Here's the important bit for me. Roguelike, as much as the term refers to a game style rather than a development process/community thing, describes a game that

Here's the important bit for me. Roguelike, as much as the term refers to a game style rather than a development process/community thing, describes a game that is turn based and tile based. I find the turn-based nature of roguelikes core to the genre, because they define so much about how you interact with the game. "Real" or "traditional" roguelikes allow you as much time as you need to decide your next move. What this means is the genre is completely removed from any sort of mechanical or reflex skill. If reaction times are at all involved, to me, it's not a roguelike. Under this rubric I find FTL is mostly a roguelike due to its pausability, whereas Spelunky is definitely not, given the required mechanical skill. (I may even consider being turn-based to be more core to the genre than having strictly no between-run progress; FTL gates off some ships behind multiple runs but this barely registers for me. Some people take this 'requirement' a little too strictly for my tastes.) Why this matters, beyond pedantry, is that blurring the genre lines has made searching for new games in the genre almost impossible. Some great roguelikes have found their way to Steam (Caves of Qud, for example), but finding them amongst the 100s of games that get the "roguelike" tag is difficult. Not a huge issue, of course, but it's why it matters to me. Beyond that, the term "roguelike" is really not very descriptive unless you're already part of the RL community and are up on how the community defines the genre, so I'm just clueless as to why it has become such a marketing buzzword. "Run based game" has only one extra syllable and provides such a cleaner description of what the game is actually like. And can we really say that a game like Slay the Spire (a game I love) is anything at all like Rogue?