> I’m surprised to hear the Berlin interpretation brought up here. I thought for the most part that people had moved on. Its primary value for me is to differe

> I’m surprised to hear the Berlin interpretation brought up here. I thought for the most part that people had moved on. Its primary value for me is to differentiate between roguelikes and roguelites, where the latter term seems to have been given too much weight and controversy (roguelike communities trying to hold onto their name too strongly, as to become unseemly); referring to berlin interpretation seems like a less sensitive workaround. Roguelite is a dumb name anyways. The differentiation is still very useful though, because the roguelike genre is a very interesting one to be able to reference. (and so thoroughly distinct from roguelites, that the short distance in naming really isn't very appropriate -- similar to NoSQL vs SQL DBs) > So there are plenty of situations in a classic roguelike which are simply game over because you saw a monster (likely out of depth) you had no chance of beating. It may be unlikely if the game throws lots of escape tools at you, but there’s always the chance you don’t get any of them on a given seed. This is true; the general design trends towards combat encounters (roguelikes really just being the DnD combat & dungeoneering mechanics ripped out and pushed on computers, dropping most of the other elements), but that's more out of design choice than out of any necessity to keep the game "interesting". That is, you can trivially conceive of interesting situations and mechanisms that are not directly combat-related, and you can also find examples of them implemented (like the orb-chasing of DCSS orb spiders, which force an awkward dance -- the challenge is from limiting positioning, and the damage is what gives it weight, but it is in no way unavoidable). Rougelikes aren't interesting because there's always a chance you might end up in an unavoidable death -- they're interesting because there's always a chance you'll push yourself into an unavoidable death. > It may be unlikely if the game throws lots of escape tools at you, but there’s always the chance you don’t get any of them on a given seed. The core point of my argument is that you could force a minimal set of escape tools to the player, and the game would still be interesting. The games aren't actually dependent on having unavoidable threats, and being able to win each and every encounter, because the goals are different from StS. The threat can be there, without the unavoidable loss. That the procedural generation may produce unwinnable games is not a requirement of procgen games -- it is a just an artifact of the implementation. But for StS and its kin, I think Jorbs is right -- potentially unwinnable games may be a requirement of that style of game.