I will now talk about roguelite for about 50 minutes

Personally, I'm a fan of the current interpretation on Wikipedia.

Rogue-likes are games like Rogue. Meaning they're turn based RPGs where you explore procedural generated dungeons, have permadeath, no unlocks, etc. Basically, they're "like Rogue".

Rogue-lites (or Roguelike-likes) have elements of these, but aren't like Rogue. They can have a metagame of permanent unlocks, but they don't have to. They can be in different genres.

At some point, the already gray genre gets too diluted and you don't know what anything is anymore. Is Diablo a rogue-lite? What if it's on hardcore mode? (Diablo spun off of Roguelike a while back and became its own genre) Is Pac-Man a rogue-lite? What if you generate a random maze each time?

At that point, though, the argument's nothing new. This happens for most everything because genres are descriptors and not containers. When's a movie "stop" being sci-fi? Where's the line between heavy rock and metal? Is Avatar an anime? etc.

There's no good universal label for any of this because that's how life is. The only real way any of it works is "well, I'm not sure what exactly a Rogue-lite is, but I know it when I see it". Otherwise, we're all just gonna argue about our own personal definitions we prescribe to.

/r/Cynicalbrit Thread Link - youtube.com