“You shouldn’t call video game genres [thing]likes because” buddy, it’s a natural transitional state. Lots of video game genres started out being named after their most notable entry or entries. FPSes used to be called “Doom clones” before evolving their own terminology. Some genres never do, and people just forget about the original game and keep the name. How many roguelike fans are familiar with Rogue? How many adventure game fans even know the genre is named after a game called Adventure?
False cognate, I’m afraid. The term “adventure game” originated in the 1970s to describe the various imitators of a specific piece of parser-driven interactive fiction called Colossal Cave Adventure, whose title was often abbreviated simply to Adventure to save space. That’s why the term “adventure game” is particularly associated with point-and-click hidden object games with complex inventory puzzles (i.e., because they’re graphical Adventure-likes), and why parser-driven interactive fiction games are often informally called “text adventures” (i.e., to distinguish them from Adventure-likes with graphics).
Also for what it’s worth, “[thing]like” is so much more pleasant to read fifty thousand times than the many combinations of:
base building
open-world
survival
PvP
PvE
crafting
resource management
With deckbuilding elements
Deck Building: the Deck-Building Deck Building Game, where you build a deck
as for action-adventure, that largely stems from how early Nintendo games would be categorized as “adventure” games if they took place in a continuous world rather than a series of discrete levels, e.g. the original Legend of Zelda. eventually, “action-” was appended to the front in order to differentiate the lineage from text-based and graphical/point-and-click adventure games.
(also note that the usage of “action-adventure” was, for a while, also in a transitional phase where some people used it, some people didn’t, and others used it inconsistently, or with a different interpretation of exactly what it meant, throughout the 2010s, like many transitional phases of language)
i’ll hold firm that the genre “roguelikes” should be reserved for turn-based top-down RPGs where death is permanent and each run is entirely new (Caves of Qud, DCSS, Nethack, ToME, etc.) and “roguelites” should be for games that step outside the core genre concept and simply have perma-death, often with incremental bonuses between runs. alternately, rename “roguelites” to “hadeslikes”
The only problem with doing that is that despite hades being very high quality and wildly popular, it was made well after the rouguelite genre became popular and widely recognized.
If anything, rouguelites should be named for the Binding of Isaac.
If we’re gonna be very pedantic, the precision puzzle platformer was initially popularised outside of Flash-game circles by Super Meat Boy (2010), which was in turn derivative of Maddy Thorson’s Jumper (2004) – yes, the same Maddy Thorson who later made Celeste. This means a.Celeste didn’t popularise the genre, it merely took back the crown; and b. if any sort of [thing]like title is warranted, our choices are either jumplikes or meatlikes – neither of them great options!
