Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Dilluting the term roguelike

I think the term roguelike has been dilluted these last few years. The roguelike genre is more popular than ever with several commercial roguelikes making a lot of noise in the indie community. In my opinion it is because of this recent success that the term roguelike has become almost like a buzzword and games that would never ever have been considered a roguelike three or four years now proudly claim roguelike heritage.

Take TowerClimb for instance. TowerClimb is marketed as a roguelike platformer and in the announcement on r.g.r.a the developer says "While not a conventional turn based roguelike, it features many things which make roguelikes fun, like permadeath, important decision making, random events etc." and in the Youtube video "A roguelike platformer". In my opinion this is not a roguelike, conventional or otherwise. The game looks fun, but I would have better understood what the game was all about if it was called "a procedural platformer with perma death".

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