What the Heck is a Roguelike Anyway?

Photo courtesy Gamegrumps

Recently, I’ve been playing Rogue Legacy, a delightful homage to Castlevania from indie developer Cellar Door Games. The game uses randomized levels that are different every time you play, and when you die, you have to start over from the beginning with a new character. This makes for punishingly difficult game, in which you will die repeatedly. However, on each run, you earn gold which you can use before your next run to buy upgrades, armor and weapon, but then you need to hand in all your gold before entering the castle for another try. This makes every run meaningful and encourages that “just one more time” addictive mentality. You’ll eventually get strong enough to take on some of the game’s challenging boss battles, even if you’re not the most skilled player. It’s an elegant system that comes together for a game that’s at once challenging and accessible.

Rogue Legacy is something the developer classifies as a “rogue-lite”, a spin-off of the roguelike genre. I’ve heard this term used to describe everything from Dark Souls to the adventure mode in Minecraft, two games that couldn’t be any more dissimilar. So what the heck is a roguelike and why has the genre suddenly become so popular?

The first thing we need to understand is where the genre came from. It may have risen in popularity in the last few years and the term may have only recently entered the video game lexicon, but its origins trace back much further than you might expect. The term comes from the early ASCII game Rogue, a turn-based, dungeon crawler RPG with randomly generated dungeons and permanent death. In 2008, the International Roguelike Development Conference(because that’s apparently a thing) established a set of guidelines that define the roguelike genre. The guidelines are as follows:

• Randomly generated environments
• Permadeath
• Turn-based
• Grid-based
• Non-modal (only one game mode)
• Complexity
• Resource management
• Hack n' slash
• Exploration

If we’re taking these guidelines as gospel, then very few, if any of the modern roguelikes are in fact, roguelikes. The IRDC did clarify that games of the genre need not possess every single one of those characteristics in order to be classified as a roguelike, but that they should possess a number of them. So by that logic, the genre is flexible, and allows for an array of variations.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

So let’s take a look at the games that have popularized this once super-niche subgenre. In the 1980’s, Rogue spawned a group of successors – Angband, Hack and NetHack, among others – which each evolved the formula in different ways, but retained the core aspects of permadeath and random level generation.

The genre would remain in obscurity even through the release of a popular game that seemingly borrowed many elements of the genre. Blizzard Entertainment released Diablo on PC in 1997. The massive release bore many similarities to roguelikes, such as randomly generated environments, fantasy settings and RPG experience points. However, Diablo lacked the most important defining element of the genre – permadeath. As Diablo has endured, with the recent release of Diablo III, it’s still not considered a roguelike, though it certainly popularized some of the elements of the genre such as random level generation.

The genre itself wouldn’t gain mainstream popularity in the industry until almost a decade later when players began seeking out more challenging experiences as an alternative to the hand-holding found in many games at the time. The rise of Twitch and YouTube Let’s Plays played a big factor as games with high difficulty provided an entertaining show for viewers. The time was right for the roguelike to have a coming out party.

Around this time, reviewers started using the term roguelike to describe a series of games developed by From Software. Relying heavily on a hardy challenge, Demon’s Souls and its successor Dark Souls contributed greatly to the popularity of the genre, though both diverged from the formula in significant ways – lacking random generation and true permadeath. By most standards, these games do not fit the definition of roguelike. Still, the Souls series proved that there was an audience for challenging games and its rising success has shown that audience to be growing.

At a time when video game publishers were increasingly risk averse, it was hard to find any AAA games with roguelike elements outside of the Souls series, despite the rising success of that franchise. However, independent developers found solace in the design philosophies of the genre. A young programmer named Derek Wu took a chance with a game called Spelunky. Developed as a flash game, Spelunky borrowed elements from roguelikes and supplanted them into an addictive and charming platformer. Spelunky has grown from its origins as a flash game into one of the most successful indie games on Steam, Xbox, Playstation and various other platforms.

Photo courtesy Edge-Online

Part of the appeal of the genre for indie developers is that the random generation is a way to build in variety without needing to meticulously create dozens of different environments. Artists can create fewer assets and recycle those assets throughout the game to surprisingly great effect. The high difficulty also extends the playtime of the game, again, without requiring dozens of meticulously crafted levels. This allows a game like Rogue Legacy to take players upwards of twenty hours to complete – playtime usually reserved for high production AAA titles.

Like the early roguelikes each putting their own unique spins on the genre, each of the recent entries in the genre does something different with the design philosophies of permadeath and random generation. Binding of Isaac uses permadeath in a randomly generated dungeon crawling twin-stick shooter. Luftrausers uses roguelike design in a retro style flight shooter. FTL incorporates roguelike concepts into a space sim RTS. Each of these games uses the genre’s loose definitions in increasingly creative ways.

That loose definition is precisely what prompted me to start investigating the roguelike in the first place. It’s also part of what makes this genre so fascinating. Its influence seems to have spread far beyond the games I’ve discussed here. Even the wildly popular Minecraft possesses roguelike elements, and the entire survival genre – games like DayZ and Rust – share more in common with Rogue than it would initially seem.

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