They seem so popular, dozens of games coming out, and reviews often positive.
But
When I see “Roguelike” I imagine a game that’s too small to be a real game, so they made it so you can never win and just have to keep trying and you’ll get a decent number of hours out of it. With just enough progression each time that you start to believe it’s possible you’ll get somewhere meaningful.
When I see “Souls-like” I think of a game where the difficulty is only there to give people with too much time on their hands a sense of superiority.
I have roughly a thousand games in my various libraries and I have never played a game in either of these genres.
I feel fine being so unreasonable about this.
Hey, just to be a pedantic asshole…
You’re describing a ‘roguelite’, which implies metaprogression. ‘roguelike’ normally means that there is no (or extremely little) metaprogression… getting better is just about increasing player knowledge, typically. The terms are used somewhat interchangeably sometimes but some games, at least, still use them correctly.
That said, if the size is the killer… Take a look at Caves of Qud. It’s a traditional roguelike, but there’s non-perma-death options when starting a new game, and the size of the game was definitely not the reason for choosing the genre.
I am worried that reasonable points like this might change my mind 😬
My lack of knowledge on the points you make is partially willful ignorance on my part afterall 😁
Worried? Intelligent people change their minds when presented with new information.
You know what stops people changing their minds?
Worry, fear, anxiety, etc!
Thought police is real?
As an aside, one of the most petty things I get annoyed at is how badly named and organized these things are. In all things.
Any sort of dark and somber low-fantasy game could be called a souls-like.
Heck, even the term RPG could apply to almost 80% of videogames. The history of exactly where it came from is a bit messy, but seems to have been used differentiate D&D from other tabletop games like poker or monopoly, or maybe even war games. It makes sense in that context, but I today’s context it’s hard to find a videogame that isn’t engaging in roleplay in some form. Yet we look to things like level and stat progression as being “RPG elements” even if they have nothing to do with roleplay at all.
It’s not just games. “Metal” music very rarely has anything to do with metals.
A lot of it is marketing. These labels make it easier to sell things. Having categories at all hells consumers find things they like or don’t like (such as OP). I just wish things were better-organized. I like things like Steam’s tag system a lot, but the tags themselves have been halhazardly cobbled together over decades of making words up and changing what they mean.