Survivors-likes! This is the new genre we’re studying! The term is a portmanteau of “survivor” and “roguelike”. Easily confused with “games like Vampire Survivors” which this spreadsheet tracks.

Survivor comes from the horde survival mechanic and the name of two early games, Vampire Survivors and Magic Survival, as well as about 150 other similar games with survivor in their title.

Roguelike refers to the features pulled from the roguelike and roguelite subgenres. Most survivors-likes are technically roguelites, but survivors-lite sounds like a survivors adjacent game and most fans don’t make a distinction with the rogue-ish features.

We take a broad definition of this because we’re excited to see a lot of variation and invention in the genre! There are many other features people feel are important in a survivors-like and we try to compare many of them in our scale!