As Aristotle before the ephemeron, a categorical abomination both quadruped and winged, these distinctions’ delinearities are a redoubled negative reflecting our various failures to capture ruptures along our faultlines: there are actually no winged quadrupeds, mayflies have six legs, but also there are actually winged quadrupeds, several kinds of bats crawl on the ground, except there aren’t actually winged quadrupeds, the front legs of the mayfly aren’t exactly legs really, and there are actually winged quadrupeds, calling a bat a quadruped relies on the lateral substitution in Aristotle’s conflation of locomotion with body plan, except what is locomotion to a body plan when a bat walks, behold you accursed and weep the bats are walking the earth, why are these bats crawling amongst our mucking ruin, aren’t you concerned beings blessed with flight have not left us for elysian elsewheres but returned to crawl among us humiliated of skyness, because you see there is nowhere else to exception exile, you’re not going anywhere you aren’t currently, wherever you are you will live in yourself damned to feel only this flinchable away from the world, in the gibbous moon I’m out wriggling in the foragegunk begging the bats to fly, please God accept their manifest being, why are you still here, you don’t have to be, the bat nuzzles up to me, because you’re here, bites into my spewing jugular gluggingly starts shrieksucking. The Philosopher said it best: “Differences are manifested in modes of subsistence, in habits, in actions performed. For instance, some animals live in water and others on land. And of those that live in water some do so in one way, and some in another: that is to say, some live and feed in the water, take in and emit water, and cannot live if deprived of water, as is the case with the great majority of fishes; others get their food and spend their days in the water, but do not take in water but air, nor do they bring forth in the water. Many of these creatures are furnished with feet, as the otter, the beaver, and the crocodile; some are furnished with wings, as the diver and the grebe; some are destitute of feet, as the water-snake. Some creatures get their living in the water and cannot exist outside it: but for all that do not take in either air or water, as, for instance, the sea-nettle and the oyster. And of creatures that live in the water some live in the sea, some in rivers, some in lakes, and some in marshes, as the frog and the newt.” Difference is the mark of difference, write that down, the logical notation to denote a newt will be on the exam.
Heck, Metroidvania used to just be the Metroid-like Castlevania games to distinguish them from the older, stage-based titles, dubbed Classicvania, now its a descriptor for just about any game with a interconnected world and progress that’s gatekept by unlocking new abilities, regardless of the underlying genre.
Also, in my mind, Bullet Hell is any time the player finds themselves in a situation where there’s an overwhelming number of enemy projectiles in play…
As for Rogue-like, Can’t say I blame people for dropping the text-based and dungeon crawl aspects from modern definitions. Procedurally generated games with perma-death is already a pretty specific combination, if definitions hadn’t been relaxed, it would likely be a dead genre only discussed in communities such as this one… Heck, the definition relaxation might have been a revival as I’m not sure I had ever heard the term befor it was being used in the newer, looser sense.
Also, as an aside, is the Scott Adams mentioned above the same Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, whom I learned via a recent post from Scott Alexander died recently?
Completely unrelated: there was the one Scott Adams born in 1957 who wrote Dilbert, was a staunch atheist, and made a sudden pivot to focus his life on far-right politics; and the other Scott Adams born in 1952 who wrote Adventureland, converted to Christianity, and made a sudden pivot to focus his life on religion.
The Dilbert one recently passed away; the Adventureland one is still going strong at the age of 73.
Waiting for the Metroidvania bullethell roguelike text adventure…
And now I’m imagining a top-down free roaming shoot-em-up with a massive, interconnected procedurally generated map… Are their even notable shoot-em-ups with free roaming? I understand most have levels that predominantly either stretch vertically(usually with a top-down perspective) or horizontally(usually with a side-scrolling perspective)… Granted, I’m not sure I ever got around to playing any of the vertical shoot-em-ups and I believe R-type are the only horizontal ones I’ve played… I generally got my fix for sci-fi starfighter combat with StarFox, which despite being rather similar, just with levels that predominatly stretch into the screen and a behind the ship/cockpit perspective, I don’t think would generally be classified as a shoot-em-up…
Not sure how to mix everything in that fusion description with text adventure, And how to balance perma-death and procedural generation of Rogue-like with the massive maps of Metroidvania sounds like a challenge… I haven’t played any rogue-likes I can recall, but I understand they tend to lean towards either the endless ratcheting challenge of arcade-style games or intended to be beaten in a single sitting, but you need to get gud to beat it style common in cart games without SRAM while Metroidvanias lean towards intended to be played over many sessions and beating them in one sitting is the realm of speed runners… Plus I would think procedural generation works better for either small levels or worlds where coherency isn’t important, while a Metroidvania kind of requires both expansive and coherent worlds…
Does sound like an interesting genre fusion if someone could pull it off… Sadly, good luck getting a publisher with the resources to work pass the technical challenges to be bold enough to try something so out of the usual.
Indie developers have tried mixing up more or less every genre with the procedural and permadeath aspects of roguelikes. Starward Rogue is the first one that comes to mind that sounds like your description; I never played that much of it, but Wikipedia describes it as a critical success but commercial failure.
Traditional roguelikes were often long-form games where (once you learn the basic mechanics) you might invest 10-20 hours ina single run, with the threat of permadeath looming all the while. 'Roguelike-likes" that transplant the procgen+permadeath aspects to other genres (Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, etc) generally tend towards shorter individual runs. It’s also increasingly common to make the core game easier, but then allow each victory to unlock additional difficulty modifiers (e.g. in Slay the Spire, victory unlocks the “Ascension” modifier which adds additional elite enemies; winning with Ascension unlocks Ascension 2 and so on).
This is the one crossover which tends to get a lot of designers excited but I’ve never seen executed successfully; the problem is that making the unlocking of movement abilities in a Metroidvania exciting requires very intentional map design in terms of exactly what the player will discover and in what order, which is a poor fit for being mixed up procedurally.
Wikipedia includes twin-stick shooters and things like asteroids in its multidirectional shooters category, so it’s a little tricky to find a particular type, but we played Zone 66 as kids, and I remember there being a bunch of helicopter shoot-em-ups that had similarly free-roaming gameplay…
Please, have mercy, my project list cannot survive another entry…
Yeah, the most successful version I’ve seen is randomizer mods for existing metroidvanias, but those require a lot of familiarity with the original game to figure out what can be reached and how.
Or, alternatively: the Scott Adams who wrote Dilbert, turned into kind of a jerk, and then made a last-minute, bet-hedging conversion to Christianity just in case God turned out to be real; and the Scott Adams who wrote Adventureland, turned into a devout Christian, and is by all accounts a really nice guy to this day.
On topic, the Dilbert universe actually offers several examples of IF-adjacent games that don’t neatly fit into any of the categories discussed above. Young Dilbert Hi-Tech Hijinks (1997) is a collection of educational minigames loosely tied together into a sort of point-and-click adventure, and The Ethics Challenge featuring Dilbert and Dogbert (1997) is an educational ethics board game developed by (I kid you not) Lockheed Martin, which features some CYOA mechanics.