The ‘roguelike’ genre started, appropriately enough, with the game ‘Rogue’ in the year 1980. Rogue was an appealing but simplistic game, a primitive ASCII-based RPG. Soon more robust imitators came along, extrapolating on its mechanics to make more complex worlds, but preserving the core aspects of turn-based movement, permanent consequence, and randomization. These were called roguelikes in much the same way as every first-person shooter game used to be called a DOOM clone. Rogue came out 40 years ago at this point, and for most of that time the roguelike genre has had a small but very dedicated audience.
In 2008, a little game called Spelunky came out: Spelunky emerged from the simple idea of trying to combine the mechanics of a roguelike with those of a 2d platformer, creating a vibrant but simple world of surprising emergent interactions. This still didn’t mark the full emergence of a new genre – Spelunky was and is beloved but, particularly at the time, mostly by a relatively small audience. However, a huge proportion of that audience were themselves game developers, in part due to Spelunky’s designer Derek Yu also running one of the largest English-speaking independent game development forum online – but also because it’s just the sort of game that game developers find interesting.
Among those developers was Edmund McMillen, then developing Super Meat Boy. After completing Super Meat Boy, Edmund wanted to work on smaller projects – and, over about six months, he, programmer Florian Himsl, and composer Danny Baranowsky created The Binding of Isaac in 2011. The core of the Isaac design was simple – what if we combined roguelike mechanics with the style of The Legend of Zelda’s signature dungeons (along with some grotesque and distressing psychoreligious energy)? The game was mechanically very simple while still, like Spelunky, allowing systems to interact in surprising and interesting ways – however, it departed from Spelunky’s design significantly in that under the vast majority of circumstances, the surprising interactions in Isaac were generally in the player’s favor, with combinations of items creating unexpected but generally beneficial effects. Isaac’s greatest innovation, though, which would prove to have the most impact on future games, was that as you played the game and completed it repeatedly you would unlock new content. Enemies, levels, items, and rooms would be added into the mix, gradually unfolding the game to be larger, more challenging, and more interesting.
Isaac quickly garnered many imitators – a departure from Spelunky’s curious state of being much beloved but seldom directly imitated. Sadly most of these imitators were not very interesting, opting not to include any of the complex item interactions or gradually unfolding mechanics, and simply emulating the randomized worlds and items. As these diverged more and more from the source, though, the term ‘roguelike’ became less and less useful – since these games were, in fact, less and less like Rogue. Nevertheless, for lack of a better term, the use persisted – ‘procedural death labyrinth’ just wasn’t very snappy.
The last step on the journey to the modern ‘roguelite’ – as distinct from its predecessor roguelikes – was taken by Rogue Legacy. Released in 2013, this took the gradual expansion of Isaac and put it under the player’s control, made it work in their favor – much the same as Isaac had taken the unpredictability of Spelunky and made it work in the player’s favor. To make up for this, Rogue Legacy’s difficulty was tuned to make it nearly unbeatable on a first attempt, but each attempt would grant you resources which you could use to make future runs easier by upgrading your descendants – thus ‘Legacy’. I am personally not a fan of this development: It took a genre fraught with consequence, where every action and interaction mattered, and made it a leveling treadmill, where obstacles were meant to be conquered primarily through the investment of time rather than the mastery of systems.
There are a few other noteworthy points in the development of the genre – Slay the Spire’s(2017) deckbuilding elements, where you had to carefully manage and judiciously prune the components of your deck to keep it nimble as you progressed; Dead Cells’(2017) branching paths, which you unlocked the capability to access in future runs through careful exploration; and Hades(2020) palpable horniness – these all exist as variations on the formula, but don’t define it the same way the previous examples did. For better or for worse, the model set out by Rogue Legacy has come to define the genre.
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One week before The Binding of Isaac, back in 2011, Dark Souls was also released. While this game has no roguelike elements, it had a significant influence on the development of the roguelite genre, with many games such as Dead Cells and Hades riffing on its movement and healing mechanics. Dark Souls is fascinating to me in part because of how much of its design is overtly contrary to much of what was considered good game design at the time: Movement is slow and ponderous, the narrative and environment are obscure and confusing, and the player is seldom made to feel cool or powerful or badass. If you showed it to many designers at the time, absent the context of it being a huge and influential hit, it likely would have been considered a design failure, a clunky mess. Indeed, that was part of its appeal – because the game wasn’t going to overt pains to empower the player or make them feel cool, the experience felt genuine, exploratory, like surviving in a truly hostile world. Though Dark Souls has a reputation for difficulty, its greatest departure from the norm of game design at the time was simply that dying didn’t just roll back the world to some earlier state, but had your character literally die and come back to life. The narrative of the adventure thus shifted – you weren’t some perfect heroic badass who won every fight, you were just some schmuck, albeit perhaps a super-powered schmuck, conned by the gods into doing their dirty work. This comprised much of the appeal – and, perhaps, much of the true ‘difficulty’ – of the game. In this one respect, it was similar to roguelikes and roguelites: Your mistakes and failures matter, they are acknowledged by the game instead of written out of history.
In 2017 PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, was released: A large multiplayer ‘battle royale’ game where a hundred players would, either as individuals or teams, fight to be the last ones standing. Since then, many other battle royale games have been released, most of them quickly disappearing again as they fail to find an audience in a field with tremendous competition and high requirements for success. A few, though, have become huge hits, far more popular than PUBG – in the USA, at least. Some have semi-facetiously remarked on the resemblance of the experience of PUBG and similar battle royales to that of playing a roguelike – you start, find a bunch of items, and then once you’re starting to feel cool and strong and competent you die and have to start over – or maybe you occasionally win, I suppose that happens sometimes as well.
The rapid concurrent emergence of the roguelike, soulslike, and battle royale genres, consisting as they do of so many things we would have not long ago considered bad game design, is fascinating. All rely on putting players in explicitly disadvantageous, even unfair, positions – roguelikes and battle royales explicitly have luck as a huge factor, and can lead the player to fail due to reasons entirely outside of their control. They all explicitly disempower the player, making them vulnerable pawns of circumstance – and while the popular emergence of survival games is also likely part of this trend, I don’t know as much about the history of that genre. One has to ask – is it small breakthroughs in design and technology that allowed these genres to flourish now? Or are these successes a product of the moment, only achieving popularity recently because the audience wasn’t there before?
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The most recent notable entry into the roguelike genre is Loop Hero, released earlier this month, a game which almost plays itself. Your character, the eponymous hero, walks aimlessly in circles along a road suspended in a black void, and will automatically battle any monster he comes across to the death. As he walks, you place terrain tiles which you acquire as random cards drawn as rewards from winning battles, and these affect your hero’s stats along with which enemies he’ll be facing. Along the way you collect resources – also determined by the placed terrain – which you can use for long-term upgrades at your base camp. Enemies get stronger over time, and you lose most of the resources you’ve found if you die, so much of the gameplay rests in knowing when to retreat.
This game has a number of aspects I find intriguing, and I’m quite curious to know what its long-term impact on the genre will be. The gameplay is almost an inversion of the tower-defense genre – instead of placing towers to defend against a relentless enemy army, you are instead placing environments which create enemy armies for your relentless hero to defeat. I think it’s likely that retreating as a gameplay concept will make its way into more roguelites – in the Rogue Legacy model, acquisition and spending of resources in these games is always preceded by failure, by the player dying while attempting to complete a run, and this makes it innately unsatisfying, feeling like a consolation prize given to the player because they weren’t good enough. However, with this approach of explicitly trying to harvest resources and build a base, much of the player’s goal is the resources themselves. Rather than death being forced on the player as part of an overarching progress grind, inevitable due to the balance of the game, safely mounting expeditions becomes a larger plan of progress, where each expedition is part of an overall goal which stays constant over time, and retreating is meaningfully distinct from mere failure. I expect we’ll also be seeing more roguelites which emulate Loop Hero in regard to how the mechanism of action is inverted – that is, where the environment moves forward under its own power and the player’s role is just to arrange elements to affect the outcome, rather than the environment being randomized while they player attempts to navigate it.
Nearly universal in the roguelike/roguelite genre is a thematic throughline of death, repetition, and being locked in place in some sort of deadly cycle. These themes obviously emerge due to the mechanics themselves – in Loop Hero’s case, the premise is that the world has been destroyed, and only one person left in the void can remember it, piece by piece. However, while most video games have to deal with a player repeatedly dying, few integrate it into the themes in the same way that roguelites do – with one of the few notable examples being, yes, Dark Souls. Whether it’s trying to escape the afterlife, a repeated nightmare of death, a cave of riches no one can ever really leave, or a wicked castle that devours generation after generation of the same family, there is a character element of bleakness and despair to the genre. As with many of these mechanics, these are narrative elements that would have been nearly unthinkable not too long ago – would be considered too depressing and disempowering – which are now omnipresent.
This thematic emergence is perhaps, as well as emerging from the mechanics of the game, a sign of the times at hand. Many people can no longer imagine a future for themselves or the world they live in, and for many of them the present is a story of unceasing struggle, slowly trying to gain ground against some encroaching inevitable doom. The recurring story of roguelikes and roguelites, as well as that of battles royale and Dark Souls, is one of being trapped and corralled by circumstances beyond your control, doomed to crushing defeat after crushing defeat. And yet, they say, you cannot give up – all is struggle, but only if we give up can we be truly defeated. A trite message, perhaps, but seemingly one we crave to hear. After all, hope can only exist under circumstances where despair might be logical. Perhaps this bleakness, this craving for powerlessness, is just the first step, opening a door to the future – remembering a world that was taken from us.
