"Rougelike" is such an obscure name for an obscure subculture, even google trends confirms that this isn't Baader-Meinhoff syndrome for me as nobody was using this term and still aren't. Its proof that all the favorite "relatable" reviewers on youtube and twitch were fed a script for Returnal because now Rougelike is in their vocabulary as if it was in the gamer lexicon the whole time.
but anyway, I guess there is no better simple term for it. Even saying "Groundhogday-esque" just replaces a game-that-tried-a-concept with a movie-that-tried-a-concept.
What? Rogue-like has been in the gamer vocabulary for years, certainly well before Returnal. Returnal might be one of the few AAA rogue-like games[1], but the term is very common in indie video game circles. Common enough to warrant sub-terms like rogue-lite and plenty of digital ink has been spilled trying to narrow in on what it actually means.
1: One could make a very reasonable case that the Diablo series is a rogue-like or at least a rogue-lite, but I don't know how much the term was applied to it at the time of release.
My understanding is that the term "rogue-lite" came about sometime around / after the Berlin Interpretation of what it means for a game to be rogue-like was agreed upon. It's called the Berlin Interpretation because it was discussed during the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin in 2008.
So, Diablo and Diablo 2 being released in 1996 and 2000, they pre-date at least common usage of the term "rogue-lite".
There have been plenty of games with over 1 million in sales being labelled as roguelike in the past decade or so, for example: FTL, Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells. You might note that each of these games has a completely different style of gameplay to the point where the roguelike label is only describing the format, similar to a game being single-player vs. multi-player or competitive vs. cooperative. I'm somewhat surprised by deck-building games in particular using the Roguelike label as they are more or less procedural and "permadeath" by definition.
I've seen "run-based" being used to describe the format, which isn't quite as catchy of a term but gets the point across better.
"Traditional roguelike" is how I've started searching for games such as Angband which are actually, well, like Rogue.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rougelik...
but anyway, I guess there is no better simple term for it. Even saying "Groundhogday-esque" just replaces a game-that-tried-a-concept with a movie-that-tried-a-concept.