Roguelike
adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Any of a genre of computer role playing games loosely characterized by various characteristics such as randomised environment generation, permadeath, turn-based movement, text-based or primitive tile-based graphics, and hack-and-slash gameplay.
"If you haven’t played a ‘roguelike’ before, it’s basically what happens when you take a twitchy hack-and-slash game like Diablo and make it boring, confusing, and frustrating."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of roguelike. alt-of
"I've been thinking about building a Roguelike recently, and a point came to mind; namely, I've played Daggerfall; I liked the concept, but the system was buggy and holeish. So, how would one go about designing a "clean" classless CRPG? Especially a Roguelike, where YASDs are common, and backing up your saves is techinally cheating."
- 1 Of, relating to, or characteristic of the roguelike genre.
"And I'm tempted to say that as long as it's got to do with fighting, single or in very small groups, with characters from different classes, different races, different stats, who learn along the way, it's roguelike enough for me. This may also include a lot of adventures, I know."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of roguelike. alt-of
"For those people that play Roguelike games, it means a lot more to say that a game is Roguelike than it means to say that it is like Rogue. Its an unfortunate name for people who are not familiar with the genre because it is deceiving."
Example
More examples"If you haven’t played a ‘roguelike’ before, it’s basically what happens when you take a twitchy hack-and-slash game like Diablo and make it boring, confusing, and frustrating."
Etymology
From Rogue (the name of a 1980 computer game which introduced the genre, from rogue) + -like.
Related phrases
More for "roguelike"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.