Roguelike

Typical graphics and gameplay of roguelikes.

"The RNG giveth, and the RNG taketh away..."

— Common saying in roguelike circles

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Roguelikes (also known by the unencumbered but less popular name of Procedural Death Labyrinths or PDL) are a subgenre of Role Playing Games, so named for being like Rogue, a very early computer game.

Rogue was a dungeon simulator originally played on text terminals in the early 1980s, which used ASCII characters to abstractly represent a tile-based game world. For example, your character is an @, walls are represented by lines of | and —, ! is a potion, and the various letters of the alphabet represent different monsters (H is a hobgoblin, while D is a dragon). You're effectively looking at an overhead view of a dungeon composed of text characters.

Every game, the dungeon would be arranged differently, with different items to find, and the various monsters would appear in different places. All of this meant that the game was never the same twice, giving it unprecedented replay value. The game was turn-based, with everything in the world moving only when your character did, meaning that no quick decisions were required - you could play it like chess, thinking carefully about your options when you needed to. You could also save the game's state at any time and return to it days, weeks, or months later.

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Adding to the addictive nature of the game was the thrill of permadeath - the fact that the death of your character would end the game, forcing you to start again from the beginning no matter how far into the dungeon you got. This ensured that players were very attached to their characters, and would play with tactical caution, weighing up their options whenever things became dangerous.

This combination of random generation, turn-based combat, and permadeath is the defining characteristic of Rogue. Players relished the risky, rewarding challenge offered by the game, and it wasn't long before copycat games began to follow, thus giving birth to a genre which came to be known as the Roguelike, in honor of Rogue.

One factor that almost certainly contributed to the rise of roguelikes was the fact that they have no graphical requirements. Any coder can create one without having to worry about graphical or audio resources — the only requirement of a roguelike is the ability to manipulate a grid of text characters, which any computer system can do trivially — especially the terminal-based systems in common use during the 1980s, when the first roguelikes began to appear.

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Because of the lack of reliance on graphics, roguelikes tend to focus far more on game mechanics instead, with the result that they are often extremely intricate, and allow for complex strategies and interactions.

Today, a truly enormous family of roguelikes exists. Many are written as labors of love, or as experiments to try out new and interesting game mechanics. (The 'experimental roguelike' is practically a genre in itself.)

The most traditional roguelikes have the following characteristics:

• Roguelikes are centered around Dungeon Crawling through randomly-generated environments randomly stocked from a list of monsters and items. Some (such as ADOM) also have a static overworld and/or special levels, but even those games rely on random content in other places. This means that memorization is not enough to win a roguelike, and walkthroughs as such cannot be made for them, but they have high replay value. On the downside, this means it is possible to lose in a roguelike purely by bad luck, although most roguelike designers attempt to avoid outright unfair situations.
• Roguelikes take Final Death to the extreme. When your character dies, that's it - they're dead for good, with no chance of recovery, no matter how far they may have gotten or what fabulous treasures they may have accrued. Saving the game is often possible, but it is only used for having a pause from playing, and when your character dies, the save file is deleted. Save Scumming is thus flatly disallowed (even if it may be possible through outside means). The result of this is that roguelike players are very invested in their characters, and are forced to learn the essential skills for survival.
• Roguelikes typically have only a single controllable character, with a turn-based engine in which everything moves at the same time. Some allow you to have allies or pets, but they can't be directly controlled, only given general orders.
• Roguelikes generally feature an enormous menagerie of monsters and enemies, which will have various abilities, resistances, weaknesses, and defenses. Part of the game strategy will be learning the best ways to fight particular monsters, and how to protect yourself from them.
• Roguelikes generally include a mechanic to encourage players to progress — be it rewarding them for going through levels fast, or punishing them for lingering too long. This can be done for a variety of reasons: it forces the player to confront the increasingly difficult parts of the game, prevent them from level grinding, or to encourage risky play. The original Rogue, for example, required you to eat food every so often or starve to death, and it was nearly impossible to find more food on a dungeon level once you'd cleaned it out — but going down to the next dungeon level meant fighting tougher monsters.
• Most roguelikes have randomized appearances for items that do not persist from one playthrough to the next. In one playthrough, for example, 'a green potion' might be a potion of healing, but in the next, it might be a potion of poison. Because of this, identification is often a key aspect of gameplay, and there are many different techniques a player can use to learn the identities of objects they have acquired: identification spells, careful observation (for example, seeing a monster drink a potion and noting what happens), elimination, or even just blindly using them and seeing what happens. It's typical, after dying, to be revealed that you had an item which could've saved you, but it was unidentified at the time. Roguelikes might also make use of Randomly Generated Loot.
• Roguelikes, especially the well-known or popular ones, have often been under continual development for many years (sometimes a few decades), making them extraordinarily large and complex. Many have to use both capital and lowercase letters to have enough inputs for their commands, and some go even further. Interactions between gameplay elements are also often very intricate, to the point where Developers' Foresight is played straight.
• Roguelikes are notoriously difficult. This is generally by design. Death is expected to be fairly frequent, enough so that the community has developed the acronym "YASD," for Yet Another Stupid Death. It is easily possible to play some roguelikes for years without even coming close to victory.
• Most roguelikes have little more than an Excuse Plot, and are designed to be started and restarted quickly.
• Many roguelikes are incredible time sinks, which is only exacerbated by the fact that most of them are entirely free.

Roguelikes can be roughly classified into a few different Subgenres that occasionally overlap:

• Hacklikes: influenced mostly by NetHack (a direct descendant of Rogue). They mostly focus on Dungeon Crawling, with an aggressive food clock and limited resources.
• *bands: influenced by Angband. *bands usually feature a non-permanent dungeon, infinite resources and very tough bosses, so the games are focused on taking levels in badass until the player is ready to punch dragons to death.
• Coffeebreak roguelikes: simple roguelikes with few controls that are designed to be easy to pick up and play (although they may still be just as difficult as a traditional roguelike). Sometimes these are deliberately short, rather than the sprawling affairs that traditional roguelikes tend to be, and often have a strong Macrogame to compensate for this. These are also known as Roguelites.
• Experimental roguelikes: these often overlap with Coffeebreak roguelikes. They are generally more like proofs of concept, and, as such, can feature extremely strange gameplay mechanics. They may be unbalanced to play, possibly by design.
• Rogue-lites: A catch-all category that refers to games that, while not being full Roguelikes themselves, have similar elements, usually permadeath and randomly generated levels. They usually have a Macrogame, diminishing the impact of permadeath since some progress can be salvaged for future playthroughs, win or lose. Apart from that, many are not RPGs with level systems (Spelunky, the first successful rogue-lite, is a Platform Game, for example).

In the west, roguelikes are mostly a niche thing, but their influence can be widely seen in indie games of the late 2000s/early 2010s. Many games, especially open sandbox style games, are turning to random procedural generation as a way of increasing their replay value. Minecraft developer Notch has admitted to being a huge roguelike fan, which is the reason that Minecraft has a Hardcore difficulty mode (to reproduce the roguelike ideal of permadeath).

There are a few true roguelikes that have managed to creep into the Western mainstream, however. The best known is probably Diablo, which was inspired by NetHack. The genre is much less niche in Japan, and there are quite a few Eastern roguelikes; the most well-known in the West is probably Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.

Indie games which make use of roguelike gameplay traits are sometimes jokingly referred to as 'roguelike-likes'. Space adventure game FTL, and platform game Spelunky often receive the 'roguelike-like' label. Sometimes, this coyness is dropped and people will simply refer to them as roguelikes. 'Roguelike' is not a well-defined term and there is no consensus upon what constitutes one, although attempts have been made to arrive at an acceptable definition: the 'Berlin Interpretation' is the most well known effort.

See also Multi-User Dungeon for a related genre of RPG with its roots in Text Adventure games.

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Roguelike games

• 20XX combines roguelike elements with the fast-paced, tight platforming of Mega Man X.
• Abandon Ship, a naval roguelike that is more-or-less a Golden Age of Sail version of FTL.
• A Hint of a Tint - comparatively easier interpretation of simultaneous turn-based roguelike gameplay. Includes a heavily story-based mode.
• Alpha Man
• Ancient Domains of Mystery, perhaps the best-known open-world roguelike. Part of the Berlin Interpretation's canon.
• Angband, the second-most influential roguelike around and the parent of an entire subgenre. Part of the Berlin Interpretation's canon.
• Azure Dreams
• Bad North, a minimalist Real-Time Strategy game with a roguelite progression that places the player in the role of a king defending his islands from the overwhelming hordes of Vikings.
• Baroque (Sega Saturn, PSX, PS2, and Wii)
• BELOW, a minimalist game about reaching the bottom of a great cave system, with a significant focus on survival elements.
• Beyond Apple Manor (Apple ][, 1978): Predates the Trope Namer; one of the first games with Randomly Generated Levels.
• The Binding of Isaac combines roguelike elements with Zelda-esque dungeons, twinstick shooter gameplay, and gallons of Nightmare Fuel.
• Bionic Dues throws in customisation of a squad of four Humongous Mechas, while adding smaller bite-sized dungeons to be completed as a final battle approaches over time.
• bit Dungeon
• Black Future 88, a Run-and-Gun roguelike where the player has to ascend a tower full of guards and bosses to kill its insane owner, while being on a strict time limit.
• Bomber Crew
• Brogue
• Castle of the Winds
• Cataclysm, zombie apocalypse roguelike.
• Caves of Qud, a sci-fi game with ASCII graphics.
• City Of Brass, a 3D first-person Hack and Slash roguelike about looting an abandoned Arabian city.
• Cogmind
• The Consuming Shadow, Lovecraftian roguelike set in a modern-day England, a few days before an Elder God is set to return to the realm.
• Convoy, a roguelike where a spaceship crashed onto a Post Apocalyptic planet divided by Mad Max-style factions, and you have to obtain four parts necessary for repairing the ship, while dealing with the frequent attackers through vehicular combat.
• Crayon Chronicles is a roguelike with a campaign that lasts 2-4 hours, and is chock-full of content to encourage multiple playthroughs.
• Crowntakers, a roguelike version of a King's Bounty-style roleplaying game.
• CRYPTARK is a Shoot 'em Up/roguelike hybrid, where you play a mech-suited contractor hired by a Mega-Corp to clear out a number of derelict spaceships. You have a finite budget for supplies and weapons, and if you end any mission in the red, your contract is terminated and you have to start over.
• Crypt Of The Necrodancer combines roguelike dungeon crawling with a rhythm game.
• Crying Suns , a roguelike based around commanding a ship in a classic Sci-Fi setting.
• Curious Expedition
• CTHON is a Wolfenstein 3D-styled version.
• Darkest Dungeon
• Dead Cells is a roguelite done like a Metroidvania, and with combat reminiscent of Bloodborne.
• Deadly Rooms of Death
• Death Road to Canada
• Deathstate, a bullet hell roguelite with Lovecraftian themes.
• Depths of Fear: Knossos is a first person 3D roguelite where you play as Theseus after he's been thrown into Minotaur's labyrinth, and must defeat the lesser bosses before being able to slay the beast itself.
• Desktop Dungeons is part roguelike, part puzzle game.
• Diablo and its sequels, which take the Roguelike formula into real time. It's also more lenient, at least in lower difficulties — rather than being permanently killed, you're teleported back to town with no equipment when you die, but with your level and everything in your personal chest intact. It also spawns an entity called "your corpse" on the spot where you died that has all your goodies on it. They became a Genre-Killer in that almost all new post-Diablo roguelikes take inspiration from it instead of Rogue itself until in the late Noughties where a sort of "Roguelike Renaissance" occurred thanks to several successful indie roguelikes. Its own clones include:

• FATE, a "cover band" version
• ''Hades, blended with Action RPG.
• Hellgate: London, MYTHOS and Torchlight, which are all Spiritual Successors made by the remains of Blizzard North.
• Diablo RL, i.e. Diablo Roguelike, is more of a roguelike than a "Diablolike" due to its turn-based nature.
• Titan Quest and its Spiritual Successor Grim Dawn, heavily based on Diablo II but with a unique hybrid class system, though they lack real death punishment or randomly-generated maps- The exception to the latter are certain dungeons in Grim Dawn which are expressly randomized.
• Path of Exile, which messes with most of Diablo II's core mechanics but very much maintains its spirit.
• Greed Black Border and Space Hack, Diablo IN SPACE!

• Dicey Dungeons mixes roguelike with RPG-style combat where dice are used to determine the effects of actions.
• Digimon World 2
• Din's Curse
• dnd, the Ur-Example of Roguelikes. It predates Rogue by several years, but has many features that would eventually become commonplace in the Roguelike genre.
• Don't Starve
• Doom, the Roguelike is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Aliens The Roguelike is basically the Alien equivalent of Doom, the Roguelike, except this one has character classes and is (especially if you play in darkness and, with headphones) MUCH scarier...
  • Castlevania The Roguelike, with sprites or with ASCII graphics.
  • Zelda Roguelike
  • Rockman Roguelike
  • Metroid Roguelike
• Door In The Woods, a largely traditional ASCII-style simultaneous turn-based roguelike, set in the modern day after it was devastated by Lovecraftian forces, to the point even saving in it is impossible.
• Dragon Crystal
• Dragon Fin Soup uses roguelike mechanics with a story mode as well as standard permadeath roguelike modes.
• Dragon Quest Monsters, especially the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance installments. Joker eschewed it in favor of 3D, although Joker 2 added some light roguelike elements in the bonus dungeons.
• The Drop
• Dungeon Crawl. A roguelike with a laundry list of unique features to increase the focus on player skill rather than luck. Part of the Berlin Interpretation canon.
• The Dungeon Of Doom (aka The Dungeon Revealed)
• Dungeons Of Dredmor not only has sprite graphics, but also animations, sound effects, background music, Difficulty Levels, and the option to turn off Permadeath, all of which are very rare for roguelikes.
• Dungeon of the Endless combines this with Tower Defense, Real-Time Strategy, and Turn-Based Strategy.
• Duskers
• The Adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress. Fortress Mode retains the aesthetic, but Genre Shifts to a city builder/survival game.
• Eagle Island's whole concept revolves around a Platform Game with procedurally generated loot, terrain, and monsters that are different every time the level is replayed.
• EarthNight, which has the core of an Endless Running Game, but with distinct, though procedurally generated levels. Moreover, each level is an enormous dragon you run from tail towards head, collecting treasure off its back and dodging enemies before finally stabbing it through the skull.
• Eldritch is a Roguelike deprived of RPG Elements and with a First-Person Shooter/Platform Game/Stealth-Based Game gameplay.
• Elona is this in tandem with also possessing farming sim elements, as well as references to many of the other roguelikes listed on this page.
• Emberlight, an isometric take on Darkest Dungeon formula, with a heavy focus on Power Copying and your own characters becoming corrupted throughout each run.
• Enter the Gungeon is a mix of roguelike and Bullet Hell shooter systems.
• Equin: The Lantern
• Everspace is a 3D space shooter with roguelike progression and randomly-generated encounters.
• Evolution Worlds, albeit with a turn-based battle system.
• FARA, a largely text-based, browser-based roguelike set in a vast open world that emphasizes freedom of exploration and interaction.
• Fatal Labyrinth
• Feral Fury
• Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission is an extra included with the International and HD Remaster versions of Final Fantasy X-2. It abandons anything resembling normal Final Fantasy-style gameplay in favor of a system like this.
• Final Fantasy XIV has a Game Within a Game, the 'Deep Dungeons'. In practice, these are Roguelikes that have an entirely separate progression system from the rest of the game. Each tier of the dungeon has 10 floors, with the first nine being randomly generated, and the tenth always being a boss. Additionally, there are 'Accursed Hoard' caches that can only be unveiled with a special item; finding one yields loot that can be redeemed outside of the Deep Dungeon. Lastly, if you max out your Aetherpool weapon and armor, you can 'cash out' a permanent version of a class Aetherpool weapon, at the cost of resetting your Aetherpool progression in Deep Dungeons to +1/+1.
• The Flame in the Flood is a top-down 3D survival game set in a flooded post-apocalyptic America, with gameplay split between on-foot and raft-sailing sections.
• Flinthook, a Space Pirate-themed Platform Game with Metroidvania elements, with randomly generated levels.
• For The King is a roguelike that seeks to replicate a tabletop adventure.
• Freaky Awesome is a real-time top-down roguelike where the player character is a mutant who can only heal through consuming mutagenic liquid that'll eventually turn them into yet another mutated form, over and over again.
• Fury Unleashed, which is equal parts roguelike and action-platformer.
• FTL: Faster Than Light mixes roguelike with Real-Time with Pause space battles.
• Galak-Z: The Dimensional mixes roguelike elements with space shooter gameplay. The normal gameplay mode only allows the player to save progress at the end of a season (consisting of five episodes): dying forces players to start over from the beginning of the season. An arcade mode is also available that eases the difficulty slightly by saving progress after every episode.
• Gateway To Apshai, the Actionized Sequel to Temple of Apshai
• Gear Head
• Gloom - combines side-scrolling slasher action in the style of Salt and Sanctuary with The Binding of Isaac-style roguelite structure
• Golden Krone Hotel
• The Guided Fate Paradox
  • The Awakened Fate Ultimatum
• Hades Vanquish is a roguelike Platform Game with a strong emphasis on Under the Sea action and maintaining an Oxygen Meter.
• Has-Been Heroes
• Heart&Slash is a 3D roguelike/brawler game with Devil May Cry elements.
• hets is a freeware roguelike Platform Game defined by minimalistic graphics, persistent enemies and lots of shooting.
• Hive Jump is a Abuse-esque Run-and-Gun version with a turn-based meta-game layered over it.
• HyperRogue, which plays out on a non-Euclidean hyperbolic surface, giving navigation and running away some novel dynamics.
• Immortal Redneck is a 90s FPS version. It has persistence in the form of being able to use gold from your last run to purchase permanent upgrades.
• Incursion
• Infra Arcana, a freeware roguelike with a traditional gameplay but greater use of graphics and sound, and which has a Lovecraftian plot where your character battles a cult in order to reach The Shining Trapezohedron, with both their life and their sanity at stake.
• Immortal Rogue, which is about a vampire who is forced to sleep for a century every time he dies, and who alters the future every time he successfully feeds on someone important.
• Ironcast, which contains the permadeath aspect of Roguelikes, and combines it with an RPG/match-3-puzzle-game combat system. With Steampunk Humongous Mechas.
• Iter Vehemens Ad Necem
• Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja
• The JauntTrooper series
• Jupiter Hell
• KeeperRL
• Legend of Dungeon
• Lethal Crisis Proto Sphere, a hybrid of a roguelike and an action-platformer.
• Larn
• Liberal Crime Squad, a Political Cartoon roguelike.
• Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals' The "Ancient Cave", a completely optional side dungeon that many people spent more time on than the actual adventure itself (and was made available as an entire new game mode if you beat New Game+).
• Magicite
• Mistover
• Moria
• Monolith
• Monster Gate 1 and 2, two GBA games that function very much like the Mysterious Dungeon games, but only had a Japanese release.
  • The arcade game that these are based on, where you put in real currency to get game money which is used to pay the dungeon fee for each dungeon (and to cast spells). Each dungeon you start at 0 XP, but can usually take up to 10 spells with you. The game also featured a non-interactive multiplayer where you could beat dungeons to take them over, and the ability to customize your own dungeons (set the number of levels, type of enimies, and specials) and challenge other players to try and beat it.
• Monstrum mixes Roguelike elements with elements from the Survival Horror genre.
• Mordheim: City of the Damned - A roguelike Turn-Based Strategy game with RPG Elements.
• Mysterious Dungeon (Fushigi no Dungeon) games, all but one of which are licensed spinoffs of other franchises:
  • Chocobo's Dungeon
  • The Nightmare of Druaga (PS2)
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is likely the one best known in the West.
  • The Torneko no Daibouken (Torneko's Great Adventure) spin-off series from Dragon Quest
  • Shiren the Wanderer: The exception.
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon, based on the Etrian Odyssey series.
• Neo Scavenger
• NetHack, the best-known and most influential of all roguelikes. Part of the Berlin Interpretation's canon.
  • Slash EM
    • Slash'EM Extended
• Noita, a platformer rougelite with physics simulation elements, allowing you to tunnel through the game world and interact with bodies of liquids, as well as other features.
• Necropolis
• No Delivery
• Nuclear Throne is a Top-Down Shoot 'em Up version.
• Omega (no relation to the next entry below) was one of the first roguelikes to feature a large and detailed overworld instead of being mostly confined to one or more dungeons.
• Omega Labyrinth Life and its predecessors are Rogue-lites that feature randomly generated dungeons for you to crawl through, with a Macrogame to help improve your chances and flesh out the world and its cast.
• One Way Heroics, which has a mechanic that's normally found in platformers.
• Our Darker Purpose, which brings a healthy dose of Survival Horror to the mix.
• Out There, which was heavily inspired by FTL: Faster Than Light.
• Paint the Town Red, a first-person Beat 'em Up with a rogue-lite mode called "Beneath".
• Paranautical Activity, which brings the Roguelike formula into that of a fast-paced First-Person Shooter.
• Pathway: a hybrid Roguelike Turn-Based Tactics Game.
• Pawapoke Dash, in the Hell Dungeon story mode. Interestingly, the series in general are sports-themed visual novels heavy on randomness that erase your custom character when you fail a story.
• Pixel Dungeon
  • Shattered Pixel Dungeon - a standalone Game Mod of the above, adding a lot of features and rebalancing some aspects
• Polygod
• Powder, a roguelike developed originally for the Game Boy Advance (and now ported to other systems)
• Prospector
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, the PSP game for the anime, is a roguelike/adventure game.
• RAD
• Ragnarok
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale in Dungeon Mode.
• Red Rogue: A Homage to the Trope Namer involving the now widowed lover of @ guided by his revenant to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and restore him to life. Unlike the original, it is in a side-scrolling platformer format with no jumping. Combat system derives from a rudimentary casting and enchantment system with dual-wielding a main weapon and a throwable weapon.
• Redungeon
• Renowned Explorers: a hybrid Roguelike Turn-Based Tactics Game.
• Risk of Rain, another hybrid of a roguelike and an action-platformer, this time in space.
  • Risk of Rain 2
• Road Not Taken is this with Block Puzzles and a romance sidequest.
• A Robot Named Fight!, a Rogue-lite Metroidvania homage with heavy emphasis on the Metroid part, as well as influences from John Carpenter's The Thing for its monster designs.
• Rogue, the Trope Namer and Trope Maker. Part of the Berlin Interpretation's canon.
• Rogue Hearts Dungeon, a Japan only Enhanced Remake of Rogue for the PS2.
• Rogue Knight Runner, a hybrid of a Roguelike and Endless Running Game.
• Rogue Legacy, a Platform Game/roguelike hybrid featuring randomly generated dungeons and player characters. There is persistence in the form of being able to use money from your last run to purchase permanent upgrades.
• Rogue Stormers is a Contra-style Run-and-Gun version. There is some persistence in the form of earned perks carried over between runs.
• Rogue Survivor, a Zombie Apocalypse roguelike.
• Runers is a 2D top-down real-time roguelike where the player character is a mage who creates new spells through combining runes, a bit like the system in Magicka.
• Sakura Wars: Kimi Aru ga Tame
• Scarab of Ra
• Second Wind
• Shadow Of The Wyrm, a traditional roguelike game set in a more open and detailed world than is usual for the genre.
• Shattered Planet, a comedic sci-fi take on the subgenre.
• Shovel Knight Dig developed by Yacht Club Games and Nitrome.
• Sil , a successor of Angband, returning to the roots lore-wise: Theme is the First Age of Middlearth
• Skyhill is a 2D sideview turn-based roguelike, where the protagonist is trapped on top of the 100-floor skyscraper after the city he is in has been hit by a bio-weapon, and must reach the exit while fighting the mutated former denizens of the hotel. There's also a significant focus on hunger and Item Crafting.
• Skyshine's Bedlam , which is played like a cross between FTL and a The Banner Saga-style game, set After the End.
• Slay the Spire
• Slayer , another first-person roguelike for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer which has the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons branding.
• Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God
• Soulblight
• Soul Knight, a Run-and-Gun shooter with Roguelike elements, it has randomly generated dungeons and equipment, Bullet Hell attack patterns, and whenever you quit the game, you lose all of your gears except your Starter Equipment and lobby upgrades.
• Spelunky, hybrid of a roguelike and a Platform Game.
• The tabletop The SPLINTER, takes the tabletop RPG elements that made Roguelikes Roguelikes and brings them full circle: randomly generated dungeons, a large variety of (very bizzarre) enemies, a focus on (randomly generated) gear for survival, frequent and permanent character death... It feels more like playing a roguelike than playing a tabletop.
• Sproggiwood is a simplistic take on the genre that also adds city-building elements.
• Starward Rogue takes roguelike elements, and adds them to a top-down twin stick shooter with a Bullet Hell flavor.
• Steredenn is a Horizontal Scrolling Shooter version.
• Stoneshard plays like a traditional roguelike, but aims to reach the production values of a Western RPG, with a proper prologue, voice-acted dialogues and more.
• Strafe
• Streets of Rogue is Rogue meets Grand Theft Auto... minus the auto part, since it doesn't have cars.
• Sublevel Zero applies this formula to the gameplay of the Descent series.
• Sunless Sea
  • Sunless Skies
• The Swindle is a steampunk cybercrime heist platformer — think Payday The Heist in Victorian England as a platforming game and there's your premise.
• Sword Of Fargoal
• Sword of the Stars: The Pit, a spinoff game.
• SYNTHETIK is a fast-paced 3/4 View roguelite-shooter.
• Tallowmere is a 2-D hack-and-slash dungeon crawl.
• Tangledeep
• Temple Of Yog
• Timestalkers — also a Climax Entertainment Crisis Crossover.
• Tales of Maj'Eyal, although it breaks the mold with a world map, quests, and multiple dungeons. Many of its modules follow a similar pattern, including a (slightly buggy) Dragon Ball-themed one.
• The two Tobal games and Ehrgeiz have quest modes that mix roguelike and fighter.
• Tomb of Terror
• Tower of Doom (on the intellivision) was probably the first console roguelike.
• Transcendence (combination of NetHack and Star Control)
• ToeJam & Earl has plenty of Rogue-lite elements and isn't super difficult, but with longer games and a lack of carry-over between games more akin to a traditional roguelike. The fourth game, Back in the Groove, adds a Macrogame that places it firmly in Rogue-lite territory.
• Tower of Guns is a 90s-style First-Person Shooter with all typical random elements, including the plot.
• Under Mine
• Unexplored, which uses the typical Rogue/Nethack premise, but is in real time, and generates its dungeons around key objectives in a more natural, circular manner.
• Unloved, a horror FPS very loosely based on a Doom II WAD, where you make single short runs though randomly-generated dungeons aiming to power up your character over time by acquiring more powerful equipment for your next run and currency to upgrade it.
• UnReal World
• Void Bastards, a sci-fi FPS where you play as a prisoner freed from statis to scavenge neessary parts to repair the prison ship from the nearby abandoned spaceships.
• WASTED
• Wayward, a survival game set on a randomly-generated deserted island.
• Wazhack, a 2.5D sidescrolling example.
• We Happy Few, a combination of roguelikes and first person survival games.
• Wizard of Legend, a 2D, top-down roguelite with co-op support, with a gameplay focused on creating magical combos.
• ZAngband - a spin-off of Angband
• Zettai Hero Project - By the Disgaea team. Far more lenient that most in that dying is not only not-permanent, it's encouraged. You still lose your fancy equipment (which becomes more taxing as you go on), but dying provides the same bonuses to base stats and stats per level-up as actually beating a dungeon, in a game where you start each dungeon over at level 1.
• Ziggurat blends this with Heretic-style First-Person Shooter. It has a difficulty select, and there is some persistent progression in the form of new characters, weapons, and perks unlocked by completing at least one floor.

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