Like any decent professional videogames journalist, I have spent the last ten years devaluing the term “roguelike” through overuse. Anything where a goblin politely waits for you to take your turn? Roguelike. Anything where a big slime can permanently murder you? You better believe that’s a roguelike. We would walk down the street with wheelbarrows full of roguelike. We burned piles of it just to keep warm. We introduced the word “roguelite” as a form of quantitative easing, but it failed to curb spiralling rogueflation. So now, faced with Stoneshard – a roguelike that’s really, very, incredibly, actually like Rogue – I’m left reaching for useful adjectives.
