Mainframe Defenders

Mainframe Defenders

After playing this for 22 hours, I must say it has been one hell of a ride. Its a nostalgia trip back to XCOM without having to worry about cover but more on your current position. At the highest difficulty, the limits of your tactical prowess are tested to its limits. You need to shoot and advance/retreat at the same time constantly. Thankfully while this is a roguelike, for now, you can return to the main menu and retry again. Why go for the easy mission when you could strive for the harder ones and reward yourself for the hard work?

Real player with 45.1 hrs in game


Read More: Best Puzzle Sandbox Games.


A great little tactics game with lots of style and a fair deal more depth than would first appear on the surface.

Its visuals are stellar, if you’re into the retro style, with plenty of very satisfying little animations and effects. The menus, explosions, and gunfire all look and feel amazing. Perhaps not as stylish as something like Cogmind, but definitely in the same wheelhouse.

The audio is fantastic, with really nice oldschool techno beats that feel straight out of synthwave cyberpunk fare, alongside unique sound effects for just about every gun and enemy in the game.

Real player with 41.8 hrs in game

Mainframe Defenders on Steam

Get Ogre It

Get Ogre It

cute aesthetics, cool music and great gameplay that makes it kind of a puzzle game, also has great value for its price.

i liked it a lot and recommend anyone to try it

Real player with 10.7 hrs in game


Read More: Best Puzzle Top-Down Games.


Challenging roguelike with a non combat twist. Always had to stay focused or i’ll get stabbed

Real player with 3.4 hrs in game

Get Ogre It on Steam

The Faded - Chapter 1 - The Perish Forest Prologue

The Faded - Chapter 1 - The Perish Forest Prologue

The Faded is an episodic pixel art horror adventure game. In this story rich adventure game, you will play as a 14 year old girl, Ume who gets lost in the infamous Perish Forest, strongly known for its supernatural and haunted activities. Many people enter the forest to suicide but whoever goes in, never comes back.

Features:

· RPGmaker style pixel art game with rich storyline.

· Chapter 1 is set in the forest environment which includes not only ghosts as enemies but also several wild animals.

· There are a bunch of puzzles to solve in the game like, finding a graveyard ghost, defeating a pack of wolves with a deadly weapon (an umbrella), sneaking through enemies and much more.

· Your choice matters with different outcomes.

· Lot of jump scares and instant kills.

· We are also giving you the cutest pet of the world, a BAT. Yes, a FLYING BAT, which will help you to progress in the game. Pets will be different in the different chapters.

· Pets will have ability which will help a lot to escape from this perilous forest and you can name them too.


Read More: Best Puzzle RPG Games.


The Faded - Chapter 1 - The Perish Forest Prologue on Steam

Adventure Minesweeper

Adventure Minesweeper

Mixed recommendation. It’s casual minesweeper-style game, with several, fixable issues.

Imagine Minesweeper, except instead of mouse, you walk on the map and turn tiles. Turning a mine will result in a health-loss. Also, there are stones (impreachable points) and food (healing). Find all non-mine spots and you find the exit.

That’s Adventure Minesweeper as a concept and in a nutshell.

Does it work?

Idea is actually alright. It introduces some deviations from the regular Minesweeper tactics.

Real player with 3.5 hrs in game

A fun adventure in a minesweeper paradise.

A Replayable & Reasonably Priced Puzzle Game.

Real player with 3.3 hrs in game

Adventure Minesweeper on Steam

HyperRogue

HyperRogue

Here’s finally my review of Hyperrogue, probably my favorite game on Steam! :)

In a nutshell, Hyperrogue can be described as a minimalist tactical roguelike in the hyperbolic plane. So, what does that mean, specifically?

First of all, it’s a minimalist roguelike, and there is no equipment, and no items except for Orbs (basically spells) which are often activated upon pick up. Hyperrogue is turn- and grid-based, and combat rules are simple: Every attack is guaranteed to hit, and is usually deadly - for monsters as well as for the player. As a roguelike, it has permadeath. To avoid accidental player deaths, the game prevents you from performing actions that immediately result in your death, though there’s a hardcore mode for the more confident players.

Real player with 728.2 hrs in game

I’ve played this game for over a hundred hours and I’m still not quite sure what to say about it! It’s certainly a weird one. But it’s a brilliant, good kind of weird that certain types of gamers should really check out.

HyperRogue is a mind-bending game of chess that takes place on a world that’s quite unlike our own. The object of the game is to collect as much treasure as possible without getting one-hit killed and succumbing to permadeath (as the ‘Rogue’ in the title might suggest) but… navigating the world is a challenge unlike any you’ve ever met before. You know how, in real life, things appear smaller as they get farther away? Like how the horizon only looks like it’s a few feet long to your eyes, when in reality it spans miles? As it turns out, on a hyperbolic plane, this effect is compounded: the horizon is much, much longer than it would be in real life. Two paths that appear near to one another will take you in completely opposite directions. The world is structured in such a way that is impossible for your poor spatial senses to intuitively understand, so scrolling something off the screen will mean that it’s probably lost forever unless you’re keeping close track of landmarks.

Real player with 638.5 hrs in game

HyperRogue on Steam

Undergrave

Undergrave

About Undergrave

After losting your loved one, you decide to bring her back by going to the depths of the Void Realm and completing the Trial of Ressurection. From the creators of Red Ronin, every try will challenge the player with a new adventure.

KEY FEATURES

Your character has 3 distinct abilities, each one being necessary for a successful run, however every one of them consumes your stamina that recovers with turns so use them wisely.

– DASH –

Cut through the enemies in a straight line dealing damage on them if you have your sword or dodging through them if you have no sword

– JUMP –

Jump from a square to another, dealing stun effect on the enemies around if you have your sword or only pushing them if you have no sword.

– THROW –

Throw your sword on an enemy dealing damage. The movements cost less Stamina when you are unarmed. You can catch your sword back mid dash or on a jump killing some enemies using less Stamina.

– PERFECT YOUR STRATEGY –

Combine your abilities to oversmart the enemies and find the best move for every turn.

Undergrave on Steam

Desktop Dungeons

Desktop Dungeons

TL;DR Not a hack-and-slash

Quick and surprisingly addictive dungeon-crawler with lots of mazes, simple rules, high strategy and low luck – you only die when you’ve made a blunder, or backed yourself into a corner by poor planning.

This may seem like a simple hack-and-slash, but it’s not. There’s almost no luck and a surprising amount of planning involved. Each dungeon is like a puzzle, and might take 15-45 minutes to complete. You start each dungeon as a lowly level 1 character. Kill the monsters in a certain order and gain the power-ups at the right times and you will be able to defeat the boss-monster and thus “win” each dungeon. if you randomly charge in like a hack-and-slash game, you won’t maximize your powerups and you won’t have enough health to tackle the tougher monsters. Same if you spend the power-ups too soon. If you don’t defeat the tougher monsters, you don’t gain the experience-point bonuses to increase your abilities enough to tackle the boss-monster. As you complete dungeons, you can unlock other character classes (again, you start each dungeon back as level 1 and the layout of each dungeon is randomly generated each time).

Real player with 435.9 hrs in game

I was wary of this. I played a ton of alpha, even after I had unlocked everything and finished all the levels. It was a lot of fun, and I appreciated the minimalism of the game. I paid for the advance copy something like three years ago, played the game, then stopped and sort of put it behind me for a while.

Then, just a couple weeks ago, I saw that it was released on steam. While I thought about looking up my copy of it, minutes later I received a message saying because I paid in advance I got a steam key!

Real player with 136.9 hrs in game

Desktop Dungeons on Steam

Hydra Slayer

Hydra Slayer

The description of this game does not do it justice. Roguelike based on mathematical puzzles sounds like an arithmetic quiz program or someone packaging puzzles in a mediocre framework. One of the reviews even said it would be ok without the math. I envisioned puzzles where there was a correct solution every time.

This is first a roguelike (oldschool roguelike), and the ‘puzzles’ are, like a game play in awell designed roguelike, emergent - naturally arising from the procedurally generated world. There are often many good solutions to the puzzles, and the game play revolves around finding good enough solutions, and using your resources wisely.

Real player with 99.1 hrs in game

Подробная русскоязычная рецензия здесь:

https://habrahabr.ru/post/282383/

Very cool, but very specific game. If you are a mathematician, programmer, roguelike fan or just a nerd, most likely, this game is for you. Otherwise… Anyway, if you’re not outright scared with the concept of killing ancient beasts with the power of math, you should give it a try.

You can start with the free version . Keep in mind, though, that free version lacks some recent and/or steam-specific features.

Real player with 77.6 hrs in game

Hydra Slayer on Steam

Endhall

Endhall

Endhall’s description - a ‘byte-sized roguelike’ - encompasses exactly what this game is.

It easily serves as a stepping stone for those unfamiliar with the genre, whilst still being enjoyable for those who are well-versed in it. The learning curve is not steep, but the game does a fine job of making you reflect on what you could have done better. It took me about 40 or so minutes to beat the game, which is completely fair given the price. A run consists of beating 9 stages, and a successful run could end up being about 15 or so minutes.

Real player with 18.2 hrs in game

Endhall is a turn based rogue like puzzle, with retro graphics and atmospheric chiptune inspired music.

The game in itself is quite simple (but there is no help, so I will describe it here): you play a robot fighting against other robots, you have 8 “health points” (labelled “energy meter”) and 4 “action points” (labelled “CPUs”). The action points are used to perform actions (like attacking, moving, etc.), and refill every turn; while health points decrease by various amounts when hit, or by one after the end of every turn (to prevent the player from camping) and are replenished by one for every ennemy death.

Real player with 15.6 hrs in game

Endhall on Steam

青之镇物语

青之镇物语

Very hard game in the beginning but very fun. Need an update cuz I cant play the second part of the game.

This is a game a would pay 10-15$ for and I bought it for 0.79$

Real player with 4.3 hrs in game

青之镇物语 on Steam