There are a lot of games I love but don't necessarily want to make full shrines for, so I'll talk a bit about them all here, adding new entries whenever I get around to it. This will also be a sort of recommendation list.

(Click the images for a better look.)

If you're looking for a roguelike there's nothing like-er than Brogue, a name which I assume stands for "better Rogue". It's very similar to the genre's namesake, as you delve through an ASCII dungeon with the goal of retrieving an amulet and making it out alive.

Sure, it may not have any groundbreaking mechanics, but sometimes the simplicity is what you really want. And as someone who understands that classic ASCII graphics can be difficult to parse, I can promise that the look of this game is wonderfully intuitive, with various colors and effects for everything. The water is animated! Wow!

It's certainly not an easy game to win, but it's perfect for just sitting down and getting started, and it's a great way to spend some time if you're bored—especially because it's completely free.

I'm not very good at it but I quite enjoy it and I would like to get other people to play it. So you should go do that and let me know about all the funny and interesting experiences you have.

Right off the bat I'll say if you're a fan of Paper Mario, you'll probably like Bug Fables. But if you're not a fan of such reductive comparisons, I'll say Bug Fables has a Paper Mario-esque combat system, with a rotation mechanic and the ability to give one character's turn to another which both offer interesting ways to strategize fights. The story is charming and the characters are fun and the world is creative.

When I first got the Hard Mode medal and was told I'd get a little reward for beating a boss with it equipped, I decided I would do that and then take it off, being the very casual gamer that I am. However, once I beat that first boss... I found out that there were achievements associated with doing such, so I had to stick with it. As it turns out, the game was the perfect level of challenging that way, and I had a lot of fun puzzling out difficult fights.

I found this game from someone who I think was reblogged by someone I followed on Tumblr at the time...? They were doing a let's play of it and I thought the game looked fun so I got it myself. It's sort of a roguelike strategy tower defense kind of game (...I just looked it up on Steam and those are indeed the top three user-defined tags lol).

I almost exclusively play with Skroig and Golgy as starting characters. I almost never adapt which minor modules I use to combat the specific enemies I'm getting. Who cares about optimal strategy or changing things up!

Once, when playing on the Refreezerator Pod with Skroig, I managed to light up the entire 12th floor! Check out the screenshot of it I've included here. Thanks, dust merchant.

Still working on the last achievement. 112 hours played, 8498/10000 doors opened.

I don't remember how I got into Picross, but I played it a whole lot growing up. I would even play it every night in bed before going to sleep. I won't say I'm the best at nonograms, but I have a lot of fun with them.

Picross DS was the first I played. The puzzles get as big as 20x20, I believe, and as a kid I had a lot of trouble with the bigger ones; I was never able to beat the game, but I'm working on that currently. My favorite aspect of the game is how each puzzle, once solved, will become a colored and animated version! Each level (which consist of 15 puzzles) also comes with it's own special set of tiles and sound effects, though they're often too obnoxious to really play with at length.

As much as I enjoyed the original, Picross 3D was my favorite—and despite what you may assume it was also much easier, leading me to have beaten it completely close to ten times over the years. Pictured here is the little cube guy who hangs out on the top of the screen while you solve puzzles, and I really despised it because of how it constantly moves around. I hate constant movement in my peripheral (which is why you won't find many gifs in prominent locations on this site), so this thing was really a nightmare for me. And yet the puzzles called, so I persisted.

Lastly I'll touch on the Switch games. I've only played S3 because it was the newest when I—my god there's nine of them now?? Well, I obviously can't comment on the new ones, but S3 was okay. The main puzzles don't have animations, which was a huge disappointment for me, and even though the color puzzles (which you solve with multiple colors, a very fun new challenge) do, there aren't that many of them. I did enjoy it for sure, and I wouldn't call it bad by any stretch, but it left a little to be desired for someone who played the DS games.

I played Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the first time in early 2023. I think it was around when a new game was teased; two friends each found out that I had not played a single Layton game and were both very surprised, so I became determined to see what all the fuss was about...

Curious Village was very fun and I can confirm it's one of the most "me" games ever. I was essentially a Professor Layton fan without ever actually being a Professor Layton fan, as someone who dearly loves both puzzles and point and click. Like, I grew up playing stuff in that kind of genre on Armor Games. I would play Picross on the DS before bed most nights. I love silly stories and art. Can you imagine if I'd been into Professor Layton as a kid?

As of writing this I've still only played the first one, because I got terribly sick not long after I finished it. But I'm excited to get to the other ones.

This is a very engrossing roguelike deck builder. There are four characters you can play as, each with their own pool of possible cards, and there's a slew of relics you can pick up that affect the game. I've only beaten it a handful of times—or maybe a couple handfuls? I don't know—but finally breaking through each Ascension level (which add increasing difficulty to your runs) is always satisfying.

I spent a long time before actually getting the game (gifted to me by a friend) watching some Youtuber play it, and for the first several videos he would bring up that he was taking things slower than usual for potential newcomers. This was kind of a shock for me, a newcomer myself, who could barely follow what in the world he was doing. I guess I understood enough to know I wanted play, though!

(By the way, this screenshot, of the first and only daily climb I've done, is indeed the best I have on hand. Maybe I'll take a better one sometime, but also maybe not; this isn't the Steam store page.)

other games: katamari, hyper light drifter, inscryption, outer wilds, risk of rain, etc....