I was highly surprised when This War of Mine didn't get the Roguelike label. My initial impression is that it is, even though its labeled "adventure".

A quick search showed that GoG considers 10 of their products roguelikes:
Sword of the Stars: The Pit Gold Edition
Sword of the Stars: The Pit Gold Edition Upgrade
Sword of the Stars: The Pit Gold Edition - The Pilgrim
Tower of Guns
Desktop Dungeons
Desktop Dungeons: Goat Person
Tales of Maj'eyal
Tales of Maj'eyal: Ashes of Urh'rok
Ascendant
Bionic Dues

Ascendant is an side-view action game and Tower of Guns is a shooter. But the rest of them are the ones that some people call a 'real' roguelike. Sure, its a fun idea to clone a thirty year old turn-based ASCII game, but shouldn't a genre-label be a bit less restrictive? A lot of game designers have looked at the core that made Rogue attractive - permadeath and procedurally generated environment - and explored how this could work in *new* games. However, none of the games shown below has the Roguelike label:

Spelunky
Zafehouse Diaries
Rogue Legacy
This War of Mine
Don't Starve
99 Levels to Hell
King of Dragon Pass
Risk of Rain
FTL: Advanced Edition
Vertical Drop Heroes
Sword of the Samurai
Smugglers V

I think it would be better if GoG dropped their wishy-washy talk about "roguelike elements", and just labeled these games Roguelike.

Then purists could write post about that the games are not true roguelikes, and creates GOGmixes that lists the true roguelikes on this site. All 4 of them.

There should be effectively 2 labels. Rouge-like and Rouge-lite. Both would benefit the games in general as you know if it's hard core vs has some random generation in it.

I think TB sorta described it best when going over the binding of Isaac.

Well, it's a crimson or reddish sort of colo--

Oh, you spelled it right. Nevermind!

I always felt "rogue-like" is the codeword for the game lacking a save feature, or at least the ability to load an earlier save game in case you die in the game. So it is those games you are supposed to replay from the very start million times.

I remember when I went to arcades as a kid, the rooms were full of rogue-likes!

Well real rouge-like i'm sure is primarily turn based, more specifically it's more like entering bullet-time where you can act on everything. If there's ten people shooting at you, in a adventure or real time game, either you are screwed, can't act in time, or the bullets are super slow (like Blood Rayne).

In Rouge-like, you can almost always choose the best path and any mistakes you make can screw you up. In this element and situation, often the stakes and challenges are higher while the rewards are higher too.

With ADOM i can very specifically remember playing a character who was specializing in the staff (for it's defensive options), and with how the enemies were swarming me i could see in my mind's eye him smacking one, jumping to the next one, turning around and getting the one just in range, etc. Full range of vision and motion, those like 20 turns were the best i ever played :)


Another appeal of Rouge-likes, is quite a few of them are totally free. ToME for example is. Other hard as hell ones include ADOM, DOOM-RL, Castilvania-RL, and i'm sure i could find more but i don't feel like doing a search. So for me when i had no money, downloading a 1Mb game and playing it for weeks even with colored ASCII text was a blast.

Rouge-likes also tend to have more in depth game play, funny dialog or commentary about items and monsters, unique actions that you don't SEE in any other genre. Also the sheer number of NPC's/Monsters you can have is ludicrous. Then there's the level management where it's random within certain ranges of values, and every level is randomly generated from rules meaning you're unlikely to ever see the same generated floor twice.

Sorry if i can't inspire interest or excitement about the original games that are much closer to the genre. Perma-death... A lot of them have this feature, i tried playing some Dungeons of Dredmor with it turned off and it felt... wrong when i continued after i died.

Calling anything with permadeath and randomness a roguelike is a bit like calling Gone Home an FPS because it has FPS elements.

Anyway, the genre isn't all that strict, actually. Even the Berlin Interpretation, one of the most rigid definitions, has degrees of "roguelikeness".

All games will have you do the same stuff all the time - there is not much difference between playing Diablo III with a character at level 1 and one at level 38. This makes dying-and-replaying seem rather natural. In games without permadeath your character will never die - but this just means that his perfect equipment and stats will gather dust when you grow tired of the game. None of my Diablo II characters has died as such - they have been deleted from my account because I haven't logged in for years.

Anyway, I can recommend this article which describes the attraction of permadeath:
Permadeath: The Best Terrible Decision You Can Make

"rogue-like" is just an over-used term for games that have close to nothing in common with the original Rogue.
A bit like were were calling every game featuring weapons a doom-like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_%28video_game%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

I would say:
- You control 1 character.
- Tile-based four-directional movement (square grid maps)
- Full keyboard controls with everything having a shortcut key
- Turn-based (everything happens at the same time) movement/attack.
- Randomized levels and loot
- No save-games

I'd say there has to be save games as you may put 5 hours into a game and you just have to turn the computer off... No you are meaning Perma-death.

I'd also put highly diversified and varying play styles are available,
Turns based on 1000 (implementation detail),
Highly customizable character growth

Among other things.

I blame TB for getting me into rougelike games Now I can't stop playing em ^_^

Nethack and ADOM :)

I've been wondering all these roguelikes and roguelites and roguewhatevers these days.

Before indie games started getting big, roguelike meant games like ADOM, Nethack etc. to me. Games that are very similar to the original Rogue. But I just don't know anymore :D

The only part of ADOM i probably don't care for, is the hunger system. You have to figure out how much food to carry, eat everything you can, orcs and animals, etc. The amount of time for the action sorta doesn't match well with the activities, and it's so easy to run out of food it gets tedious. Other than that, the originals show a very specific picture.

Perhaps one of the bigger parts of them, is since they weren't going for anything graphical, they could concentrate on everything else with such stellar detail.