9to5 (dot cc)

So the term “roguelike” has been around for a while and it seems that the genre has had a resurgence recently with the advent of easily accessible indie games using the model. The term also seems to have a broader definition than the one I thought it had.

I was under the impression that “roguelike” applied to games that were RPGs with randomly generated dungeons that sometimes fucked you in the face with unfair gameplay. Like Nethack. That never really appealed to me all that much. The Wikipedia article on the topic mentions a few other quantifiers like permadeath (when you die you start over), unidentified items (you need to use an item to know what it does) and turn based gameplay.

The genre never really appealed to me since for the most part, the reason that I played an RPG was for the story and the random nature of roguelike games meant multiple attempts at a playthrough and almost invariably meant not much in the way of storytelling. I’m just not a big enough fan of turn based combat to want to do it over and over again trying to figure randomly generated nuances out. As a result I never considered myself a fan of the genre.

The little blue balls he’s throwing are his tears. I’m not joking.

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