Is it an RPG?

[Rob Lang]

[kylesgames]

Betrayal at the House on the Hill is another game that I think is interesting to look at; it has characters that fit all the horror tropes, but you never really hear people play it and talking about what their character did: it's what they did.

Of course, that happens with true roleplaying games as well. In the case of BatHotH the issue is just exacerbated because it's clear at some point that they were working on the story for people to get into and I've never actually seen it happen: the stories that arise are always due to mechanics (and only when mechanics work in unexpected ways), not character-building.

[Nicephorus]

I think it's mostly an rpg. I think there's a bit of genius here in that it skips a big stumbling block. Character creation presents a blank slate where a new player has to create a whole persona before they really understand the world or what they're doing. There are so many ill defined options that it can create mental paralysis. By saying, "start with these cards, and go from there." you are getting them over that hump.

As others have said a bit of a persistent world and persistent characters would make it more of an rpg. They're also right that an evolving game would achieve this without a ton of world building. An example of this is the Pathfinder Card Game where players have a deck that is their character. As they get new gear and abilities, their deck evolves. If there is a random deck played against that represents a villain or the environment, it would be easy to add/subtract cards from the deck for the next starting situation - bonus points if the changes are the outcome of player actions. Maybe also give players an option to discard one of the cards that describe them and get a new one.