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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

What does roguelike mean? I've played the original Rogue, but haven't been a gamer for decades now. I'm not seeing how this is connected?

Sorry, but you said ask anything lol.

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There are a lot of interpretations, but it's roguelike in the sense that:

1) It's permadeath 2) It's random 3) It's systemic

The term is used quite broadly these days. Only the "Berlin interpretation" is quite strict about the sense of it you might be thinking of.

Thanks. TIL.

Is there a term that people who don't use the Berlin interpretation call games that fit in the Berlin interpretation? Or are they just called "Berlin interpretation roguelikes"?

(I'm asking both out of curiosity and out of utility, since I'm a fan of the Berlin interpretation roguelikes (and have been since before the modern overly-broad interpretation came into use), so I used to be able to count on "roguelike" meaning it was one style of game, and I miss those days. I'd like to be able to know how to specifically find those games again.)

Also, congrats on the success of the game! I'm looking forward to trying it out sometime. It's on my wishlist, despite my quibbles with calling it a roguelike. :)

I think I've heard of "old school roguelike" or "traditional roguelike" being used to refer to those games. (googling seems to show that the latter naming seems to be more common.)

Hardcore players generally use "traditional roguelike" for things that are like rogue and "roguelite" for everything else.

As far as finding traditional roguelikes, a few big-name commercial ones are Caves of Qud, Cogmind, Jupiter Hell, and Rift Wizard. The r/roguelikes subreddit and discord can point you at a bunch of other ones both paid and free.

My understanding is that roguelike means that when you die you start over from the beginning.

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