Indie Developers Are the Metalcore Bands of the Video Game World

Genres are ways to talk about things that are alike. They are not lifestyle achievements, marketing tools, or badges of honor. All reasonable adults know this. But the world is not populated solely by reasonable adults. And when the unreasonable get access to large platforms, they can bend, stretch, and distort genres in ways that make them useless for their intended purpose.

Two groups of people (on the internet) have, more than most others, bludgeoned genre identifiers into a useless pulp to meet their own ends, whether commercial or emotional, and in doing so, made it impossible for people to use genres to find other things they might like based on things they already liked. They have done this because they care more about the title (and its presumed cachet) than they do about accurately describing the thing they make so that people that like things like the thing they make can find it.

The Case of the -core

Hardcore is a genre label used to describe a style of punk rock that meets some pretty specific requirements; rhythm over melody, volume over nuance, and speed over technique. Verse-chorus-verse punk rock (Sex Pistols, Ramones, etc…) would never be mistaken for hardcore. Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, and Minor Threat were a whole different style of music, as it is plain to hear. Shouted (not sung) vocals in minor scales, distorted power chords played as fast as possible, and drums that alternate between fast D-beat and elaborate breakdowns are also signatures of the genre.

⊕The “metalcore” portmanteau was originally a joking reference used by the fanzine Maximumrockandroll to describe the Richmond VA band Black Pyramid, Oxnard CA band False Confessions, Mesa AZ band Desecration and Austin TX band Last Will at various points between 1985 and 1986. If you wanted to be a stickler for authenticity, you could say that only bands that sound like those four exemplars could claim to be metalcore bands. If you take the hardcore formula and incorporate a couple of tweaks to it, you get something very much descended from, but still different enough from, hardcore to need its own moniker. Let’s say the drummer uses double bass all the time, the singer screams and/or growls the lyrics instead of shouting them, and the drum breakdowns become all-band breakdowns and slow down even further, into chugging intense percussive passages. Let’s say all those stylistic tweaks came primarily from another genre, like Death Metal. Then you could call that style of hardcore metallic hardcore or metalcore.

Rogue -like, -lite and not at all like

In 1980 a video game called Rogue was published. It was based around a set of gameplay systems that worked together to make a very specific type of game. In short, it spawned a new genre, which by 1993 had come to be known as roguelike games. Roguelike games shared certain defining features: ⊕Within fans of the original Rogue game and its immediate offshoots, the differences that are discussed tend to be about whether good equipment in game is hard to find (Hack-like games) or hard to upgrade (Moria-like games), whether game levels once generated persist for the entire playthrough (Hack-like games) or regenerate every time you enter them (Moria-like games), and whether or not there is a non-trivial plot (Moria-like games usually have one, Hack-like usually don’t)

Permadeath - the consequences of your actions cannot be rolled back, and dying in game ends the game and erases your save game.
Procedural Generation - the levels of the game are generated anew for each new game you start, in order to create infinite replayability.
Turn-Based - Thinking carefully about your actions is encouraged by giving you all the time you need between moves to decide on your actions.
Non-Modal Clean Runs - There is no “meta-progression”, every action in the game is available at all times, and no “unlocks” or other advantages persist between playthroughs.

I have been a fan, and player, of Rogue-like games since the late 1980s.I know it was after 1987 because NetHack was already out but was relatively new, and before 1990 because Angband had not been released yet. In particular, I have been a dedicated player of NetHack for 30+ years, and I am always on the lookout for new Hack-style Rogue-like games. For me, and I am pretty certain I speak for a lot of old-heads here, the above four defining features are non-negotiable. They are the very essence of what makes the genre what it is. There are plenty of cool games that have come out since the late 80’s that incorporate one or more different aspects of the definition into their gameplay. I have played a lot of them, and I like them.

I am pretty certain that procedural generation is one of the best ways to make a game replayable, and I gravitate towards games with it regardless of genre. As a matter of fact, one of my current favorite games, Zero Sievert is a weird combination of procedural generation and the extraction shooter genre.

I enjoy games with serious consequences for in-game actions, and I vastly prefer games with permadeath to those without it. Dwarf Fortress is awesome because it allows you to fail in so many permanent ways.

I enjoy the slower pace of turn-based games that reward lateral thinking and experimentation, and I am always on the lookout for good examples of them. The XCOM series, particularly Enemy Unknown, polishes the turn-based combat mechanic to a high-gloss sheen.

I deeply dislike games that fake replayability through forcing the player to grind through essentially identical runs of a game in order to unlock “upgrades” that do little more than allow you to rerun the identical level(s) faster. Essentially I am uninterested in Incremental or Idle style games.

Game	Permadeath	Procedural Generation	Turn-Based	Clean Runs
Hades				❌
Slay the Spire				❌
Binding of Isaac			❌	❌
Dead Cells			❌
Darkest Dungeon				❌
Enter the Gungeon			❌	❌
Spelunky			❌
Rogue Legacy	❌	❌	❌	❌