Some days, I think I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read another email about a new roguelike or roguelite. This confuses me, because many of favourite games are roguelikes or roguelites, including Dead Cells, Balatro, FTL: Faster Than Light, and the recent Morsels, a reeking procedural dumpsite that speaks to the overproduction of Rogue/rogue derivatives at large.
Roguish games are everywhere right now. According to SteamDB, 1602 games tagged “roguelike” were published in 2024 out of 18567 total, versus 312 out of 9655 in 2020. Stir in roguelites and the countless games that advertise themselves as having “roguelike mechanics”, and I sincerely worry that you’re describing the majority of PC releases from the past couple of years.
Then again, how many of these games are ‘genuinely’ Roguish? Roguelike and roguelite have become such broad concepts as to be functionally useless, describing everything from carpentry to casino machines. This was the case back in 2011, when Adam Smith (RPS in peace) marvelled over a peculiar new “Roguelike arcade game” called The Binding of Isaac; it was the case in 2016, when Alice O (RPS in peace) observed that the term roguelike is “so very bendy and too confusing to throw around without explanation”.
Personally, I define these games as follows: a “roguelike” adheres more closely to the original Rogue from 1980, featuring permadeath, equipment or character progression, procedurally generated environments, and semi-randomised challenges. A “roguelite” is a less harrowing variant that may not have an explicitly defined rogue character or dungeon – in particular, it may feature an over-arching system of unlocks that persist between runs, taking the sting out of restarts. Still, perhaps a more useful way of thinking about roguelikes and roguelites isn’t to tick off correspondences or take them back to their roots, but to look at the shapes they form within the greasy currents of platform economics and player habits.
Among the companies who’ve gone large on roguelikes and roguelites are tinyBuild, publishers of The King Is Watching and Streets Of Rogue. The company’s higher-ups feel the genre suits “modern” working lives and recreational habits, as marketing and publishing director Arnaud Richard told me over email. “Roguelikes allow for short, self-contained play sessions that always feel fresh thanks to procedural generation and randomized elements,” he explained. “This format aligns with how players now consume games: shorter bursts of playtime, often constrained by busy schedules or reduced free time as they get older.”
In an expected but interesting bit of symmetry, Richard added that roguelikes and roguelites appeal to game developers for similar reasons of efficiency. The charm of procedurally generated worlds, after all, is that you can get more variety out of the ‘same’ assets – useful to recall, as we try to distinguish between acceptable and reprehensible usages of various generative AI tools, which dangle the same promise of doing more with less.
“Instead of having to design and polish dozens of handcrafted levels, cutscenes, and voice-overs, studios can focus on a smaller set of environments enriched by systemic gameplay, modifiers, and enemy variations that refresh each ‘run’,” Richard went on. “This design philosophy keeps production costs significantly lower while still enabling deep replayability and a long-tail player experience. Given the current production climate, where budgets are tight and risks high, the roguelike structure offers a financially sustainable model that doesn’t sacrifice engagement.”
“Engagement” and “retention” are important when you’re making games for a subscription service, such as Game Pass, where upfront purchases aren’t a factor, and the publisher’s goal is to drive up the profitability of the service as a whole. But the more-ishly looping Rogue template also makes for a good hook when selling games direct over Steam, whose recommendation systems reward developers that attract a steady audience.
“As discoverability and algorithmic visibility become increasingly tied to player retention, these games naturally fit the platform logic,” Richard explained. “They generate consistent playtime data, favour community sharing through ‘run stories,’ and sustain relevance far beyond launch.”
In short, roguelikes are valuable because they easily become habits available to live servicing. The roguelike loop is a way of disciplining the audience, making it more quantifiable and predictable, easier to pace and slot into enterprises such as Game Pass. Richard argues that “roguelikes sit at the intersection of design efficiency, player accessibility, and platform performance, a rare alignment that explains why so many developers and publishers continue to explore the genre today.”
All of which is quite capital-B Businessy. For more of a developer’s take, I turned to Miko Charbonneau, creative director and lead designer (amongst other roles) at prettysmart games. Charbonneau echoed the point about “modern” gaming habits, adding that roguelike and roguelite formats guarantee a certain longevity. “If you can only afford to buy one game, replayability is appealing,” she told me. “They’re comforting, too, because once you know the rules you can zone out playing while watching a movie or listening to a podcast, and get that little boost of confidence from a great run.”
Charbonneau also agreed with Richard’s point that roguelikes and roguelites are a way of making the most of minimal development resources. “[O]n a small team like ours (only six people) we don’t have the resources to make elaborate fully custom levels at the level of a AAA studio,” she told me. “But by being clever with how we generate floors and author our content, we can build something that players enjoy over a long period of time.”
It’s not just a question of efficiency, however. Charbonneau feels that roguelike and roguelite concepts such as permadeath loops “work nicely with most gameplay styles and they’re fun to design”. She added that the abundance of games working with these ideas has created space for more adventurous combinations of formats and aesthetics. Games like prettysmart’s own The Spirit Lift, a roguelite set in a haunted house from the 1990s, which hits Steam on 27th January. In this grislier take on Scooby Doo, eight high school teens must ride an elevator to the penthouse, fighting a host of munsters while exploring 3D layouts in first-person view.
It’s not the weirdest game I’ve encountered, but it certainly speaks to the breadth of projects rallying to the roguelite banner. “Games like Balatro and Blue Prince have brought in new types of players, which is so great,” Charbonneau observed. “It means there are more people out there willing to give unexpected game mashups a chance.”
Charbonneau does, however, share the worry that Rogue derivatives have lost all coherence. “[W]ith so many games using roguelike mechanics now, there’s a danger of the word having no meaning at all,” she said. “We’re already in a position where the differences between roguelike/roguelite are not well understood. Our game is more of a roguelite, but I don’t always know if the players know the distinction. Or perhaps they have their own definitions for each word that differ from mine!” (At the risk of being snide, it seems worth noting that players have tagged The Spirit Lift as both “roguelike” and “roguelite” on Steam.)
“I truly love this genre,” Charbonneau told me in closing. “It would be a shame for this rich history to be watered down to mean nothing, so it’s important for those of us making roguelikes to know which features we’ve included and why they matter in our game.”
Which takes us back to the process of ticking off the bits and pieces we’d expect from a roguelike or roguelite game. I think those conversations easily spiral into fruitless squabbles about whether, say, a haunted hotel is really the same thing as a dungeon. That said, I do want to conclude by reconsidering the figure of the rogue.
We tend to associate rogue characters with stealth, dual-wielding, backstabs and pick-pocketing, but I would argue that nothing about “rogue” implies those associations. In contemporary English, to go rogue is just to defy expectation, and the origins of the word are appropriately murky. The OED entry offers several possible etymologies. One is that “rogue” is a derivation of “roger”, which – I’m delighted to learn – once meant “an itinerant beggar who pretends to be a poor scholar from Oxford or Cambridge”. Any Rogers in the audience? You’ve been rumbled.
I love this fake scholar framing because – as legendary “broughlike” creator Michael Brough suggests in a recent presentation about the literary influences of D&D for the annual Roguelike Celebration – the arc of the classic D&D rogue is sort of evolving into or passing yourself off as a wizard, by gathering magical artefacts. But I also like this etymology because the OED adds that “roger” comes from the Latin rogō, “I ask” – and what is playing a roguelike, if not asking a terrain generation algorithm: what world have you got in store for me today?
In putting things that way, I’m again making the connection between roguelike procgen and “prompting” a generative AI. But I would argue for the philosophical difference that where today’s generative AIs are often posed as sycophantic and worryingly pliable, even when they’re couched as characters inside hostile gameworlds, the roguelike algorithm doesn’t just aim to please. It also wants to decieve, filling the world with random buffets and moments of treachery that border on ‘bad design’: the bouncy poison frog stuck in a narrow passage metres from the exit. Perhaps the lesson we should cling onto about roguelikes is that the world itself is the rogue.
This dishonesty, this mischievousness is what I love about games that call themselves roguelikes or roguelites, more so than how they reassure with the promise of a certain inherent variety, or fit themselves neatly inside my lunchbreak. I’ll try to keep that in mind, when next I see one in an email.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
