If you play real roguelikes then you are probably old enough to remember the days when games starte to add "RPG Elements" to their genre description. "RPG Eleme

If you play real roguelikes then you are probably old enough to remember the days when games starte to add "RPG Elements" to their genre description. "RPG Elements" meant then that there was some way to level up and gain stats or skills or something like that. Nowadays these games usually just tack on the word RPG if they really want to emphasize that skill trees are a meaningful part of gameplay. A similar thing happened here, originally a few games were "inpsired by roguelikes" and then had "roguelike elements". Nowadays if it has procedural generation and some form of permadeath it is a roguelike. Recently I've heard that it was common to use "roguelite" if there's some important meta-progression where you get significantly more powerful between runs (like Rogue Legacy) and "roguelike" if the meta progression mostly just unlocks new stuff for runs and doesn't make you significantly stronger (arguably like The Binding of Isaac). I won't be surprised if the meaning changes even further before really settling.