I recently tried a video game from a genre I never knew about – a roguelite game called Returnal – and I was surprised by the powerful effects it had on my motivation and willingness to persist through its high level of difficulty and frequent failure experiences. Returnal is infamous for its brutally high difficulty level which is usually a turnoff for me, but I found myself strangely compelled to master the game’s punishing learning curve in a way few games have provoked in me before. What was going on here?
I started reading up about roguelites and roguelikes and learned that punishing difficulty is a common feature in this genre of games. Fans of these two closely‐related genres love the high level of challenge paired with the “permadeath” mechanic where every time you die in the game, you start over at the beginning with all your progress wiped out. This seems like it would be a huge de-motivator for players, but instead roguelike games are also famous for being infinitely replayable, for actually motivating players to persist and try again, with players logging hundreds or thousands of hours into the same game, happily playing the same level over and over. Why?
Producing motivation in learners is the holy grail of gamification in education and instructional design, and getting learners to engage with truly challenging tasks and persist through failure to try again is similarly critical to supporting struggling learners. These are also things that elearning course modules do worse than human teachers in real‐time interactions with learners. So how does the programming of these games succeed where most eLearning fails?
I wanted to understand the learning psychology behind roguelike games to see if we can harness some of what makes them so compelling in our learning design work. This blog post is an attempt to synthesize the best thinking about motivation, persistence, and playability in gaming crossed with the psychology of learning.
Good design, not gamification
For the record, I remain proudly skeptical of gamification in education. Though I am an enthusiastic gamer myself, I don’t believe that games are ideally suited for teaching skills and content within the constraints of formal education institutions or workplace training programs.
Why? Good games are often measured in time spent playing – the best thing you can say about a game is that it’s “addictive”, meaning that the player becomes highly motivated to play the game over and over again.
Teaching and learning in schools and workplaces must be time‐efficient. We have more content to teach than we have time to do it in, so efficiency is critical in these contexts. Getting learners “addicted” to playing a repetitive game is not an efficient use of their time, especially if there’s little relationship between “time on task” and learning outcomes achieved. This is why gamified courses look mostly like ordinary courses with some gimmicky game mechanics sprinkled on top – the goal of teaching is to share knowledge (hopefully efficiently for everyone’s time), not just to enthrall and entertain for endless hours the way games can.
So this post is not about “what if we made roguelites educational?” It’s more about “what design inspiration can we take from roguelites to make eLearning experiences feel as urgent, as relevant, as self‐directed as roguelites?” This is a fruitful path that can inform the work we create. Just don’t call it gamification.
What characterizes a roguelike/ roguelite game?
A note on terminology: There are real technical differences between roguelites and roguelikes but they’re more alike than different. What’s more, the wide variety of games in these two genres actively blur the distinctions between them, so it’s hard to talk about them as two distinct genres. We’ll go into the differences below, but this article may freely use the terms “roguelike” and “roguelite” interchangeably. I’ll also use the term “roguish” for when we’re talking about these two closely‐related genres and the characteristics they both share.
Roguelikes are games that share a specific set of characteristics with the seminal 1980 game Rogue, while Roguelites follow only a subset of those rules while embracing a wider variety of genres and gameplay mechanics.
Roguish games share a few key features:
- high difficulty – roguelikes set the challenge bar high, expect players to die frequently, learn from their mistakes, and progress through the game only after having mastered key gameplay actions
- procedural generation and replayability – game levels are generated dynamically by an algorithm, not designed by a human, so the game changes in important ways every time the player replays the game. This builds a sense of unpredictability into the game, as even when you’re playing a level you’ve been to before, it’s never quite the same as it was before. You can’t memorize specific things to look for, so you’re encouraged to understand the game mechanics deeply and use that knowledge improvisationally to overcome unpredictable challenges you encounter.
- “permadeath” – In roguelikes, when the character dies, all progress is wiped out and the player must start again from the beginning without any of the enhancements they’ve collected along the way. Roguelites soften the difficulty somewhat by letting players keep certain enhancements that persist through death and help them on future runs. This makes roguelites more forgiving, allowing less skilled players to progress by trying multiple times and accumulating advantages that will help them in later runs, while roguelike players can only progress by developing their own skillset to overcome the game’s high difficulty.
- exploration and resource management – the character finds items along the way to enhance their character and adjust key conditions of the gameplay, such as health, damage output, and more. These items can confer advantages or even disadvantages to change the game in interesting ways moving forward. The player has an unusually high degree of freedom to choose, discard, and combine these resources creatively to change key conditions of the game. It’s even possible to “break” the game difficulty by combining upgrades in such a way that the player becomes overpowered and can win with ease.
Before we go too far – are these games I might have heard of?
I have played and loved video games for most of my (nearly 50 year) life – I’ve followed the progression from Atari through Nintendo, PCs to consoles, from the 80s to today. In all that time I had heard of but never investigated the genre of games called roguelikes (and the closely related) roguelites.
There are over 8000 games on the Steam Store tagged as roguelikes/ roguelites but the ones mainstream gamers might’ve heard of include Hades, Returnal, Balatro, Dead Cells, or Slay the Spire. There are also less well‐known “classics” of the genre like The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Rogue Legacy, Spelunky, and Vampire Survivors, that are spoken of with respect and awe in roguelike forums but might not be familiar to mainstream audiences.
Roguelikes are having something of a moment in 2025, and mega‐budget game franchises like Elden Ring, God of War, and Hitman have released spin‐off roguelike games set in the universe of their blockbuster game worlds. Still the vast majority of roguelikes/roguelites are from smaller independent developers with smaller budgets and simpler graphics who manage to keep players enthralled with their compelling variations on the core roguish gameplay features so beloved by this genre’s fans. Poking around in the spaces roguelike lovers dwell online opens up a small and passionate world of enthusiasts who love these games more than any other.
Roguelites and Motivation
It seems paradoxical that roguelike games, expressly designed to be extremely difficult and kill you off right away, would actually attract a loyal following of players willing to play them over and over again for hundreds of hours, to play the game multiple different ways in an attempt to progress. Do these games just attract masochists? Or do they subtly condition the player to embrace the cycle of trying, failing, and trying again to “come back stronger” ?
I found myself being “shaped” or “coached” by Returnal to get over my natural aversion to dying in video games, to see the deaths as a part of the process, and to start to think forward beyond each individual death to the long‐game strategy that would get me to my goal. Each run becomes an experiment in changing little things about your gameplay, making different choices each time, and seeing how those affect your fortunes. If your experiment fails, it gives you a clearer idea of how you can overcome it next time.
This is consistent with my belief as an educator that learners thrive when they have the freedom to try, fail, reflect, and try again. Too often in learning/training, learners are given one chance within a narrow time window to prove their understanding of new material. It is inherently motivating for a learner/player to know that they can experiment in ways that make sense to them, monitoring feedback, and adjusting performance to get the outcomes they want. All it takes is time on task, sustained attention, and compelling activities that reward multiple attempts.
Building motivating experiences, then, requires us to create safe spaces where learners are challenged to master new skills and knowledge above their currently ability, given timely feedback of the success of their attempts, and multiple tries to achieve the outcomes they want. This is the opposite of “dumbing down” curriculum – as in roguelikes, the level of challenge stays high, and the learner progresses through skill and perseverence. The courseware must be optimized to support this virtuous cycle.
Roguelites and Player Progression
The thing that separates roguelites from roguelikes is that they grant the player lasting advantages the more times they try and fail, making initial runs harder but later runs successively easier as they progress. True roguelikes don’t do this – they start the difficulty high and the only way a player can advance is by increasing their skill.
The second roguelite I played, Hades, also structures its experience so that advantages are meted out gradually after each player death brings them back “home” to the House of Hades where they can regroup, re‐tool, and set out again. Interacting with various Gods of Olympus so they’ll bless your run creates vastly different patterns of play that change the experience every time. These boons from the Olympian gods grow more powerful over repeated attempts, and the player can leverage these to advance more effectively through the game.
What do roguelite players love about the genre?
I asked in a roguelite forum what seasoned players like about games in this genre, and their responses rang true with my experience. The sections below are a synthesis of those answers and my interpretation.
Roguelites and repetition
These games inspired me to go back and watch Groundhog Day, the classic comedy about a man cursed to re‐live the same day over and over. The comedy turns existential after Bill Murray’s character has lived the same day hundreds, maybe thousands of times, learning everything there is to know about the tiny Pennsylvania town he’s trapped in and all of its inhabitants:
A similar scene in Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow depicts a conversation he’s had hundreds of times, trying and failing to convince a tough army general to help him until finally he succeeds:
In these stories, the hero prevails simply because they have tried every possible path forward, made every mistake, and come back again to finally prevail, finding the only way to truly progress.
The Curse of Infinity
Of course, human learners do not have infinite patience for infinite tries, infinite failures, with no guarantee that they will succeed. The characters in these stories feel cursed with the power to relive the same moment over again. If they had their way, they would move forward, or even give up – anything to escape the endless cycle of trying and failing. And yet, it is precisely because they persevere that they eventually succeed.
This infinite try‐fail‐try‐succeed loop is how AI machine learning works. Researchers use computers’ ability to perform the same action millions of times, rewarding it for achieving desirable outcomes. AIs learn to recognize the difference between an apple and a cat by looking at millions of pictures of apples and cats until they’ve seen all the variations and can differentiate them accurately. This is why CAPTCHA tests ask us humans to tell the difference between a bus and a crosswalk – because those are the ambiguous edge‐case images that the computer needs our help telling apart.
Of course we humans have far less patience for repetitive tasks that machines or even enthusiastic gamers do – we like to do things once and be done. Often if something isn’t done right the first time, teachers often will refuse to grade a second try (that’s “cheating”, isn’t it?) and learners will refuse to try again for fear of wasting effort and suffering the disappointment and shame of failure a second time.
I have successfully redesigned training programs into experiences that embrace the “long tail” – to be woven into learners’ and workers’ schedules over time rather than force fed once and never again.
I asked in a roguelite Reddit forum:
How would you explain the extreme replayability of roguelite games? What motivates you to put hundreds of hours into them? What specific mechanics made the difference between the ones you stick with and the ones you drop?
I got some very thoughtful and generous responses from members of this passionate subculture of gamers, telling me what about roguelites compels them to spend hundreds of hours replaying a single game.
Themes include:
Trusting the player with greater autonomy and decision making
As opposed to conventional games, roguelikes give the player an unusually high degree of control over their own experience. The game exposes its core mechanics to the player through frequent decision points, and allows them to change key conditions of the way the game works so they can experiment with different “builds” to better match their play style and increase their chances of success on their run.
For example, in Returnal your character encounters alien parasites that give you both an enhancement (like automatically regaining some health after every enemy defeated) AND a penalty (like taking damage every time you pick up an item). The player makes a risk/reward judgement to see whether the benefit is worth the drawback, and they have to alter their play style going forward to avoid negative consequences. There are multiple overlapping systems like this in the game, resulting in each run feeling very different as your customizations interact in varied ways.
A firm‐but‐gentle place to try‐fail‐try‐succeed
As devastating as it can feel to die over and over again in a roguish game, players appreciate the feeling of transparency about the reasons why they failed – it’s valuable feedback so they can adjust future attempts and overcome past mistakes. The experience of playing these games feels like the game is training you, coaching you, in the skills you need to be successful in it. The level of difficulty remains high, but the criteria for success are also highly visible to the player.
Asking the player “how far will you get” through a challenging, endless task?
Many roguish games are truly endless due to their algorithmic level generation, and yet players continue playing to see how far they can progress through the endless levels of the game. Early roguelikes used the marketing message “how far will you get” to the game’s end goal. There is a thrill in knowing clearly what your end goal looks like and being shown clearly how far along that path your current skill level can bring you.
In Hades, your protagonist is the prince of the underworld, son of Hades, in this Greek‐mythology inspired game. His goal is battle his way out of the land of the dead and up to the surface to escape his father’s influence (mostly out of a sense of relatable teenage rebellion). There are five levels of the underworld to battle through, and actually making it successfully is nearly impossible to do on your first try. Again, there are lots of game criteria you can experiment with to see which will give you the edge you need to successfully defeat your grumpy dad and reach the land of the living. As you play through, you realize that the journey is as important and enjoyable as the destination.
Creating a “sandbox” or laboratory full of toys and tools for the user to combine creatively, rather than a linear one‐size‐fits‐all experience
- Sufficient number of meaningful mechanics and systems
- Randomization across a sufficient number of those mechanics/systems
- Sufficiently distinct starting states
- Sufficiently meaningful control over the game state
- Sufficiently enjoyable core gameplay loop
- Sufficient depth (this could be in meta progression, character mechanics, game scaling, etc) to facilitate game runs feeling purposeful
- Sufficient brevity in runs to feel accessible and not exhausting
A rigid set of rules perceptible to the player, while giving them freedom and tools to follow (or even break) those rules
The upgrade mechanics in roguelike games are often highly detailed, spelling out what specific upgrades or penalties will result from using each in gameplay. Roguelike players love deep upgrade systems full of discoverable synergies – where upgrades can stack on each other and create multiplier effects that dramatically affect gameplay. The most beloved roguelikes put an outsized effort into making these game mechanics discoverable and comprehensible to the player. Similarly, great eLearning should make the intended outcomes of instruction transparent to the learner, and all elements of the course design should reinforce and support that intended learning outcome.
Progress is continuous (endless) but game sessions can be short
Roguelike games are called “runs”, and they are expected to be short enough that a player can finish one in a single half‐hour sitting. This is great for busy players who want to get a sense of accomplishment amidst other responsibilities, since you can play, make progress, and die within a short time window. Roguelite players like being able to see the results of their forward progression as they unlock key game upgrades that will improve their fortunes in future runs. Having progress be visible and transparent to the end user is great design practice for eLearning as well, so learners can budget their time and feel a sense of accomplishment after working for a reasonable stretch of time.
Zone of Proximal Development – letting the player feel a strong degree of challenge while giving them the support they need (or at least the transparency they need) to reach a very ambitious goal.
“It’s the fact they respect u as a gamer. If you want easy go for a walk or play ubisoft games or story games. If you want to feel challenged and rewarded in success the best games give u that” — JimBoonie69
Permadeath is a motivator, not a de‐motivator
Yes, that feeling of “how far can you get” was constantly with me in Returnal and it really raises the emotional stakes. Like you say – you realize how much work it was to get there and how fragile your progress is at that point. At that point, though, I still had options. I realized I could progress in a variety of different ways – that I didn’t just have to follow the linear progression that the devs had laid out, as is so common in other AAA games I’ve played. That feeling of agency, of being in control is extremely motivating. I went in thinking “permadeath” would be just plain frustrating, but instead it challenged me to form a strategy that included dying on my way to my goal. Dying was not the simple showstopper it is in most games – It was part of the journey and just another challenge to think through. That’s incredibly empowering. — Me
Roguelite game mechanics in teacher‐speak
Permadeath
Even though it sounds a lot less “🤘metal🤘”, we educators might call this a “try‐fail‐try again‐succeed loop”. It’s good teaching practice to create a safe space where learners are not penalized harshly for trying, even if they fail at first. The ideal approach is for learners to be able to try, possibly fail, receive timely feedback about their performance, and incorporate that feedback into subsequent attempts until they achieve the desired learning outcome.
At first look, permadeath sounds like it would hurt learner motivation, except for one thing – you get to try again. Think about all the times in teaching and learning where you only get one chance to get a good grade, and never get another opportunity to show what you know. The weekly pop quizzes we endured where we weren’t allowed to know ahead of time what to study, and our permanent educational records were tarnished by every missed question on a high stakes exam. A game where you play through, see what’s required, die, and start over until you succeed is positively humane by comparison.
By structuring games into short runs where players can freely experiment with different play styles, see the effects of the changes they make in the form of instant game feedback, and adjust their approach on future tries means they eventually practice their way to better performance organically.
The takeaway to educators is to design experiences where learners can plunge right ahead, see what’s required of them (maybe with a low‐stakes, ungraded assessment), receive instant feedback and reteaching about the questions they missed, and get the chance to try again until their graded performance actually meets or exceeds the desired learning outcomes.
This may require you to invest more of your development time and effort into creating great interactive assessment tools with specific feedback rather than spending all your time making a beautiful slide presentation that learners will see once and never again.
High Difficulty, Transparent Success Criteria, and Player Progression
These games start hard, stay hard, but they give you multiple tries and they also gradually introduce “power ups” designed to help the player to eventually achieve success. In education this sounds very similar to keeping the learner in the zone of proximal development – a perfect “goldilocks” state of challenge calibrated to the learner’s starting abilities. Tasks in the ZPD start off difficult (because they are above the learner’s beginning level of skill) but are within the range that the learner could reach within the time allotted with appropriate effort and instructional guidance/support towards that goal.
Too often, it’s not clear to the learner what successful performance looks like, so they don’t know how to demonstrate success. Often teachers and trainers deliver training without specifying clear learning objectives first.
Pre‐ and post‐ testing
Offering a diagnostic exam at the beginning of training and a summative exam at the end (based on the same learning objectives) can help document the growth learners made from the beginning to the end of that experience. It can also make transparent to the learner exactly what they’ll be expected to know and be able to do as a result of training. Roguelikes function this way, since the initial experience is usually brutally, demoralizingly difficult. Players get a visceral sense of their inexperience with the game mechanics, but gradually that sense is replaced by an authentic satisfaction and confidence that they have actually grown better at the game. We use pre‐ and post‐ testing in our eLearning courses to document learner growth over the duration of a course, and making this transparent to the learner also shows them directly that they have improved as a result of instruction.
References:
What Are Roguelites? A Deep Dive | HackerNoon
Roguelike vs. Roguelite Games: The Differences, Explained – whatNerd