Roguelike

A style of role-playing game traditionally defined by four traits: a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based play, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character. The name comes from Rogue, a dungeon crawler by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, with later contributions by Ken Arnold, developed around 1980 for Unix-based minicomputer systems. Rogue became popular with college students and programmers in the 1980s and 1990s and led to hundreds of variants; better-known ones include Hack, NetHack, Angband, Ancient Domains of Mystery and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Because the label kept stretching, players and developers at the International Roguelike Development Conference 2008 in Berlin drafted the 'Berlin Interpretation', a list of high- and low-value factors based on five canon games: ADOM, Angband, Linley's Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and Rogue. Many newer games keep the procedural runs and permadeath but drop turn-based, grid-based play; Spelunky, FTL: Faster Than Light, The Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire and Hades are common examples. These are sometimes called roguelites or roguelike-likes to separate them from the traditional style, although they are still often described as roguelikes and use the roguelike tag on stores such as Steam. Since no two runs share a layout, the genre rewards learning systems and item synergies rather than memorising a fixed route.

NetHack is a traditional roguelike: turn-based, grid-based, and one death ends the run.