There was a linguistic shift that happened and what the term Roguelike means changed dramatically. Roguelike used to refer to a game based pretty closely on Rogue: procedurally generated dungeons, perma-death, item identification, a hunger mechanic, a specific implementation of turn based combat. Even ASCII graphics were considered necessary for some people. There was an organization formed to police the boundaries of what constituted a Roguelike that was, for better or worse, like the Académie Française in its pedantry.
In Japan, Roguelikes never went out of style in the same way because traditional dungeon crawlers kept being made. So Roguelike elements found there way into games as diverse as Azure Dreams and Baroque.
It took longer for American devs to realize that the basic joys of a Roguelike: the novelty of procedurally generated content, the pressure of permadeath, and the risk/reward tradeoff of trying to go down one more floor. Once indie devs caught the Roguelike bug, it became an epidemic of inserting elements of a Roguelike into every genre imaginable. This new genre was deemed the Roguelite, though this didn't make the Rogue purists happy as they had a much more restrictive definition. And some people just call them all Roguelikes.
Personally, I love both Roguelikes and Roguelites, whatever you want to call them. Slay the Spire is one of the greatest video games ever made, and that wouldn't exist without Rogue, even though on the surface it shares very little in common with its ancestor. Under the surface you find the same joys: risk/reward, high difficulty, just one more run.
Yeah, I did go down that rabbit hole several years ago. It is what it is.
One big part of it for me are the graphics. If the graphics/UI aren't kind of shitty, it's not going to "feel like Rogue" to me. I don't need ASCII per se, for instance I did most of my Rogue playing on the Mac port in the early/mid-80s.
This isn't the full issue for me though. Take Darkest Dungeon as an example. I love that game. And it checks all the standard boxes, even my "kind of shitty" graphics. But ... it's not Rogue.
Dungeons of Dredmor is kind of ideal: not ASCII but very functional. Same with the Shiren games I've played.
Even if the graphics are clearly better than ASCII, what makes something feel like Rogue is that there's no attempt to hide the artifice. The grid is clearly a restrictive grid. Simple icons are used to represent various types of items. There's something very clearly "programmed." An unidentified item can be broken down into a handful of variables: item type, cursed or not, effect, etc.
In fact, I wonder if Rogue is one of the reasons I got into programming. The first real thing I tried to code was a version of Rogue. The rules are so clearly defined. Playing it is kind of zen.
I'd never thought about it that way, but you're exactly right. Roguelikes that feel like roguelikes always have a certain "open/transparent case" sense to them, even if the actual mechanics are hidden away from you a lot (such as in NetHack). They make a virtue out of not feeling curated and crafted (even though there's a lot of craft that goes into them), and the more narrative, cinematic quality, visual polish, etc. that gets added the less it feels like Rogue.
Honestly, I think the closest experience to a classic Roguelike is playing Minesweeper or Solitaire. Most of the time your next move is pretty clear, but you always reach a point where you have incomplete information and you have to way the risk/reward of, say, trying that armor on or zapping that tough enemy with a wand of polymorph. Not a lot of video games really lean into incomplete information as a core mechanic. Experimentation is necessary to figure out all the interactions.
Though to be honest, I like my Roguelikes pretty limited in scope. I could never get into Nethack because it felt like the number of factors you needed to take into account outstripped my working memory. I found myself going to a wiki, which isn't my favorite activity.
And if we want to really get nerdy about the history of game design, I have a theory about Dark Souls. Dark Souls is a roguelike/lite... but without the three gameplay elements considered most necessary to be a descendant of Rogue: there's no permadeath, it's not turn based, and it's not procedurally generated. And yet... no other game of its era leaned as hard into the idea of incomplete information, high challenge, necessity for experimentation, and risk/reward calculations.
The history of games is so cool, because nothing ever gets forgotten. There's always some visionary who grew up on some genre of game considered outdated and niche but who can adapt that genre into a new form which can find a fresh audience.
In Japan, Roguelikes never went out of style in the same way because traditional dungeon crawlers kept being made. So Roguelike elements found there way into games as diverse as Azure Dreams and Baroque.
It took longer for American devs to realize that the basic joys of a Roguelike: the novelty of procedurally generated content, the pressure of permadeath, and the risk/reward tradeoff of trying to go down one more floor. Once indie devs caught the Roguelike bug, it became an epidemic of inserting elements of a Roguelike into every genre imaginable. This new genre was deemed the Roguelite, though this didn't make the Rogue purists happy as they had a much more restrictive definition. And some people just call them all Roguelikes.
Personally, I love both Roguelikes and Roguelites, whatever you want to call them. Slay the Spire is one of the greatest video games ever made, and that wouldn't exist without Rogue, even though on the surface it shares very little in common with its ancestor. Under the surface you find the same joys: risk/reward, high difficulty, just one more run.