Roguelike Memes

The gaming industry has discovered the cheat code to infinite money: slap "roguelike" and "soulslike" on everything and watch the sales roll in. Good price? Check. Good graphics? Check. Original gameplay? Nah, just make it punishingly difficult with permadeath and call it a day. It's like every game studio had a meeting and decided "why innovate when we can just copy Dark Souls and Hades?" The indie scene is 90% roguelikes at this point, and AAA studios are scrambling to add "souls-inspired combat" to everything from racing games to farming simulators. Next up: roguelike soulslike dating sim where you die if you pick the wrong dialogue option. Game devs realized it's easier to make players replay the same content 50 times through procedural generation than to actually create 50 hours of unique content. Brilliant cost optimization, terrible for my controller which has been thrown across the room multiple times.

Steam store's genre system is the digital equivalent of asking a toddler to organize your bookshelf. "Is Mayonnaise a Roguelike?" isn't just Patrick being Patrick—it's literally what happens when you filter games by genre these days. That indie pixel art card-building survival crafting battle royale with roguelike elements? Yeah, it's in 47 different categories simultaneously. The algorithm's just slapping tags on games like a drunk person at a name tag convention.