I've been forming an idea of a type of game I'd like to play for a while now. I still haven't fully articulated it, so please forgive any contradictions or imprecision in this top post.

The basic idea is "Like NetHack, but more of an open world/repeated exploration feel." Basically, I want the base game as intended to maintain the generated levels for longer than "until a character dies." Also, some sort of overworld or fast travel between areas is probably necessary to get the feel I'm looking for.

So, procedurally generated levels in the style of NetHack, the same style of high fantasy, overhead square grid with 8-way movement, etc. But designed to make it easy/meaningful to revisit the areas that have already been explored. With a world map that is less linear than NetHack/Rogue.

I want the generated levels to be tied to a particular savefile, with every new start having its own seed to generate the levels.

As to permadeath, I don't particularly care if it has permadeath or not, so long as the exploration already done isn't nuked along with character death. If it has a more modern non-permadeath system, that's fine. If it has an endlessly refreshing cast of characters rotated through upon character deaths, that's fine, too.

If it uses an overworld for travel and linking things together, it's fine if that overworld isn't procedurally generated, as long as the individual dungeons are procedurally generated, but stay the same within a particular save file tree stemming from a single start-of-game creation seed.

I've been looking around at roguelites for the past few weeks, and haven't yet seen anything that feels more or less like what I'm looking for.

I've been playing Sproggiwood, and it's fun, but differs pretty wildly from what I'm looking for. The graphics, smoothness of play, and style of combat and tactics are all spot on or pretty close to what I'm looking for, though.