"Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character. Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons".
FTL was just confusing, hopeless death for me.
That was a key misunderstanding I had that let me make significant progress once I figured it out. That... and liberal use of the spacebar to pause.
That really is a core element of roguelikes- some playthroughs, you're just going to get screwed by the random number generator- hence the saying "pray to RNGesus". And when you die, you start over- no fixing, no recovery.
With those precepts in mind, FTL is a pretty fair game. I've beaten the mothership a few times in vanilla FTL, and each time it was a combination of making good tactical decisions, and getting one of the several equipment configurations that I knew how to capitalize on. There's no shame in bailing early on a run where you know you're not going to get a useable set of equipment.
The only way I know to "cheat" (and one I don't feel guilty doing) is to discuss strategies among a community of people who have also been experimenting with different approaches. That's how I learned that teleporters and mantis raiders are so OP.
The thing about roguelikes is that they’re turn-based, while FTL requires some micromanagement skills being closer to real-time strategies. You can still pause of course, but I’ve seen some Twitch streamers make no-pause runs on hard difficulty, which is abolutely insane.
Regardless, a very original game.
/ Wikipedia
For the longest time game journalists and people on game forums were careful to refer to these games as "rogue-lite", etc., but in recent years it's become more common to just call them roguelikes as well, even though they don't play anything like Rogue/Angband/Nethack/etc. That's fine by me, it feels more like a natural evolution of the terminology than people using the wrong words for things.