A roguelike is full reset permadeath. Nothing carries over and there’s no sweeping upgrades between characters.
A rogue-lite lets you keep or upgrade something between runs, even if the character itself is perma-killed.
Do upgrades include simply unlocking items or starting equipment like Binding of Isaac?
Yus! A roguelike is the same exact experience every time.
If anything at all is unlocked for subsequent playthroughs, it’s a roguelite!
So Mario is a roguelike?
At the International Roguelike Development Conference 2008 held in Berlin, Germany, players and developers established a definition for roguelikes known as the “Berlin Interpretation”.
These guys have extremely strict definitions, which mean that most “rougelike” games are in fact roguelites, if you care about what they think.
There are nine “high value” factors that are more or less a requirement:
Random Environment Generation
Permadeath
Turn-Based
Grid-Based
Non-Modal
Complexity
Resource Management
‘Hack-n-Slash’
Exploration and DiscoveryPlus six “low value” factors that are less important:
Single Player Character
Monsters are Similar to Players
Tactical Challenge
ASCII Display
Dungeons
NumbersThere is, as you might expect, a fair bit of controversy about that though.
Yeah, a big shift in the definition happened with the roguelike hype in the 2010s, spearheaded by The Binding of Isaac, FTL etc… It wasn’t as controversial back in 2008.
For all but the most stubborn purists, that definition has sort of retreated to the more specific term “traditional roguelike”, letting the roguelike/roguelite distinction be about meta progression.
If turning into a lich is desirable then it is rogue-like
New sub-subgenre: Rogue-Lichen
To be fair most of the confusion stems from just the stupidity of the word rogue-lite. I also believe that if you insist on using the words interchangeably - that’s fine as long as you correctly establish the context. Like first you say you’re going to talk about Hades and Dead Cells and then you bring the R-word into it. I personally get confused when I see a video on YT saying best upcoming roguelikes and there isn’t anything resembling Rogue on it at all and the author seems to be completely unaware of the existence of a whole genre. Happens more than I’d like to admit.
EDIT: was meant as reply to another comment.
People get angry when you call something a roguelike
Roguelike is getting a random brand new dessert from a wide variety of desserts and not knowing whether you will get the same one next time. Roguelite is getting a vanilla cone ice cream, and each time you get the same vanilla cone ice cream but more options for toppings.
Nothing…literally nothing.
It’s the same thing that people misheard
Incorrect. Rogue-lite allows you to collect upgrades that are permanent between runs. Roguelike makes you start from square one every time.
It’s literally why they invented a separate term.
That’s how meanings have shifted. Originally roguelite meant anything that borrows stuff from roguelikes while not playing like the original rogue.
Stuff like Nethack, Dungeon Crawl (Stone Soup), Pixel Dungeon, ADOM, Mystery Dungeon,… were the true roguelikes. If you ask the purists, they’ll probably throw the freaking Berlin Interpretation at you.
The Binding of Isaac muddled the popular definition of roguelike (because frankly, it was not on the radar of many people before that).
Now everything using procedural generation and maybe a hint of permadeath gets to be called roguelike.
Rogue-lites are usually games with only a few elements of Rogue. Mostly what differentiates them is that you can often unlock things that persist between lives, unlike a true Roguelike where you start over 100% from scratch with each character/new game.
Pixel Dungeon is a Roguelike. Hades is a Rouge-lite.
So Balatro is a Rogue-like and Elden Ring is a Rogue-lite?
I don’t know anything about Balatro, but I suppose one could say souls likes are a bit rogue-liteish. The other element of roguelikes and lites alike is RNG. Which only occurs in souls likes through drops and what move the enemy decides to use, and not really the level design to a point where death is still a massive setback toward progress in the overall game.
Ah my bad, I forgot about the rng part. I was confusing the dying over and over to “git gud” with it. Yeah, Balatro is pure rng and you start from scratch every run. And I hate it. The rng fucks me every time lol.
