Imo the charitable/interesting view (for roguelikes) is that most games expect you to progress, and want you to, and will actively help you. Roguelikes on the o

Imo the charitable/interesting view (for roguelikes) is that most games expect you to progress, and want you to, and will actively help you. Roguelikes on the otherhand don't particularly care, and you as a player have to overcome it despite the game's negligence. Which I think is where most of the difficulty comes from: how little it helps you when you get into a bad spot, and you've got 20 unknown potions. or rather, how little it tries to stop you from getting into such a bad spot. More extreme down that line would be dwarf fortress, particularly adventure mode (fortress mode doesn't help my point: they even have the motto "losing is fun"...) I agree that roguelikes are self-aware, and make it mostly painless to restart, but I think its more a result of roguelikes actively working with the permadeath mechanic, whereas ironman is more of a "game mode"; that is, the game isn't built with iron man in mind. Ironman is a variant of the gameplay. Both I think still are primarily valued for the fear of death, and I don't think either require, expect or encourage death. Its just more that, ironman is worse at the mechanic, primarily because its a rather shallow, incidental feature, rather than at the heart of it. It happens to be easy to tack on ironman mode, on a non-ironman game; you just remove the save slots, and delete it on death. But they're still normal, non-permadeath games at heart.