[matrixcubed]

There’s a pretty clear (and intentionally vague) definition used by the greater 7DRL community.

https://blog.roguetemple.com/what-is-a-traditional-roguelike...

1. Permanent consequences

2. Character centric

3. Procedural content

4. Turn-based

Check out some of the entries from past years, along with their “how roguelike is it?” scoring.

https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2021

[bhaak]

Your link discusses classic or traditional roguelikes.

OP's blog post is from 10 years so I can't blame them. But today "Roguelike" is usually something slightly different.

A roguelike these days is a game that has (at least some) procedurally generated content and permadeath without meta progression.

A roguelike purist would call these roguelites.

[morelisp]

I would be more forgiving to hand over the term "roguelike" to roguelites and other PGC-based games if I had a term to replace it. The problem is - what's a better term than "roguelike" to mean "more like Rogue than the other things which are (sometimes only very slightly) like Rogue"?

[bhaak]

What's wrong with "classical roguelike" or "traditional roguelike"?

Definitions change over time, often you can't do anything about that. But I would expect those two not to deviate too much in the future (hopefully).

[morelisp]

"Classical roguelike" usually means "direct descendent of Hack/Angband/Larn/Moria" (Rogue itself produced very few descendents, I think). "Traditional" excludes several interesting categories which are uncontroversially roguelikes: games not part of the current 'body of practice' like Dungeon Hack; radically different PCG approaches like 868-HACK; and the Japanese design lineage in e.g. Shiren or Baroque which uses a very different approach to progression dynamics than today's roguelites.