ET challenged my idea of fun, and won! (eventually...) Definitely in the top 10 2600 games, and probably the best dungeon crawler on the platform. The competition is pretty lousy - Superman and Adventure aren't exactly masterpieces.
This is exactly what I mean by cloning being a big issue with genres. If you clone a game, you haven't made a new game, it's just a reskin of another one. A lot of these arbitrary (often outright undefinable) metrics boil down to "is a literal one-for-one clone of Rogue". This attitude kind of annoys me about the scene when even tiny changes could create the illusion that you're actually playing a new game.
I've been successfully reverse-trolled with its claim of the labyrinths of Toejam+Earl not being "dungeons".
Seriously though, putting the "single controllable avatar at a time" metric as "low value" is something I'll never agree with. It's literally the most important aspect of the genre, only "space matters" is as important: it's an in-between space between realtime and turn based games. Round robin inputs slow the game to an absolute unplayable crawl (the second character halves the impact of your inputs, the third thirds, etc). Action Point systems try to simulate the visceral immediacy of choosing between moving through space and action, but they still compress several seconds of time into a single round.
.... .... I kind of want someone to make a roguelike where you walk through a mall and are given missions to buy certain things. ... not enough for me to be that guy......