Roguelike

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Typical graphics and gameplay of roguelikes.

Roguelikes are a particular subgenre of Role-Playing Games, so named for being like Rogue, a very early computer game. The most traditional roguelikes have the following characteristics:

• Roguelikes are centered around Dungeon Crawling through randomly-generated environments randomly stocked from a huge list of monsters and items. Some (such as ADOM) also have a static overworld and/or special levels, but even those games rely on random content in other places. This means that memorization is not enough to win a roguelike, and walkthroughs as such cannot be made for them, but they have increased replayability.
• Roguelikes take Final Death to the extreme. When your character dies, that's it - he's dead for good. Saving the game is often possible, but it is only used for having a pause from playing. Save Scumming is thus flatly disallowed.
• Roguelikes have only a single controllable character, with a turn-based engine in which everything moves at the same time. Some allow you to have allies or pets, but they can't be directly controlled, only given general orders. The power of your character, companions, and items are crucial, so roguelikes tend to be extremely heavy on Level Grinding and Min-Maxing.
• Confounding the player's need for Level Grinding, most Roguelikes have some kind of built-in time limit that requires the player to push on into harder content. The original Rogue, for example, required you to eat food every so often or starve to death, and it was nearly impossible to find more food on a dungeon level once you'd cleaned it out—but going down to the next dungeon level meant fighting tougher monsters.
• Most roguelikes have randomized appearances for items. In one game, for example, potions of healing might be green potions, and in another purple. Items must be identified either by blindly using them and see what happens (beware of Poison Mushrooms) or by careful observation - or by using scrolls of identify. It's typical, after dying, to be revealed that you had an item which could've saved you, but was unidentified at the time.
• Roguelikes, especially the well-known or popular ones, have often been under continual development for many years, making them extraordinarily large and complex. Many have to use both capital and lowercase letters to have enough inputs for their commands, and some go even further. Interactions are also often very intricate; The Dev Team Thinks of Everything is named for a catchphrase among the Nethack community.
• As a result of the above points, roguelikes are mostly very hard. Death is expected to be fairly frequent, enough so that the community has developed the acronym "YASD," for Yet Another Stupid Death. It is easily possible to play many roguelikes for years without even coming close to victory.
• Most roguelikes have little more than an Excuse Plot. Some have less. A rare few have more.
• Traditionally, most roguelikes have ASCII or similar text-based graphics, although support for graphical tiles has become increasingly common.

Roguelikes can be roughly classified into a few different Subgenres that occasionally overlap:

• Hacklikes, influenced mostly by Nethack. They mostly focus on Dungeon Crawling, and have mostly finite resources to force the player to manage them well.
• Bands, influenced by Angband. Bands usually feature a non-permanent dungeon, infinite resources and very tough bosses, so the games are focused on taking levels in badass until the player is ready to punch dragons to death.
• Open worlds that typically have content beyond simple Dungeon Crawling, such as multiple quests and a nontrivial plot.
• Coffee break Roguelikes are Roguelikes that are simple and easy to pick up and play for a while.

Though they have a very steep learning curve, many roguelikes are incredible time sinks, which is only exacerbated by the fact that most of them are entirely free.

Although roguelikes are more readily associated with Western RPGs, oddly enough the gameplay style is much more popular in Japan, resulting in quite a few Eastern roguelikes as well.

See also Multi User Dungeon (MUD) for a related genre of RPG with its roots in Text Adventure games.

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Examples of Roguelikes include:

• 3059 has no real goals, just a big sandbox roguelike. One of the few Real-time roguelikes. Needs More Love.

• 3069, the same thing as 3059, but has more of a story, is in 3D, and has a user interface.
• Alpha Man
• Ancient Domains of Mystery
• Angband
• Azure Dreams
• Baroque (Sega Saturn, PSX, PS2 and Wii)
• The Binding of Isaac
• Castle of the Winds
• Cataclysm
• Caves of Qud
• Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle
• Desktop Dungeons is part roguelike, part puzzle game.
• Diablo and its sequels, which take the Roguelike formula into real time. They have arguably become a Genre Killer in that almost all new post-Diablo roguelikes take inspiration from it instead of Rogue itself. Its own clones include:

• • Fate, a “cover band” version
  • Hellgate:London, MYTHOS and Torchlight, which are all Spiritual Successors made by the remains of Blizzard North.
  • DiabloRL, i.e. Diablo Roguelike, is more of a roguelike than a “Diablolike” due to its turn-based nature.

• Digimon World 2
• Dnd, the Ur Example of Roguelikes. It predates Rogue by several years, but has many features that would eventually become commonplace in the Roguelike genre.
• Doom the Roguelike, is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Aliens, the Roguelike is basically the Aliens equivalent of Doom the Roguelike, except this one has character classes and is (especially if you play in darkness and, with headphones) MUCH scarier...
  • Castlevania, the Roguelike, with sprites or with ASCII graphics.
    • The same person also made a Zelda roguelike, a Rockman roguelike, and a Metroid roguelike (kind of makes you wonder how he represented Samus taking off her suit at the end of each game)
• Dragon Crystal
• Dragon Quest Monsters, especially the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance installments. Joker eschewed it in favor of 3d, although Joker 2 added some light roguelike elements in the bonus dungeons.
• Dungeon Crawl
• Dungeon Master, the innovative first person, turn-based roguelike for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.
  • Legend of Grimrock, a 2012 Spiritual Successor.
• Dungeon of Doom (aka The Dungeon Revealed)
• Dungeons of Dredmor not only has sprite graphics, but also animations, sound effects, background music, Difficulty Levels and the option to turn off Permadeath, all of which are very rare for roguelikes.
• The Adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress.
• Arguably the RM Game Dungeons
• Elona
• Evolution Worlds, albeit with a turn-based battle system.
• Fatal Labyrinth
• Gear Head
• Incursion
• Iter Vehemens Ad Necem
• Izuna Legend of the Unemployed Ninja
• Larn
• Liberal Crime Squad
• Lufia 2's "Ancient Cave"
• Moria
• Monster Gate 1 and 2, two GBA games that function very much like the Mysterious Dungeon games, but only had a Japanese release.
  • The arcade game that these are based on, where you put in real currency to get game money which is used to pay the dungeon fee for each dungeon (and to cast spells). Each dungeon you start at 0 XP, but can usually take up to 10 spells with you. The game also featured a non-interactive multiplayer where you could beat dungeons to take them over, and the ability to customize your own dungeons (set the number of levels, type of enimies, and specials) and challenge other players to try and beat it.
• Mysterious Dungeon (Fushigi no Dungeon) games, all but one of which are licensed spinoffs of other franchises:
  • Chocobo's Dungeon
  • The Nightmare of Druaga (PS2)
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon
  • The Torneko no Daibouken (Torneko's Great Adventure) spin-off series from Dragon Quest
  • Shiren the Wanderer: The exception.
• Nethack, the best-known of all roguelikes.
  • Slash'EM
• Omega
• Powder, a roguelike developed originally for the Game Boy Advance (and now ported to other systems)
• Prospector
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, the announced PSP game for the anime, is a roguelike/adventure game.
• Ragnarok
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale in Dungeon Mode.
• Rogue, the Trope Namer and Trope Maker.
• Rogue Hearts Dungeon, a Japan only Enhanced Remake of Rogue for the PS2.
• Rogue Survivor, a Zombie Apocalypse roguelike.
• Sakura Taisen: Kimi Aru ga Tame
• Scarab of Ra, a rare first-person roguelike
• Slayer (no relation to the band), another first-person roguelike for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer which has the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons branding.
• Spelunky, hybrid of a roguelike and a Platform Game.
• Sword of Fargoal
• Timestalkers—also a Climax Entertainment Crisis Crossover.
• Titan Quest, though it lacks real death punishment or randomly-generated maps.
• Tales of Maj'Eyal, although it breaks the mold with a world map, quests, and multiple dungeons. Many of its modules follow a similar pattern, including a (slightly buggy) Dragon Ball-themed one.
• Tomb of Terror
• Transcendence (combination of Nethack and Star Control)
• In many ways, Toejam and Earl functions as a (comparatively) very easy roguelike.
• Z Angband - a spin-off of Angband
• Zettai Hero Project - By the Disgaea team.
• Tower of Doom (on the intellivision) was probably the first console roguelike.