Kiri-ai: The Duel

A very efficient little game once you get the rules down.

This 16 card game represents a fight between two samurai on a cliff. One card is the battle field, a series of pips along the center with either short or long sets (flip side). Each player has a samurai card which shows their stance (Heaven or Earth), if they are injured (on the flip side) and you place this at an angle on a pip to show where you are standing.   

On a turn each player will play two cards and then take back the second one, leaving the other card as "exhausted" for the next round. Repeat until one or both samurai take two hits. Movement always happens first, followed by attacks which can only succeed depending on your stance. Heaven hits 2 pips away, Earth hits 1 pip away. Both have a stab that hits right beside you.

There are also 3 special "one shot" move cards which get randomly assigned to each player each match, with the extra sitting out face down. Two dual hitters and a counter attack (you hit me, but not really - I hit you!). Excellent card quality and container which is an old style Japanese coin purse that you just tie with a string which oozes theme. The rules and imagery might take a bit of getting used to but otherwise its very cool, easy to setup and put away AND is very affordable. Highly recommended!

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (board game) and Uno No Mercy

Games of wrath!

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

In this 1-5 player cooperative game, each player is a character from the World of Warcraft setting out to stop the Lich King who is spawning stationary ghouls and up to three abominations who actively pursue players. He also wanders around making things hurt more if he's in the region. To win, the team must complete three random quests (out of 9) and then complete a final quest at the Lich King's castle by rolling dice and maybe having cards with the right symbol to help push the progress tracker along. 

Combat plays much the same way. Players lose if the despair marker reaches the end of its track: moving twice for any player "killed" and once for each figurine you needed to spawn but have no more of. But how does the game actually play? Almost exactly like Pandemic. 7 hand card limit, do four actions per turn, ghouls spawn in location cards drawn, bad cards wait in player card pile to make things worse. I do quite like that you don't need to do the five of the same cards business this time around which makes it different enough to be interesting for me, but I also think it makes it much easier than any of the other Pandemic games in my collection thus far. :P

Update: Playing will all the scourge cards puts it at an ok difficulty level, always go ahead and do that!

Uno No Mercy

This competitive card game is just like Uno in that you want to be the first one to get rid of all your cards and have to say "Uno" once you're down to one. The no mercy bit comes from all the +plus cards in the deck, like +2 means the next player draws two and loses their turn - BUT the +plus cards stack, so if you have a plus card you can just put that on, and on, and on, until someone needs to pick up a +32 or something. Also, if you ever get 25 or more cards in your hand, you're out which opens up another path to victory: kill all your opponents. Expect tears if played with younger kids. Not the type of game for me.

Carnival of Monsters

In this two to five player competitive card drafting board game, players are trying to earn the most points by displaying an assortment of creatures over the span of four seasons (rounds). Each season has it's own bonus - maybe this time Cave monsters or Ocean monsters get bonuses, but other than that the seasons all play exactly the same: everyone gets eight cards, picks one to play or keep and passes the rest on clockwise or counterclockwise depending on the round number.

Event cards can just be played outright, just like land cards most of the time (yep, some magic the gathering feeling going on here). Monster cards need enough of the correct land type to play them, and staff require enough gold to play them. If you aren't immediately playing your selected card (or your card is a hidden objective that gives you more points at the end) you can store it for the cost of 1 crown. Stored cards can be played in the future whenever you feel like, provided you can cover the cost.

If you can't you can always take a loan which gives you 3 crowns for -5 VP at the end. There's a tiny more to it than that but basically have the highest victory points at the end and you win! It's a fun game with great art that flows pretty smoothly once you get going. Only the dealing of 8 cards to each player at the start of each season is a bit tedious but otherwise an enjoyable and solid game. Recommended!

Fox in the Forest Duet

Designed for klepto couples? :P

In this two person, cooperative trick taking game the goal is to collect all the gems in the forest in time. Both players lose if you run out of forest tokens and need to put one or end the last round with any gems still on the board. How does that actually work? Well, the trick taking part is exactly the same like in Hearts or the Crew. In this game there are three suites and when one player puts down a card (usually the one that "won" the previous trick) the second player must put down a card of the same suite if they have it, or any other card if not.

If it is the same suite then the player with the higher number "wins", and it its not then one of the two happen: the trump suite card wins (randomly chosen at the start of each of the three rounds) and if its not a trump suite then the original suite wins. The cards also have footprint movement values and you use these to determine your movement on the map which consists soley of a single path. If you win the tracker moves that many steps towards you, if you lose it moves that many steps away.

If at any point it falls "off" the map then add a forest token to one end of the path, making it shorter and continue (if you can't its game over). If it doesn't fall off then you can collect any gems attached to that space, then play the next round. The odd number cards also have special powers in addition to nice art which let you do something special like move less, trade a card, switch direction regardless of winner etc. Despite all of those it's still a pretty tough game and one we're still trying to get the hang of. :)

Moving Out and Black Book

Craziness and craziness... but dark?

Moving Out

This cooperative party game for up to four players has you racing the clock to move furniture out of locations and into your truck, often in the most comedic fashion possible as you don't really care about fragile items. Nor do you care about the state of the property! Break those glass windows to make more access points and toss things at the truck to save time, but heavier items will need more hands to lift. Pretty easy controls, but for me its not as fun as the wackiness of Overcooked which is a direct competitor in this genre.

Black Book

Playing as a young woman who lost her love, you naturally do what any sad girl would do: become a witch. Erm what? The art style here leads to some really beautiful scenes but while the game calls itself an RPG you only have a handful of options to choose from at any time. Do you go left or right? Do you advise this person a, b or c? Do you do evil things either to gain power or to not be cursed? You will be dealing with demons regularly so just a heads up if that's not your thing. For me the "card" style combat (thematically its pages of your book) is what turned me off. If I have a book of spells why is it that on my turn I can only pick from x amount that randomly are available to me? Obviously its so that you can't just keep using the super powerful ones over and over but I think some sort of mana system would have suited better. If you can get past that it's an interesting game.

Chupa (Movie) and Organ Attack (Card Game)

Made for kids!?

Chupa

A young boy visits his family in Mexico where they befriend a friendly baby Chupacabra and must hide it from the evil foreign researchers. Despite not being the highest budget film the CGI of the critter is rather nice and the child actors do an OK job. Obviously the entire plot is tailored for a young latino audience so expect to read subtitles if you aren't fluent in Spanish and don't expect high levels of viole... well, anything really. Don't expect high levels of anything. Unless you are this target audience, I suspect you can find better things to watch.

Organ Attack

After distributing organ cards, which are all face up so everyone can see them, each player gets five attack cards which can damage a particular organ (making it hard to target specific people), block damage, return damage or cause necrosis to instakill an organ. The objective is to destroy the organs of your competitors while protecting your own, so you'll be doing cruel things like giving your buddies strokes, multiple sclerosis, rupturing their appendix and other horrible diseases like that.

The art tries to inject humor into this but my gaming group just found it to be horrible theme, especially as we know people who were affected / died to many of the said cards. Not recommended. Exploding Kittens is a better alternative if you are in the market for something similar.

Waiting for Duviri: The Frightening Fifth

After all that fighting it's horror time!

Slain - Back from Hell

This pixel platformer beat em up is basically the same plot of Altered Beast, but with a more metal backing track and less impressive graphics and game play. That's kinda sad as Altered Beast was released in 1988.

Rising Hell

Another pixel platformer with a very vertical slant as you need to escape from hell by going UP while taking souls on the way. Interestingly you get a power up shop to spend said souls almost every 30 seconds which is awesome and goes a long way in breaking the tedium of doing the same thing over and over. Now you get to do the same thing over and over... with breaks!

Darkwood

A top down horror survival where you must scavenge for gear and can only see active threats the direction your character is looking. This means checking your pack and crafting lets you see NOTHING. The lack of color is certainly a stylistic choice, but one that makes the game very bland to look at. That said if you like skulking around dangerous places and having to board up your doors and windows at night (because that's when they come for you) and don't mind a non-intuitive interface and clunky combat this might be for you.

Hell is Others

In this top down horror shooter (which has the same visibility constraint as Darkwood), you need to feed your bonsai with blood while doing a bunch of fetch quests in the horrifying city streets prowled by monsters and "others" (other people: because PvP is easier content to create). Luckily bullets grow on plants because you'll need them... if the matchmaking ever finishes loading. LOL. Should be renamed, Hell is Matchmaking.

Doom64

Ever miss the days in a FPS where you didn't need to reload guns that were smart enough to shoot up and down without you looking up or down, where pistol ammo was the same as chaingun ammo, and where pushing on every wall was the way to open secret passages? If so this nostalgia trip is for you. It's just Doom, with new maps.

Ring of Pain

This is a strange game that displays your encounters as a ring of cards and you can either deal with or try skip a card on the left, or a card on the right which rotates the entire ring. Finding the exit card brings you to the next ring and so forth, provided you are still alive by then as the monsters get very dangerous quickly - and you'll probably only be wielding a bent spoon and have rainbow socks for armor when you meet them. Props for a different idea and art style but not one that could hold my interest for long.

Amnesia: Rebirth

It's time to forget again! After Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs, this new protagonist suffers the same memory loss as the previous ones but her story has much better graphics, much better dynamic lighting and ... much more boring!? What? Yep, a stupid protagonist and way too much walking to make space for narrated exposition doesn't help - to the point that I lost interest in it entirely. If you are looking for short and sharp horror, this isn't it - instead go for the original game with the Justine DLC which remains my favorite, proving again that simple and elegant will always beat something fattened with filler.

Ecosystem (Card Game)

In this little card drafting game up to 6 players are trying to create the best ecosystem they can by playing a 5x4 grid of 20 cards. Each type of card unique points based on what they are or are not next to which sounds messy at first, but its actually super simple to tally up at the end. Best of all (for me) that while it is competitive, there are no direct attacks against other players.

There is a simple elegance in how it is played - everyone gets 10 cards, picks one to play, then passes their entire hand clockwise and so on. After all 10 are done, everyone gets another 10 cards to do the same again, except the cards are now passed counter clock wise. As a result this goes rather quickly and is fast to setup and take down.  Recommended!

Shadowrift

In this cooperative 1-6 player deck building game, you are tasked with defending a town from a variety of invading monsters. You can win in one of two ways: constructing 8 walls or closing a number of the titular Shadowrifts from which the enemies spawn from (you need to close the same number as players) BEFORE the town is overrun with corpses.

Yes, every time a towns person dies the card is replaced by a corpse card and if on any turn the active townies are all corpses (or a mix of corpses and bad dudes) you instantly lose. On the flip side, you (as players) can't actually die as you can hold an infinite amount of wound cards from battle - though that eventually does mess up your active hand too.

Nice art and cool ideas in this game, but there's not a lot of deck building required if you are going for the wall win strategy as you are already optimized for that from the start. So far we've played five of the six enemy factions and the strategy has worked for us against four of them (that fifth one was just focused on breaking walls and stealing money lol). Interesting game, but not as fighty as you might like and a bit heavy on setup time. DL also has a review!

Monopoly Deal Card Game and Secret Code

Kids games that I'm terrible at! :P

Secret Code

Basically a rebranded "Mastermind", this two player game has one player set 4 (or 5) colored pins behind a shield and it is the other player's job to match the colors (8 choices) in the correct sequence. The Code setter then verifies how many are correct colors in wrong spots and how many are just correct but not necessarily which ones are correct. I rate it a "meh".

Monopoly Deal

This competitive 2-5 player card game goes much faster than the original Monopoly. On a players turn, every one draws a random "money" card (which could also be an action card like: steal someone's property or block a steal), play an action card if you want to, then open a property card to bid on. Whoever bids highest wins the property, then its the next person's turn.

The objective is to collect 3 "sets" of property, easily distinguished by colors to win. It's worth mentioning once a "set" is completed it can no longer be targeted by steals and such. The result is a blitz-speed game with some light strategy and some heavy luck in the money draws. Quite fun!

Paleo

Much like Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Paleo is a cooperative game for up to four players who take control of caveman tribe members trying to survive through a decent bunch of modular encounters. Unlike Robinson Crusoe this game is much easier to setup and play and apart from survival your main objective is always to draw a mammoth on the cave wall.

It doesn't matter if there's a giant river you need to cross, or if you are in wolf territory or have an enemy tribe warring against you - you must always draw the mammoth to win. Unfortunately cave people aren't that smart so it will take some time to do that. During the day the scenario cards are shuffled out to each player in their entirety, then using only the card backs as guides players must pick one out of three to explore with plenty of opportunity to not do your card and help someone else instead usually to get resources, build gear or draw the damned elephant.

Once you run out of cards or choose to sleep (which means you can no longer help others but also means you can dodge the rest of your hand if you feel they are all "bad") you are finished for the day, and once everyone is in that state - night descends. This is when you must spend all those resources to feed and/or protect your tribe, suffering skull tokens for each failure and each death. Gain five skull tokens and you all lose. All the components here are quite nice, as is the art on the cards.

It takes a bit to get used to the card iconography but once you get it the gameplay loop goes very fast and is quite fun. You will start remembering card backs as you play though which means player experience has a tangible effect, for good or ill. "I'm sure there was an elephant on this sort of card for this scenario," sort of deal. That said you'll get at least seven games out of this, and number seven is quite a bastard, but if you enjoy cooperative card games this one is worth looking into!

BraveRats (card game system)

Why rats though?

BraveRats is a two player competitive card game where each side has eight cards representing their clan trying to compete for territory, or you know, just trying to kill each other. Play is simple: both players play one card face down and reveal at the same time, then usually the one with the higher strength value wins and the first one to score four victories wins the war. 

All cards have unique special abilities that can alter the battle though, like if you play the princess (strength 1) and the enemy plays their prince (strength 7) you not only win this round but the entire war immediately because the prince falls in love with the princess.

It's a super simple concept which means once you have the rules you can play with regular playing cards or in my case, we used the ones from Game of Thrones: Westeros Intrigue to make it Starks vs Lannisters. Not a bad little game to try outwit your opponent, but ultimately Love Letter uses a similar mechanic, is simpler, and can host more players.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea and Regicide

A pair of card games requiring some brain power!

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

This very affordable and excellent cooperative trick taking game is super simple on the surface and will be easy to understand if you play other trick taking games like Hearts. The deck of 40 cards contains numbers 1-9 in four colors and black submarine cards numbered 1-4. Whoever gets the 4 submarine is the leader and gets to start by playing one card. Players must then in turn play a card of a similar color/suite or anything if they don't have a matching one.

Other than flavor text, it has nothing really to do with diving or the ocean.

Whoever played the highest number whose color matches the first card or played the highest submarine card wins the trick. They then get to start the next one. The interesting part comes from the "cooperative" section of the game where people get assigned missions, pulled from a secondary deck of scaling difficulty. Maybe this round I cannot win any tricks while you must win using a blue 5 or something. Should anyone fail their mission everyone fails, and the fact that you mainly can't show your cards to each other (apart from one card ONCE per mission and indicate if its your highest/lowest/or only of that color/suite) makes it that much more challenging and really gets the brain working.

It can be tough if you aren't used to trick taking so expect to "be that guy that lost the game" (usually me) but at the same time also have an open mind and ask questions to improve your game. I'm at the point now where I know where I go wrong, and follow up by asking after the game what from my options I should have done so I'll know better next time. I'm also practicing card counting in that on the last trick (everyone has one card), I try get everyone to predict what cards remain.

It also sets up and plays really fast which is fantastic. If you like cards, trick taking and cooperative games, you should definitely check this one out.

Regicide

Because this card game uses the standard deck of 52 cards, you can freely play it with the rules found here. In it, you must cooperatively defeat a castle of 4 Jacks, 4 Queens and 4 Kings using the rest of the cards as your troops and suites indicate special powers/troop types (which are nullified when facing enemies of the same suite). Clubs do double damage, Spades block damage, Hearts heal by returning discarded cards to the available tavern deck and Diamonds hand out said cards from the tavern deck to you and your allies. Except if  

If a player fails to kill an enemy by playing their card (or a set if they have one), they then must suffer the damage from the enemy in return. Jacks do 10 damage for example, and so you must discard 10 worth of numbers to survive (a 5, 3 and 2 would cover it). If you survive, great! It's the next players turn. If not, then all the players have lost. This gets tough to mitigate as Queens do 15 and Kings do 20 damage per hit!

While you probably need a decent amount of luck to win, this game is easily accessible but expect to do a fair bit of maths as you play. The Queen who starts with 15 ATK and 30 HP has taken 6 spades + 4 clubs of damage so... what's her HP and current damage? Expect to be doing calculations like that every turn. Given that this game is so easily accessible, I do recommend trying it out at least once.

The Mind and The Grizzled

A pair of cooperative card games.

The Mind

In this two to four player cooperative card game, players are given cards that have a number from one to one hundred and without talking or telling anyone what they have - put them down in numerical order from lowest to highest.

That would be easy if all numbers were handed out but nope. On level one, each player only has one card. On level two, two cards and so on (our best was level five). Somehow, this makes for a very fast and fun party game - even for spectators. Definitely better than I initially expected. Worth checking out!

The Grizzled

In this one to five player cooperative card game your goal is to uncover the "peace" card buried under 25 trial cards and have no cards left in any players hand. At the start of each round the leader says a number and that's how many cards dealt from that pile.

Then on their turn players will usually play a card, trying to avoid having any three of the same symbols on the trial cards show up. If this happens, the mission is lost. All played cards return on top of the peace card and cards from the pile on top of the "monument" card follow suit - one for each card still in a players hand (minimum of three).

Art by Tignous (RiP).

If the monument is revealed, the players lose. Also if any one player suffers four "hard knocks" (lasting conditions that are a pain to deal with) they lose.

While each player will be able to mitigate some dangers by removing cards from the battle field, or cards still in hand, or the above mentioned hard knocks, the challenge comes from not actually being able to tell your friends what is in your hand. A very neat and difficult game that requires some thinking. I quite enjoy this one.

Five Minute Dungeon

Stays true to its name.

The objective in this one to four player cooperative card game is to defeat a dungeon and the boss at the end before time (tracked by a voice over app or a simple timer on your own device) runs out. 

It has a uniquely shaped box too.

The dungeon is basically a stack of obstacle cards that you open one at a time. Collectively you must throw cards with the relevant required symbols to beat it before you can open the next obstacle, or in some cases use your characters special power to simply brute force past a particular type.

All of this expends your hand, which is bad since each of the five bosses all need a mixture of things to beat them. While the bosses and dungeon vary in difficulty (shorter deck of obstacles = easier dungeon) the time limit is always the same: five minutes.

And it will be a crazy adrenaline filled five minutes too. Quite fun if you are after a quick and light game. It is easier with more people though - we got really into it and simply crushed it twenty times in a row. Worth a look if that sounds like your sort of thing.

Exploding Kittens

Needs to be played with the right crowd.

A competitive card game for up to five players where everyone starts with a "defuse" card and a random array of seven others. On your turn you can play as many or as few (none is valid) cards as you like, many of which are of the "take that!" variety.

Afterwards you draw a card and play moves to the next player, UNLESS the card you drew was an exploding kitten. In which case you must use a defuse card to remain in the game (and hope others don't cancel that). Otherwise you're out and get to watch everyone else play while idling and doing nothing (because that's fun).

Fortunately the game rounds are pretty quick and the last player who isn't exploded wins. My family found this hilarious but everyone played nice most of the time, never "noping" a defuse and usually only cancelling direct attacks on themselves. This is how we enjoyed it.

Obviously the mechanics are there to let you be more cut-throat if you want, so your enjoyment with this one really depends on what you are after and what the people you are playing with are after. As long as everyone's on the same page if there's a gentleman's agreement or balls to the wall take that (which it is by design) then it should be fine. Otherwise...

Take that!

Steam Discovery Queue - Crusade of the Free XXVII

Continuing freebies from last time... the one in bold is the best of this set.

Alphadeck: Pixel card battler where your cards are weapons instead of the usual minions/monsters. Bleh.

Astro Sentai Jarbonder: Side scrolling pixel bullet hell with awful music. Garbage.

Dream Dasher: A hard core 2D pixel platformer where you are either a dream catcher or a beholder. Good music and quick rooms make it addictive. I gave up at the upside down levels.

Flak: An odd game about purchasing and sending out air planes to fight the enemy. I didn't get into it.

Greed Knights: Pixel idle game of boredom.

Lirica: A very cool student made 3D game with a nice story and heavy emphasis on music. Despite there not being an ounce of violence, I really like this game.

I actually played through it twice.

Puzzle: A 2D puzzle platformer where you are a rectangle with a face mask. Bleh.

Shu's Misfortune: An odd RPG Maker game where you play a princess who wants to kill their father so you set out on your quest with a chainsaw and aminoacids? WTF.

Tree Trunk Brook: A point and click exploration game where loads of people decide to go hiking into the forest with face masks because of COVID, and then lose shit that you have to find. Stupid. Also, don't these people know of self-isolation? Walk speed is annoyingly slow too.

We're All Going To Die!: PvP top down shooter. Bleh.

Some Epic Misses

Games I got from Epic's freebies that I didn't get into.

Aven Colony

A space colony builder and management game where all your structures must be connected by -roads- tubes, and all your people kept happy and fed and zzzzzz... Obviously not my type of game, but the graphics and controls are ok so it might interest the builder types among you.

Guild of Dungeoneering

A card based game where you build a dungeoneering guild and send adventurers to -their deaths- collect gold from the dungeons which you also build based on a random deck of cards. Also outside of combat (again card based), you can't really control your adventurer. Instead you need to spawn gold to lure them places. While I like the funny songs that get played the rest of the game doesn't really do it for me.

That's actually a good hand.

KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION

Not a game, an experience. A trippy Radiohead experience... which is also garbage. Stay away.

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragonkeep (Wonderlands One-Shot Adventure)

While I did enjoy this Borderlands II DLC and can vouch that it will have funny moments in there, I think you will be doing yourself a disservice if played as it stands here - alone. The opening cinematic basically spoils Borderlands II for you, and robs you of all the other interactions you have with the characters outside the DLC. Your call.

Dark Souls (Cards): Pursued into the Darkness

A board game session from Dark Souls: The Card Game

A staircase descends beyond the realm of fire into an impossibly huge cavern - lit only by distant fauna and skittering bugs. It is here that that the party sets up another bonfire before patrolling (level I + level I) the area and resting up. The path to the first boss here - Yhorm, the last giant, gives a choice of going the long way (the two level I areas again) or through a harder (level II) path. The team picks the latter, and while the enemies are slightly scarier they are whittled down in no time.

Whittling down is the name of the game against Yhorm as well, as the giant makes for a decent opponent with big hits while jumping around the board. Eventually with enough spells from our sorcerer (mom) and axe strikes from the warrior (DL), the giant falls to the coup de grace from our assassin (wifey). It's then back to the bonfire to prepare for the battle against the Pursuer!

To reach him is either a level III encounter or a level III encounter which makes the choice a bit meaningless, and boy are those enemies tough! Our assassin in particular takes a bit of damage before we can get past them to the boss fight. While this dark knight has less hit points than Yhorm, he has more armor making him a pain to deal damage to while his damage output is ridiculously high. Lucky the assassin could evade his impale attack because if not that does around 9 damage (around 1/3rd of someone's life).

The Pursuer then wails on the cleric (me) for a bit, forcing me to use too many heals on myself while the others chip away at him. Soon, the assassin and the sorcerer are also on the defense as their cards (life) run really low. Luckily the warrior gets his good cards just as the boss gets weak to their attack types, and DL finishes him off for a narrow victory. Mom had six cards left, wifey had TWO! 

Interesting that they made a non-boss the final bad guy over Yhorm, who gave me a hard time in the PC game. Thus concludes another exciting adventure and for the time being, this story as those are all the bosses/maps I have.

Steam Discovery Queue - Crusade of the Free

As I've been enjoying a number of free stuff each week from Epic, I figured I'd check on the games in Steam which surely has lots of free stuff too, just not as advertised. I'm mainly using the Discovery Queue for this, but with a few filters: I'm not interested in anything PvP, anything about Sports, anything requiring VR, anything without English translation/subtitles, etc.

Anyway, I've found quite a lot so expect some short and sweet review batches of 10 as I make my way through them... starting right now! The one in bold is the best of this set.

Big Klondike: Solitaire. For vision impaired? Bleh.

Bridge of Dawn: Poor loading. Fox chasing rainbows in a valley for "points". Bleh.

Deep Night Detective: Pixel platformer where you play as spirit detective Spooky. Awesome music. Lots of reading. Dying (to gazillion other ghosts and monsters) means you need to do corpse run to get clothes, otherwise people you need to talk to can't see you. Lol :P

Destined to Die: One of those WTF games where you play as someone who "needs" to waste time on the computer (literally run the clock), over and over until you... don't kill yourself? What?

Eternal Cave Escape: Pixel platformer - miner with pickaxe that can assist in climbing against dirt walls. Lousy controls. Bleh.

Fights in Tight Spaces Prologue: Turn based, deck builder. Nice art. Interesting idea but, odd combo since you expect it to be fast and fluid. Also baddies get much less moves than you do.

Flower Girl: Nice tunes in this flower grid popper to "attack" cute female fairy demons? OH. It's one of THOSE H-games! Only one girl available in this freebie. Need to get the DLCs for more fairy demons "popping".

Goblin Stone Demo: Made by a friend of mine, control a band of cute goblins to build a base and survive against the oppressive humans. I quite liked it even if not all the features are there yet. Try it out. :)

Slightly Darkest Dungeon combat wise too.

Recursive Hate: Single player shooter with two small maps where you must survive waves of giant spiders. Crawlers abound but as long as you can sprint and reload you might be fine. The tiny spider swarms are the worst/best. Very shallow but I kinda liked it.

Samurai Shampoo: Pixel roguelike dungeon crawler of repetitiveness. Bleh.