#roguelites

Since people liked the first one, especially surprising since I thought no one would find it, let's back through every faction and redescribe them "totally accurately!"

Baron: The Mythical "Egalitarian Bourgeoisie" brings chivalry and taxation to a lawless land at swordpoint, but still decides to style on the poors with his golden armor and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Necromancer: A drunk old man with an excavator and a lot of time on his hands forces his Padawan to go insane for the sake of immortality. Accompanying them is the entirety of the 27 Club, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and a billion lesser soldiers. They have seen better days, though, let me tell ya.

Demonologist: Moloch demands your firstborn, and will not reward you fairly for them. Bring fire to the non-believers, as well as the believers, and the children, and the animals, and fuck it, burn everything! Asmodeus loves that shit.

Witch: Swamp babe with no chill and few friends occupies her time by using parsnip and other herbal remedies to take over the world with an army of poisonous shrooms, slime cubes, and facestealing Octopusses.

High Priestess: Satanic cult devoted to the god of blood wants more blood and skulls for their new obsession with interior decorating. The Skull Throne can't construct itself, you know, that thing takes valuable time!

Bakemono: Weeb Goblins studied the blade while you were having premarital sex and they're about to make it your problem. Omae wa mou shindeiru. You shall die today/It is inevitable/Make your peace with it.

Barbarian: Jason Momoa hits Puppet Pal Clem with a bonking stick for five hours, followed by rounding up the rest of the Street Fighter cast and bringing his bonking stick to the rest of the planet, too!

Senator: Dumbus Fuckus, first of his name, tries to duck assassination on his way to becoming President for Life of Life. I came, I saw, I kicked so much ass that now the planet wants me to win every election.

Pale One: Rufus, the naked mole rat, has founded a society of dirt daubers that are dedicated to laying waste to the surface world. With a combination of grit, determination, Jonny 2x4 as a Gopher, Rock Magic, and the infinite grace of never seeing the sun because you're playing too much Conquest of Elysium 5, this dream can become a reality.

Druid: Animal Farm, but the bad one with Seth Rogan, and also they're hippies, which would be cool except for the fact that I'm here for Animal Farm and not beatniks with more marijuana than the US has missiles.

Burgmeister: Bilbo Baggins engages in Capitalism, an evil far greater than the One Ring, because he received a sports almanac from the future.

Warlock: A D&D class with the wrong powerset begins collecting the four treasures of the elements because he was really bored and discovered that snorting Agate through a silly straw connects you to the Gods with same day shipping.

Priest King: Kotal Kahn in a wheelchair begins his grand invasion of Europe in a siege that would make Crusader Kings II: Sunset Invasion look like Crusader Kings II: Sunset Mild Disagreement With Your HOA Over The Length of Your Lawn.

Troll King: Big man with a big club (not an innuendo) smashes the world (not an innuendo) to satisfy his mother (NOT AN INNUENDO) and penetrate the enemy's defenses (...an innuendo.)

Enchanter: Michael Rodent summons the broomsticks, as well as a bunch of swords and suits of armor, to help Sora find the Door to Darkness.

High Cultist: Nyarlathotep's in this game, too?! He's fucking everywhere! Uh, anyway, Fish Man discovers a page of the Necronomicon in the ruins of the Titanic and begins a crusade to re-Titanic the entire planet.

Dwarf Queen: Insectoid miners and craftsmen dig just deep enough to discover their inner strength, and decide to Manifest their Destiny by Diggy-Diggy Hole-ing the tall boys.

Voice of El: Jesus Loves Me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so! Well, that's what this part said. In the first half, his Dad wants me dead?! Now you, too, can want everyone dead, with the low-low price of UPENDING THE SEALS TO THE APOCALYPSE AND BRINGING HELL UNTO ELYSIUM WITH ONE FLICK OF THE QUILL! You know, Hot Girl Shit or something.

Illusionist: Mirror, Mirror, on the wall. Who's the Loneliest of them all? Not this guy, apparently, if he can hold a conversation with upwards of five-hundred mirrors.

Markgraf: Simultaneously a Graf named Mark and a cabal of vampiric and dead-raising Hobbits with a chip on their shoulder. In other words, a group of Neck-Romancing Necromancers who are Hairy-Footed Dancers and prance within disaster.

Dryad Queen: Firstly, Would. Secondly, nature lady unites the forces of the animal kingdom and the Fae Wilds to get revenge on Industrialization, over-expansion, capitalism, the barbarism that the meat industry can cause, AI, NFTs, and whatever horrid astroturf campaign made Daniel Tosh popular.

Scourge Lord: Ah, the desert. Count how many sand there is, Omega. Middle-Eastern Edgelords seek to harvest the lifeforce from the universe to secure enough resources to build a skyscraper taller than the Burj Khalifa. Why? To put a drill on that bad bitch and pierce the heavens, just who the hell do you think I am?

Cloud Lord: Wind Men from the Cotton Candy of the Sky Kingdom think breathing air means breathing them, which they find racist. To counteract this, they'll strike your house with more lightning than is found in Venezuela until you stop breathing oxygen, as well as everything else.

Kobold King: Bold lizard men combine their forces with literal dragons to incubate a clone army capable of decimating the Trade Federation as well as securing good Health Coverage and the Unlimited Rice Pudding.

Monkey Maharaja: The primates have converted to Hinduism and they are prepared to go ape on your candy ass if you fail to follow them. Do the monkey with me! Hee, hah, huh! [Other Johnny Bravo Noises.] Pretty mama.

Raksharaja: Evil Hinduist Primates got real fuckin' sick of the whole "cycle of Samsara" BS and decided the best way to field their complaints to the forces of life was to make a pact with the Super Devils to make their own cooler Samsara with blackjack and hookers.

Novy knows roguelikes. And a bunch of other genres, too! Check out some of the incredible games we've launched since 2011 🎮

Promo video for Magic Castle, a Net Yaroze game that was never finished... until recently! 

Magic Castle is a rogue-lite game where you explore 20 floors of a dungeon to defeat an evil warlock. It was planned to have four-player simultaneous multiplayer and included a number of very modern features, including a HUD that can be re-positioned on the screen, an item wheel that allows for weapon switching/item use without pausing, and dynamic music. 

The game was being developed by ex-members of Video Systems (who worked on the Aero Wings series among others) and was essentially an indie passion project, something they hoped they could get funding to make into a larger game, but while Sony was impressed by the game, they were more interested in the devs working on another project. Eventually Magic Castle was abandoned and the devs went their separate ways.

However, recently (December 2020) they released a completed version of the game. It has some bugs and they’re still working on full multi-tap support for the multiplayer, but it’s 100% beatable. The developers also gave an interview where they discussed the project, what the Net Yaroze scene was like back in the day, and what they are up to now. 

the thing the game is named after is just. there. the real villain is a cop who does not want you sitting on the cool chair for reasons

A Single Heart is the cause of all your suffering and you need 3 random crystal looking things if you want to even try to kill it

a completely different heart from the previous roguelite is god

the shopkeeper is part of the ancient group of wizards partially responsible for everything. no this is not a big plot point it’s just there.

your dead gf is the source of all the monsters

Marketing, mostly.

In theory, a “true” roguelike has all of the following elements:

The gameworld and its contents are procedurally generated, with limited or no use of hand-crafted maps and assets

“Permadeath” exists, whereby dying or otherwise entering a non-recoverable failure state irrecoverably invalidates your save file

The mechanics are survival-oriented, with medium to long term resource management being a primary focus of play and resource exhaustion being the most common cause of failed runs

The particulars of certain game mechanics (e.g., the functions of magic items, etc.) are initially obscured from the player, and must be discovered through experimentation

… with any game in which one or more of these elements are only weakly present being classified as a “roguelite” instead.

In practice, most classic examples of the roguelike genre don’t rigorously adhere to all of these criteria as designed, let alone as actually played; using third-party tools to evade permadeath – or simply copying and pasting your save folder to safe location – is common, as is using player-written guides or exploiting non-developer-intended information leakage to uncover obscured game mechanics without risky experiments. Heck, for some classic roguelikes it’s a matter of considerable debate among their respective fandoms whether it’s even possible to complete them without “cheating” in this fashion!

So, what it really boils down to is that we have:

A set of games that it’s generally agreed are “roguelikes” because their gameplay closely imitates that of the genre’s founding titles, regardless of how well they adhere to any particular list of rules for what a “real” roguelike is (hint: the answer is “frequently not very well”);

A set of games that it’s generally agreed are “roguelites” because they make only minor use of roguelike elements embedded within a more conventional framework of play (nine times out of ten this just means “has some procedurally generated maps”); and

I could actually rant quite a bit about how the roguelike/roguelite dichotomy is functionally useless and seems to exist more for purism of labels than any helpful purpose.

As a descriptor, ‘roguelite’ is impressively unhelpful - anything that can lump FTL, Nuclear Throne, and Rogue Legacy into the same category tells you approximately no more than ‘Contains procedural elements but doesn’t look exactly like Nethack’.

Genre labels are no more than descriptors - helpful shorthand to tell someone a little about the game - and every single one of them is fuzzy around the edges. Some of them are even fuzzy in the middle; Etrian Odyssey and Undertale are both RPGs, for example, and yet are different in almost every meaningful way. Gatekeeping what does or doesn’t belong in a particular subgenre is not only a lost cause, but also unhelpful for the main thing labels are actually good for: telling people something meaningful about how a game plays.

And in this role, a one-word label can only ever be a starting point. If you want to distinguish the Etrian Odysseys from the Undertales or the Nuclear Thrones from the Rogue Legacies, you’ve always needed to say more than one word - no matter how fastidiously you try to refine its definition. ‘Old-school 1st-person dungeon crawler in the vein of Wizardry' or ‘jRPG with bullet-hell-based combat and a world that responds meaningfully to player choices’ already paint a much clearer picture than any number of xRPG labels ever could and there’s always the ever popular “Like [game X] crossed with Dark Souls” (Hint: Stop saying ‘ Like [game X] crossed with Dark Souls’ unless you’re talking about Salt and Sanctuary or Hollow Knight or something)

And regarding roguelites, I personally think that terms like ‘roguelike platformer’ (Spelunky) or ‘rhythm roguelike’ (Crypt of the Necrodancer) and what-have-you are far more useful than roguelite ever could be and barely any longer (and also conveniently removed from all the elitism that genuinely surrounds the roguelike/roguelite dichotomy).