The One Video Game Feature Everyone Is Sick Of

What Makes A Roguelike Tick?

For the uninitiated, the roguelike sub-genre consists of titles that are… well, like Rogue.

This game, first released in 1980, popularized the concept of procedurally generated dungeon crawlers. Forty years later, the central mechanics of similar titles have been refined and improved in countless ways, but the core experience remains largely the same.

In a roguelike, the player generally embarks on a foolhardy quest through a series of randomly generated areas, with vast numbers of enemies to slay and a lot of treasure to procure from their rapidly cooling carcasses. Along the way, there are often many different power-ups to acquire, with a degree of RNG allowing the player to modify their build on the fly but not really choose it outright.

Many gamers are confused by the difference between roguelikes and rogue-lites, but it’s essentially this: rogue-lites offer a more accessible take on the core experience, with an end goal being the focus rather than specific runs with very little (if anything) being carried forward to the next run. In true roguelikes, permadeath is all but an inevitability.