85
Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that's just our 7-person "engineering" team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I'm not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
When anyone describes a game to me as being a "roguelike" I immediately understand what the game is like less. I also constantly wonder if they mean "rogue-lite" since they sound 99% the same.
And this is after watching like 3 youtube videos on why the term exists; I really don't know how that term caught-on like it did.
They really just mean entirely different things to different people. In fact, when you imply that "rogue-lite" would clarify things here, that confuses me, because "rogue-lite" also means different things to different people.
There's the traditional roguelike purist view that goes something like this:
Roguelike: ASCII or tile based graphics. Turn based. Dungeon Crawler. Procedural generation. Permadeath.
Roguelite: Some of those qualities but not all, permadeath is mandatory.
That's the version on wikipedia. Based on that dichotomy, roguelikes include Rogue, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Cogmind. A game like Spelunky, FTL, or Hades is a Roguelite.
But then there's a newer dichotomy that's based on the way perma death works, so it's a bit like:
Roguelike: Procedural generation. Dungeon Crawler. Permadeath with no meta-progression
Roguelite: Same but with meta progression
(there might be some disagreement on what constitutes meta-progression, I'll just say it means progress between runs excluding unlocks, so upgrading your stats or adding more stuff to your run, but not unlocking new spells or heroes to do the runs with)
Based on that dichotomy, games like Enter the Gungeon, Spelunky, Noita, and even Slay the Spire (if you can consider it a procedurally generated dungeon crawler) enter the category of roguelike, while games like Hades or Rogue Legacy are roguelite. Games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors, or Monster Train (unless you consider a couple of random shops and an event between combats a procedural dungeon crawl) aren't really either, unless you loosen it up to no longer require the dungeon crawler aspect. The reason I still included that one, though, is that the dungeon crawler aspect is what really distinguished roguelikes originally.
I think the most general sort of vibe of what a roguelike or roguelite is, is simply a game where you start and end a run within a play session, each run has significantly different stuff you find because there's random terrain/enemy/loot/etc generation, and you generally aren't expected to be able to beat the game on your first try (nor are you expected to stop after your first win)