Games

I mean, its not about the art style, its about the gameplay loop.

I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an "action roguelike" a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don't functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren't roguelikes?

My red lines are:

• Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I'd accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.

• At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I'd definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps -- Tales of Mag'eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say -- roguelikes.

• At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.

• Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.

Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:

• Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn't call a first-person grid-based game -- and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure -- a roguelike.

• Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn't rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player's "mind" is controlling.

I don't think that I'd make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I've played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That's a big part of the game.