Roguelikes and Roguelites Never Needed Narrative (But I Am Glad They Have Them Now) – An Oral History Inspired by the ‘Slay the Spire 2’ Timeline

The original Rogue was published in 1980. A procedurally generated dungeon crawler, the game’s story was as barebones as they come. You were an adventurer. You needed to acquire an item from the depths of the dungeon. You needed to escape.

By Thedarkb – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100192403

Conversely, the game play was nearly infinite. Given that each dungeon was a different layout with different monsters, no two delves were exactly alike, and no matter how strong your character got, your next run featured a new protagonist who had only your knowledge and skills. It was truly revolutionary for the time, and to this day, we have both roguelikes (games that follow closely to Rogue’s original design philosophy of procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid based movement, and perma-death mechanics) and roguelites (games that some degree of inspiration from Rogue, but did not necessarily adhere to all of their trappings). Disregarding the massive outlier of hours that Destiny 2 contributed to my FPS hours, the roguelike is where I spend the majority of my gaming. I like getting the full experience within smaller increments. I like the rush of snowballing. I like the fact that I can leave and come back to it without feeling like I’ve lost my place or need to start over. Ever since FTL, I have been enamored with the loops. And my history speaks for itself. One of my first ever video game reviews on this site was Into the …