Rogue actually has a save feature. You can copy the save file anywhere and restore your game from it -- in the roguelike community this is known as savescumming. Rogue is a hack and slash with RPG elements even without the save feature, though.

Sigh, no, just no.

Well seeing as you can't access Nightmare normally, 'one difficulty less' doesn't work. Quite often Vanilla D2 is too easy, and you don't really have the options of strategy beyond the roles the classes have. D2 is closer to pre-MMO than Rouge-like.

I said Zy-El would be a lot closer since it's a lot more difficult (you're running from skeletons in the first act til you're like 30th level), but strategy is either kite or melee. It's very much hack&slash&loot. Hardcore is more a gloating status than anything else; At least that's my impression of it.

Except that those things have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is a Roguelike game. I swear at least 3/4 of the people in this thread have never actually played Rogue.

Diablo is an aRPG, the franchise pretty much invented the category. If you compare Rogue with Diablo there's very, very little in common. In order to place them in the same category you have to render the category meaningless.

Thanks - I actually considered both Hammerwatch and Grimrock, but I feared a bit that their world weren't random enough! Will give it some thought ...

Maybe! But can you express why? Lets say that I play Minecraft at hardcore ... what is it I'm missing from this experience, which I would have had if I had played a true roguelike...?

Honestly, before including games, maybe you should play them first. I have nothing against KoDP -- in fact, it's one of my favourite games -- but calling it a roguelike is a huge stretch. It is a clan management game where you build structures, recruit people into your clan, assign jobs, grow crops, trade and wage war with other tribes, send out expeditions to discover more of the map, and make decisions for your clan in random events that pop up. It doesn't even have permadeath.

Thanks for the heads-up - I'll remove that one.

If Legend of Grimrock is a roguelike, then so is Lands of Lore, Eye of Beholder and all other Dungeon Master clones. Might as well include Wizardry at this point.

I thought there was a mode in Grimrock for randomly generated levels, but then again i recall seeing an editor...

Course there's programs to generate random levels you can play, like i've tried for Hammerwatch, quite interesting. But yeah, it's not random enough on it's own to really warrant it.

Don't know about the second game, haven't played it yet, but in the first game there certainly wasn't.

Hmmm and here goes my only play through with it and after dying putting the game on hold...

If you just want a taste of the genre, play Lands of Lore and you'll have experienced the best that it has to offer.

Short Answer: a Roguelike is a game that is like Rogue.

If you have ever played the original Rogue then the term Roguelike makes absolute, perfect sense. It's like saying a movie is a Michael Bay Like action flick, just that phrase alone tells you exactly what to expect from the film.

Long Answer: [url=]http://truepcgaming.com/2013/06/14/roguelikes-breakdown/[/url]

It's a brief synopsis of the Roguelike genre by fan who is also incredibly good looking, absolutely brilliant and an all around great guy who somehow manages to remain quite humble. :) I think the whole point of genre-labels is to be fairly restrictive. If you water down what the term Roguelike means then it will have no real meaning. If we classify every game that has random elements as a Roguelike then everything from Borderlands (random weapons) and Left 4 Dead (random enemy placement) all the way to video poker (random shuffling of card) and pinball (the randomness of chaos theory in physics) can rightfully be called a Roguelike. At that point why even bother using the term, it could literally mean just about any game there is. As a fan of the genre, I find the restrictiveness to be very helpful. When a game is labeled as a Roguelike, I should know exactly what that means. Your given examples of Ascendant and Tower of Guns are nothing like Rogue, ergo they should not be labeled as Roguelikes. It angers fans of the genre like me and confuses the non fans like you.

I have the same issue with the Survival Horror genre. When a new game comes out bearing the label Survival Horror, what does that mean exactly? What is my point of reference? Should I expect something like Resident Evil or more like Amnesia? Is it a Survival Horror that plays like Don't Starve or a Survival Horror that's basically a Doom 3 clone. Depending on how someone defines the genre is could encompass games like Alan Wake, Alien vs Predator and Pac-Man.

It's an essential part of the genre. The ability to see where you were and where you are. If you're stats are high, you even see things that you aren't going to be able to get to if you screwed up.

The games were tile based and turned based, those are essential qualities, changing the perspective changes the way that the mechanics work out. I'm not gong to suggest that it can't be rogue-like if it uses more modern graphics, I think that would be rather silly, but roguelike shouldn't be a catch all for dungeon-crawlers.
Precisely, it's not a matter of good or bad, it's a matter of what to expect. We have plenty of other terms for things that are cousins of rogue-likes, I see no reason to bend the definition to the point of no longer being descriptive in order to cram as many games into the description as possible.

I remember the FO3 hubub because the game changed the perspective, but a lot of the "rogue-like" games people list here are much further removed from rogue. Perhaps we should go back to calling them rouge-like and be done with it.