As somebody that generally enjoys both action games and especially roguelikes, I am familiar with the frequent discourse around what is or is not a roguelike/lite. Instead of joining that discourse, instead, I am here to be an angry person on the internet in a different direction.

I do not like the phrase “action roguelike” being used to describe the genre of games that I’m going to, for brevity, call “Vampire Survivors” clones. Calling a game that shares almost no similarities to Rogue and requires less inputs than most other games an “action roguelike” feels deceitful and misleading.

Neither “action” nor “roguelike” define much of anything related to what makes that genre of games unique. There are a myriad of phrases or identifiers that could instead be used, but I’m not here to propose a new name because that would be a productive use of my time. Instead I just want to explain why this name gives me hives and move on.

“Action” - indicates that primarily the goal of a given game is to control player actions and that they serve as the primary form of autonomous interaction with the world. In these games, you, explicitly, do not control the actions of your character. Your character is constantly interacting with the world without player input. You, do, control some “actions” in the game world - usually just character movement, but I would argue that controlling character movement is substantially less action control than practically any other game type in the “action” genre.

“Roguelike” - this is messier to define but to me, looking at the most influential pieces of rogue that have moved into the genre typically referred to as “roguelike” I think would be procedural generation. Moving past procedural generation you get into the discourse involving “like” vs “lite” vs who knows what else which I think is where distinctions like rpg systems and permadeath can be examined. These games are, in the most rudimentary sense of the phrase, procedurally generated, but that’s in much the same way that kraft singles are technically cheese. If you read “cheese plate” on a menu somewhere and they brought out to you a charcuterie board with kraft singles and saltines, you would be disappointed. Well to be honest I wouldn’t be that disappointed, but it certainly wouldn’t match my expectations at most restaurants. Which is ultimately my point here.

When I read “Action Roguelike” in a games description or tag or genre or whatever, I feel deceived. The first games that I think of are things like Dead Cells, Risk of Rain, Hades, etc. That’s not to say that these types of games aren’t enjoyable, I just think that when labeling them we should come up with a term that better describes what makes them unique instead of glomming on to a phrase that doesn’t identify any of the core gameplay elements that make the genre unique.