And it’s only a matter of time before we get our first Empire-based roguelike. Step up in scale from there and we find ourselves suddenly managing an entire community of people in a Clan-based game. The game then becomes more Operations-based, with you managing the resources and facilities for this burgeoning roster of ill-fated individuals that you send off to their deaths. Or perhaps you are controlling a roster of characters where only some subset of them is used at once. Some roguelikes feature dudes and dudettes onboard some sort of vehicular contraption (like a spaceship, a boat, or a wagon). Then there are roguelikes where you are controlling multiple individual lives. The original Rogue and its direct descendents were all Individual-based games, which means that you controlled a single individual character. ‘ere we go!įirst off, I want to talk about the format of roguelike(-like) games. So, for my own sanity and the purpose of this eXposition, I’m going to stab into the dark, embarking on my own little adventure to define a number of roguelike and related terms that pertain to a lot of current games these days. Where does a roguelike tactical RPG end and a roguelike survival-craft game begin!? I’m having to split hairs by saying this game does X and that game does Y, so they are different, you see! And when you knead additional trends into the genre-dough, like the RPG-ification and survival-craft-ification of everything, then it gets really complex. As the ideas and mechanics behind roguelike games start to permeate into other genres, I often find myself trying to make distinctions between them and understand how different “roguelike elements” are used in one game compared to another. I mean, we ALL played Oregon Trail right? We can all relate to Jenny and her snakebites. This makes me wonder about the hidden influence Oregon Trail might have had on the rise of roguelikes, their underlying mechanics, and the surging popularity of roguelike elements woven into other genres. Did many of us cut our teeth on Oregon Trail without realizing that it was priming us for a love affair with roguelikes? Curiously, Oregon Trail, first released in 1971 (!!!) predates many of the original early roguelikes (ahem, Rogue from 1980). Even FTL could be taken as a futuristic homage, come to think of it. Then there’s BEDLAM, a modern-day Oregon Trail. We’ve got Organ Trail, the recent zombie-themed remake. It’s spawned its share of imitators and tributes.
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