Hand-drawn, brutally atmospheric, and enormous for its price. It respects your intelligence and punishes your impatience. I bounced off it twice before it clicked — then it swallowed 40 hours.
Every run tells you more story, and the writing is good enough that losing feels like progress. The combat is the tightest in the genre. This is the one I hand to people who "don't like roguelikes."
It looks like a spreadsheet and plays like a slot machine designed by a genius. One more run turns into four hours with alarming ease. Made by one person. Genuinely dangerous.
The tightest controls in any platformer, wrapped around a story about anxiety that lands harder than it has any right to. Assist mode means anyone can finish it. The B-sides broke me.
Platformer · Maddy Makes Games · 20h played · 2018
You barely press buttons and somehow can't stop playing. A dopamine slot machine that spawned a hundred imitators. I got my money's worth ten times over, then walked away satisfied.
By day you spearfish, by night you run a sushi bar. It should be a mess, and instead it's one of the most charming loops of the last few years. Currently mid-run and thoroughly hooked.
Looks like cute top-down Zelda, actually a dense puzzle box where the in-game instruction manual is the real game. When it clicks, it's one of the best 'aha' moments in years.
Action-Adventure · Andrew Shouldice · 9h played · 2022
Frantic, gross, gorgeous fake-90s cartoon energy. Movement so fast it took me a level to stop panicking. On the backlog because I need to be in exactly the right mood for this much chaos.
A 22-minute time loop and a solar system full of secrets. The whole game is knowledge — once you know a thing, you know it forever. On the backlog and I'm guarding it from spoilers with my life.
The base-building cult half is genuinely great. The combat half is fine but repetitive, and once the novelty of the loop faded I stopped booting it up. Dropped, not out of dislike — just drift.
Roguelike · Massive Monster · 11h played · 2022
Dropped
Forest Quartz
Beautiful early-access world, but the systems don't hold together yet and progression stalls hard. Dropped until a couple more updates land — the bones are there, the loop isn't.
Survival · Various (early access) · 6h played · 2024