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RogueLike
A RogueLike game is a computer role-playing game (CRPG) which is similar to /Rogue (the first roguelike game).
The typical features of roguelike games:
- single-player computer role-playing game
- turn-based (non-real time, wait until the player enters a new command)
- game uses ASCII graphics (characters, letters and symbols) or simple fixed width graphics tiles to represent different monsters, objects and map/terrain elements in the game. The player character itself is most often represented by '@'
- the game happens in a fantasy setting (the game world has magic, fantastic creatures borrowed from various mythologies, fantasy literature or role-playing games)
- most of the game happens in maze of rooms and corridors, aka dungeon, which is built randomly
- the game has a highly random nature: many actions are triggered by the pseudo-random number generator, the objects and monsters usually have some random variance (instead of having the exactly same statistics), the monster behaviour has random parameters. The game does not have a pre-determined plot.
- movement and most other commands are done by a single key press
- by doing specific things (like defeating monsters) the player character is able to gain experience points and advance in "levels", becoming more powerful (better abilities, skills, new special powers etc.)
- the game usually takes a very long time (from days to many months) to complete and most players never complete the game. Despite this, they often have lots of fun. For example, it usually takes several million game rounds to complete the game of Angband or ZAngband (this usually involves killing tens of thousands of monsters, examining huge areas of dungeon etc.).
RogueLike Games
Here follows a non-comprehensive list of RogueLike games.
External links:
RogueBasin, a wiki about all roguelike games
BALROG (via web.archive.org) - BALROG has an extensive chronologically ordered list of roguelike games. The site went offline; this link goes to an archive.