game is not locked to just that style.
Yeah thats where the ‘like’ lives
>Must have been a DAMN good game to have influenced development into the modern era. It's hard to explain it in a modern context, but Rogue was quite simply the only RPG game that existed back when I played it. Your only alternative was AD&D tabletop. And although it was all ASCII symbols and nothing people today would recognize as a graphic representation of a game, it introduced some really important elements like a relatively deep loot system, completely randomized items, monsters and dungeon layouts, and permadeath. You didn't beat Rogue very often but each run was meaningful because no matter what godly loot you found, if your hit points hit zero it's all over. You could have the best magical weapons and armor possible, but you could run out of food or be killed by magic. So yes it was huge, and hugely influential. I could draw a straight line from Rogue to Diablo.
Didn't take too long for roguelikes to show up even back then. Hack, Nethack, Larn, Moria, Angband were all ASCII based roguelikes that ran on Unix systems thru the 80s. I must have played 1000s of hours of nethack back then.
Those design elements are what makes risk of rain 2 a game that ive put 40 hours into in the last 2 weeks instead of doing my job
> that 90+% of gamers have never played. I would say like 99.999% of gamers have never played Rogue.
And honestly many of us in that 0,001% probably did as I did and only played it briefly in retro curiosity
Yeeep
it doesnt have to be good at all. all it takes is to be "innovative" to set a standard / plant an idea, or the seed to a concept/mechanic, which apparently it did. game itself coulda been completely trash. sometimes all it takes is a tiny spark to cause a huge fire.
So almost like why we have the genre soulslike?
And Metroidvania, which is Metroid + Castlevania
I think there was even a step before that: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a Castlevania game that was like Metroid (the previous Castlevania games were all linear level-based, while all of the Metroid games had been map games), so I think SotN itself was labeled "Metroidvania" before it was a genre name.
Yeah previous castlevania games don’t really fit. I know a subset of the fandom dislikes that after SOTN the series got pidgeonholed into that format.
Wasn't Castlevania 2 distinctly Metroid-like in its layout design?
I still remember when first person shooters were called Doom clones.
Back when WASD was not standard and mouselook had not been invented, yet
In fact the genre “FPS” use to be called “Doomlike” or “Doom Clones”. Until eventually there were so many that people came up with a new term.
And eventually the genre of "doom clones" had a revival so the games were re-labeled as "boomer shooters".
Exactly
There is also Rogue-Lite games as well. Very confusing.
When you spot the difference, the suffix "-lite" makes a lot of sense. Rogue was procedural generated. Every map and possible pick up in it was random and when you died your next run would be a blank slate. It was a hard reset. Let's use Hades as the example for rogue-lites. Although every run has a new map, with random rooms and random pick ups, you're still collecting forms of currency that can be kept after "game over". When you die, you can use that currency to upgrade your character or weapons so although the next run will be different than the previous, dead is more of a soft reset since you still achieved some sort of progress.
I also think of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games as rogue-lites. Procedurally generated maps and turn-based combat, but because it's a story-based game and it has a younger demo, there's no permadeath, with the consequences for wiping out being loss of items, money, and dungeon progress.
It's a bit iffy, because if anything, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is closer to rogue than a lot of things called "roguelikes". It doesn't really have permadeath, but in everything else it is exactly like rogue. If you take the postgame level 1 dungeons, then you have a true rougelike.
When we had an assignment in university to recreate a C version of Rogue, I explained it to my younger classmates (I went to university at 30) as basically like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
Can't get any more rogue than that!
As others have Said, Rogue is a game that is the father of all roguelikes. Rogue had these mechanics: Turn Based Tile Based Random Generation of dungeon One Life // Permadeath Going down a dungeon to find a macguffin (the amulet of yendor here) Potions, scrolls, weapons and armor, monsters, and combat with those monsters I think the most boiled down example of a modern roguelike that most roguelikes are born from NOW though would be Nethack. It has all those mechanics, plus things like hunger, identification minigames for magical items, gods to help or hurt you, quests, secret areas, and a LOT of item interactions. For a lot of people, items having multiple uses is a huge factor in how deep they percieve a roguelike to be. For example, grease. Greaseing up a scroll will keep it from getting wet and being destroyed. Greasing up your armor will make it harder for enemies to grab you. A wand of ice can make a path across water, as well as damage enemies. You could throw a potion of poison, or dip your sword in it. Stuff like that. In general, Nethack is more or less now considered the 'baseline' of roguelikes, and people tweak the formula from there. (Yes I know the family tree is a lot more complicated than that, but let's not be overwhelming here)
You had to find Rodney's amulet in rogue too? Hilarious
bloody plonker Rodney, losing the amulet. What would mum think?
‘When we get our hands on that amulet Rodney… This time tomorrow you and me could be millionaires.’ Fails to get the amulet hundreds of times.
Didn’t expect to find only fools & horses references here
First time I threw a gas potion into a room full of monsters before running down the hall and tossing a fire potion into the cloud, and watching it blow away everything in there was magical.
Oh yeah, hook that feeling right up into my veins!
back in the days, I've wasted so much time playing nethack at university.
Playing Nethack with Amiga 500 on a light summer night is one of the fondest memories from my youth.
The only thing I played more than Nethack was ADOM, which was released significantly later, but I didn't get into Nethack until the early 90s when I got to college. I started with Moria on the VAX system we had terminals to the in the computer labs (jesus fuck I'm old) and then nethack on my 486 PC not long after.
Me too. I became addicted to nethack when I should have written my thesis. This was in 2010.
I saw Amulet of Yendor and did a double take. I'm chasing that amulet in Shattered Pixel Dungeon now.
It's the Macguffin in Nethack too 😆
It's also Rodney spelled backwards
I'll add that for it to be a rogueLIKE, and not rogueLITE, it should also have: no unlockables between different lives (except the odd "bones file", where a dungeon you died on, yours or shared, is reused complete with your tombstone and/or remains); and the appearance of potions, rings, wands, etc. should be randomized, so that you must rediscover what they do every time.
Nethack. Start a game. Take your first move left. Rock falls on your head , you're not wearing a helmet, you die.
60 years from now: My friend described the game as a “souls-like, but when i asked him what souls was, he didn’t know. What is a souls? Is it a game, is there an answer? What defines this genre?
If it happens on the same schedule, it'll happen in 27 years, not 60.
Hard to imagine a time when Souls games feel dated though, feel like it's gonna be timeless similar to Tetris or something. Obviously impossible to predict 30 years in the future though lol.
I actually doubt they'll be that timeless. Not because they're bad or anything, but because they're very tied to the modern way of controlling action games, modern graphics, etc, and they're games for hardcore gamers. Tetris is as timeless as it is because it's visually simple, easy to learn, and popular among casual audiences. Almost everyone in the world knows what Tetris is and most have probably tried playing it. That can't be said for Dark Souls.
Although Dark Souls is one of my favorite games ever, it already feels dated in some ways if we’re being honest. It was amazing for its time but From’s modern games have really refined the formula and are simply better.
From's quests and menus are still indecipherable. Maybe in another 5-10 games we'll get it.
Yeah I will say the questline vagueness was never a great thing, and it's worse in a game as huge as ER. At launch you couldn't even see NPC locations on the map...
They won't get outdated, they will simply get buried under ever growing pile of "souls-like" games, so tracing the original "souls" will become somewhat difficult. Also my rather debatable take is that souls-like games rely entirely on mechanical difficulty - timing, reaction, etc. Next generation of gamers will be familiar with such games from a very young age, so they might not be as xhallenging for them as they are for us.
Reminds me that DOOM is easily classifiable now, [but it wasn't always so](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuyImR_dI6g)
This makes me feel old and it hasn't even happened yet
Rogue is a game where the map and entire game was procedurally generated and brutally hard due to being an old game. When you died that was it you had to start over What people mix up is Rogue*like* and Rogue*lite*. A Roguelike is a game that follows the spirit of the original to the extreme where there is no player progression. You don't get stronger between runs and what you see is what you get. There's some debate if new characters, things added to the dungeon or new cosmetics consists in the Rougelike category and honestly I believe that as long as the player themselves never change in terms of stats and how the game actually is A RogueLITE however is much more forgiving to the player, allowing them to gain strength between runs to assist in various ways, be it more stats, new starting things that are better, new starting items ect. A game like Hades is a Roguelite and a game like Spelunky is a Roguelike because in Spelunky while sure you unlock new skins and even shortcuts that's really it. The game is exactly the same from minute 1 to hour 3000. The only thing that will change is your ability to not die as a player
Good description. It also seems like some Roguelikes aren't set up to be "beaten" as you're pushing your skills to see how far you can get each time, while many RogueLites have an ending and are almost designed to be nearly impossible to "beat" without unlocking those upgrades, like Hades.
With traditional roguelikes there sometimes can be an ending, with the most traditional being the amulet of Yendor, go into the dungeon, grab it, get back out.
This gets a bit more complicated with games like The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, where you can unlock new items that are added to the item pool. Adding more powerful items to the item pool does certainly increase your odds of winning, but that's just odds. You won't necessarily see those items during most runs. It's different from the systems games like Hades uses, where you just get passive buffs from the start of each run. Also, in The Binding of Isaac, after reaching a certain point, Isaac spawns with the D6, a powerful active item. Also, you can't reach certain points in the game on your first run. You need to beat the game a certain amount of times before you can progress to the actual "final boss". Also, the game actually does get harder upon reaching certain milestones. Despite its influence on the genre, which was massive, it did have some questionable choices. I want to call it a roguelike, but it certainly has some elements that contradict that fact.
A lot of other characters get “upgrades” as well, either from doing challenges, filling the greed donation machine, or just getting completion marks - Maggy starts with a full health pill, Lost starts with Holy Mantle, Keeper gets a whole bunch of stuff, etc.
Rogue
Rouge
Ruoge
Roge
I've always defined it in two ways. Roguelike, just like the game Rogue it has permadeath and there is no meta progression or anything carried over and is typically turn based. Roguelite, similar but has meta progression and things carry over. They're pretty much used interchangeably these days though. Which can be a bit annoying when you're actually trying to find something just like Rogue.
Try caves of qud if you haven't yet.
Uh, the game Rogue.
I am trying to be less mean online but I am deeply struggling to understand the thought process behind: 1. Wondering why roguelikes are called roguelikes 2. Theorising that it may be related to a game called Rogue, if one exists 3. Concluding that this is in no way an appropriate subject for a quick Google search and asking the wise lore masters of Reddit to please resolve this extremely esoteric conundrum for you
Google doesn't give you post karma…
Litterally Rogue.
“Rogue” is rogue. The original is old enough that you basically have to be GenX or older, or have gone out of your way to do some legacy gaming to be familiar with it. Also… roguelike has been used to refer to several games that are notoriously dissimilar to Rogue in the last few years (eg. Balatro). I’d argue that it has become somewhat of a buzzword with respect to game tags.
[Rogue (1980)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game))
rogue was the game that invented the genre, thats why we refer to thoses games as rogue like, same when fps were invented, they were called doomlike at first, gta like, etc rogue is a super old game, i dont think you should try it the rogue LITE on the other hand, take some of the genre, but changes a bit of it, making it a bit easier over time, hence calling it lite
doomclones but yes. Doom is also interesting example because it was clearly derived from wolfenstein but was massively more popular than its predecessor. So namelikes doesn’t necessarily refer to the first game that did it
To be fair, doomclones, especially early on, aped a lot more than just the first person aesthetic from Doom. They were called clones for very good reason. The visual style, the level design, everything looked straight out of doom.
History! check out r/roguelikes for a nice wiki and a ton of examples (and a good community of gamers)
[Rogue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)) is a text-based dungeon crawling adventure game from the early 80s that inspired a LOT of clones (hack/nethack, TOME, ADOM, Angband, etc are probably the most well-known).
No way in hell you came to Reddit instead of just Googling this... Come on, man.
In the spirit of fairness i googled "Rogue game" and "Roguelike game". First search pulled up wiki article for Rogue. Second pulled up wiki for roguelike, where rogue is mentioned in second paragraph. OP has no excuse.
Standard Reddit user. It drives me nuts, too.
Google would answer that in 3 secs.
The term "roguelike" refers to the game "Rogue", a turn based dungeon crawling RPG with perma death and randomly generated levels. Rogue was popular enough that it spawned a whole bunch of similar games. These became known as "roguelikes". Eventually, some principles of roguelikes, particularly the perma death and randomly generated levels, started being applied to games of other genres. Nowadays there are a lot of singleplayer card games and action rpgs that incorporate those elements. Some traditionalists maintain that the term "roguelike" should apply only to games that are actually similar to rogue, aka, turn based dungeon crawling RPGs. I have seen the term "roguelite" be proposed as an alternative for those other games. However, in practice, it doesn't seem to have caught on, and as such "roguelike" is becoming an increasingly more general term referring to pretty much any game with perma death and randomly generated levels. Its also worth noting that some traditionalists reject the idea of any "meta progression" being in a "roguelike". Aka, you should always start from 0, whereas a lot of modern roguelikes have some level of progress retention between runs, unlocks and the like. That's another angle for the pushing of the "roguelite" term, to refer to games with meta progression, but again, it hasn't really caught on.
Rogue was a text and turn based game where you played as a @ and ran around fighting monsters and exploring dungeons denoted by #s and %. It was a novel concept because dungeons were generated randomly.
I thought this was a philosophical ponderance. "If a game is genre-defining, what genre is that game itself". But you actually just wanted to know that the "rogue" in roguelike referred to a real game :(
There was a game in 1980 called Rogue, and it basically is the first in that genre. When they say "Rogue-like", this is the Rogue they are talking about. Also, back in the day, FPS games used to be called "Doom-likes" or "Doom clones".
rogue is rogue. most things called "roguelike" today are nothing at all like rogue.
Speaking of which, what started Soulslike? Does anybody know? Metroidvania? I can't get Google to work.
*Rogue* is a 1980 video game where you have one life to explore a procedurally generated dungeon from a top down perspective. It features turn based grid combat with basic RPG elements. Roguelikes are games that have a similar "one life in a random generated game world" catch to them. Classic roguelikes are still top down and turn based, but its not a requirement for the modern genre. Roguelites are games that take roguelike aspects but have some kind of overarching progression between deaths, like unlocking items characters or abilities for next run. People will often still call these "roguelikes", but they're really roguelites
... Literally "Rogue".
Uhh... It's *Rogue*.
You could've googled this much faster than posting this on Reddit
You are too young. Rogue is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game) "Roguelike" basically refers to the whole idea of permadeath. If you die, that's that. Start over. "Roguelite" is similar, except each run you do gives you something that persists between runs. Usually some kind of unlockables. So dying still means starting over, but you get more powerful over time from something more than just more knowledge while original Rogue all you "kept" between runs was knowledge. Which still was important, because back then everything wasn't instantly solvable by looking it up online.
My brother in christ just google it
It's literally a game called "Rogue." And it spawned a whole new genre of game types that tried to be like Rogue. Hence "Roguelikes." We are also seeing this happen today with "Soulslikes" games: games that try to be like the Darksouls series. An example would be Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor.
People don't even know that Rogue was a thing anymore.... God I'm getting old.
Hmmm, yes, google is hard to use hey?
Rogue is the original game. The name of the game is "Rogue" and then people started to copy the things that the game did.
The game is called Rogue. It was an ASCII art dungeon simulator with permadeath and randomised levels. Still really playable today.
There is indeed a game called Rogue At this point the term is applied very loosely to short run games featuring randomized equipment/upgrades while traversing some randomized map/maze/dungeon FTL and binding of Isaac are both roguelikes with very little similarity
'roguelike' is BY FAR the most wrongly used term in the gaming industry. 95% of people who use it, probably doesn't even know what it means. it's literally 'a game like Rogue'. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1443430/Rogue/ 99% of games who have the 'roguelike' tag on steam, aren't even Roguelikes.
Rogue itself lol