Your Game Is Not a Roguelike

- 3 mins read, 550 words

I have an issue with the roguelike (and to an extent roguelike-like and roguelite) genre. More specifically, I have an issue with the name of the genre.

The problem with roguelike

There’s this age old, ever discussed topic: What is and what isn’t a roguelike? Of course, there’s the (in)famous Berlin Interpretation which basically says that above all, a roguelike game is a game

  • where the world is randomly generated to increase replayability (their definition actually disallows ā€œfixedā€ content such as puzzles, or plots/stories)
  • where death of a character is permanent and is punished by deleting the save file
  • a game that is turn-based and not sensitive to time at all; where the world is represented by a uniform grid of tiles (and everything takes up only one tile)
  • a game that is non-modal, so all actions like movement in the world, battling, shopping, etc. takes place in the same mode (no overworld, no dedicated battle screens, and so on)
  • a game that is complex enough to allow several solutions to the same goal; where your resources like food, potions, etc. are limited
  • where killing monsters is a very important part of the game with no monster/monster relations
  • and finally a game that offers exploration and discovery, be it through randomly generated levels, or unidentified items.

With less ā€œrequiredā€ features like having a single player character, monsters being similar to players, providing a tactical challenge, being rendered in ASCII, containing dungeons and deliberately showing numbers.

Recently, I have stumbled upon a tweet with a flowchart (also displayed below) that actually prompted me to make this post and that seems even more restrictive than the Berlin Interpretation. ā€œIs It a Roguelike?ā€ chart Click the image to open it full-size in a new tab

The chart overlaps a lot with the Berlin Interpretation, except it also says that a roguelike is strictly top-down or isometric (no first or third person camera) and lists a bunch of genres that you should define your game with rather than roguelike if it breaks one of the ā€œrulesā€ along with some examples.

And there lies the problem, those definitions are way too restrictive and the result of following those ā€œrulesā€ is pretty much just cloning and reskinning the original Rogue with little room for innovation.

A solution?

I don’t think the Berlin Interpretation or the grid is inherently bad. Sure some of the rules should just go away completely, like forcing the camera view or the ASCII output. I also think there should be less emphasis put on certain ā€œrulesā€, like disallowing a plot, or puzzles, non-modality, or even the aspect of killing monsters.
The core values, to me at least, are Replayability, Complexity, Exploration and Discovery.

In the end, I think the problem is actually rather simple and it’s in the name - Roguelike - a game ā€œlike Rogueā€. I think we should move past this, we are not calling First Person Shooters Doom Clones anymore so perhaps we should move on from roguelike and invent a new word for the genre.

What should that word be? I don’t actually know, I am bad with names. The best I come up with is Dungeon Crawler, perhaps someone has a better idea?

Let me know what you think on Twitter, maybe you even have a better name for the genre :)