Roguelite

Roguelite names games that borrow a Roguelike's surface machinery — procedurally generated levels, permadeath ending each attempt — while adding persistent progress that survives a run's death: unlocked characters, permanent stat boosts, currency banked toward the next attempt. Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells are the genre's reference points, and both make the same bet: permadeath stays as a source of tension, but it stops being the total, unrecoverable loss the strict roguelike tradition insists it has to be.

The term itself came out of a fight. The Berlin Interpretation, a set of criteria a small community of purists drew up to defend what "counts" as a real roguelike, treats permadeath, procedural generation, and a handful of other traits as load-bearing and non-negotiable; games that kept the aesthetic but softened the loss condition needed a name that didn't claim the stricter lineage, and "roguelite" was the compromise — a little dismissive in its own suffix, by design.

The real design effect is on what a loss means emotionally. In a strict roguelike, dying costs everything accrued in that run, full stop; in a roguelite, dying still ends the run, but the player walks away with something — banked currency, a permanent unlock, experience toward the next meta-tier — which means the Compulsion Loop never fully resets. This is why roguelites tolerate, and often court, mainstream difficulty expectations that a strict roguelike wouldn't: the sting of an individual death is cushioned by Meta-Progression that a Berlin-Interpretation purist would say undermines the entire point of permadeath in the first place — a real disagreement about design philosophy, not just branding.

The Roguelike Deckbuilder hybrid usually leans roguelite in exactly this sense: card and relic unlocks persist across runs even as Slay the Spire resets the deck itself to nothing each time.