What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[ArmyOfOptimists]

Well, that's the point of the "lite" bit. And brute-forcing things usually isn't in the cards in any case, since straight numerical bonuses are often run-specific, not part of the meta progression. Eg. Slay the Spire is often referred to as a Rogue-lite, because it has meta-progression. But said progression is ONLY in the form of unlocking new items/cards/options that you can find in future playthroughs.

It's sort of like if when first playing NetHack you could only start as Tourist, but by completing certain bonus objectives in a run could unlock other classes. I don't think that would in any respect constitute "brute forcing" a run, since most classes are equally viable if you know what you're doing.

There are a lot of Roguelites where stat progression is the default. Rogue Legacy and Hades come to mind, to the point where I've met many people who think grinding meta-progress is a core feature of the genre. There's also Vampire Survivors and its many derivatives where meta-progress is expected, though I don't like calling those Roguelites.

I tend to stick to classifying traditional turn-based, tile-based, Rogue-inspired games as "Roguelikes" and there's still a lot of those being made, Quasimorph and Cogmind are fairly recent additions. Games that take the spirit of Rogue and deviate further out of turn-based or tile-based RPGs, like Enter the Gungeon or Slay the Spire, are "Roguelites." Anything that adds meta-progress beyond variety (unlocking new classes or items) ceases to be Rogue-anything at that point. If you aren't starting from zero every run, you aren't that far off most non-Rogue games that set you back some amount of progress on death.

It's sort of like how Soulslike has been stretched so thin that any game that has a stamina bar or loss of currency on death is now a Soulslike. Heck, I've seen some people put Armored Core 6 in the Soulslike category simply because it's made by FromSoftware, which is a terrible way to classify anything.