What is a roguelike?

A roguelike is a game built around short runs, where dying sends you back to the start with nothing. Levels, items, and enemy layouts are generated fresh for every attempt.

What carries over is what you've learned, not the gear you found.

How a roguelike run works

You begin each run with a basic character and build it up from whatever the game hands you on the way. Die, and that build is gone for good.

The next attempt reshuffles the map and the drops through procedural generation, so memorizing a route gets you nowhere. Reading the situation in front of you does.

That's why runs stay short. Slay the Spire gives you a deck you rebuild from scratch every time, which makes a lost climb cost minutes instead of an evening.

Roguelike examples from our guides

• Slay the Spire sends you up a dungeon with a fresh hand of cards each attempt, and losing simply resets the climb. It holds a 4.3 average on Google Play from 30,134 ratings, and we put it second in our best offline mobile games guide.
• Returnal is a solo PS5 shooter about breaking a cycle of chaos on a hostile alien planet, rated 4.37 out of 5 on the PlayStation Store. It's the one pick nobody else is imitating in our best PS5 shooter games guide, though $69.99 for something this demanding is a real ask.

Roguelike or roguelite?

A roguelike wipes you back to zero. In a roguelite, some progress sticks, so each death leaves you slightly stronger for the next run.

Dead Cells lands on the roguelite side of that line, because the blueprints and weapons you unlock stay unlocked for every attempt after. Its store pitch still runs to four words, kill, die, learn, repeat, which is why plenty of write-ups file it as a roguelike.

At 4.8 across 135,746 ratings it's one of the highest-rated picks in our best offline mobile games guide, and PEGI 16 makes it a poor fit for a shared family tablet.

Vampire Survivors is a roguelite too, and its Google Play listing carries role-playing, survival, and roguelike tags together, which is another reason the two words get mixed up. Our roguelite explainer covers where the line sits.

The labels also blur because the hardest roguelikes get compared to a souls-like. What separates them is the reset: a souls-like sends you back to a checkpoint, while a roguelike sends you back to the beginning.