Curse of the Dead Gods

While this adventure has about as basic a formula as you can get, the game manages to pull it off in an unusually fun and addictive way. Curse of the Dead Gods could be called many things: Dungeon crawler. Roguelike. But whatever you call it, there's a certain draw to exploring the depths of some ancient tomb, fighting through hordes of supernatural creatures, and never knowing what secrets or traps lie ahead, all for the sake of gaining more and better loot. While Curse of the Dead Gods never strains itself to tell a good story (or any real story, for that matter), it also doesn't bother to shy away from the fact that the core motivations for the player are survival and greed. You're just sort of trapped in a loop of getting as far as you can and collecting as much as you can, just so you can die, unlock a few new goodies with your ill-gotten gains, and then set out to do it all again.

One of the major things that sets Curse of the Dead Gods apart from other games is its use of curses. Nearly every action in the game takes a toll on players in the form of "corruption." After building up enough corruption, players are inflicted with random curses. You can end up suffering the effects of up to five of these curses, with the fifth always being a more dire detriment to your progress. What makes these curses so interesting is how they challenge players to not only overcome new obstacles on the fly, but also to occasionally find ways to use the curses to their advantage. An example of this would be getting a curse that expands the radius of exploding jars. Afterwards, you could quickly charge into a room, light a jar on fire, and run away, using the massive explosion to clear a group of unlucky foes caught in the blast. Couple this with the constant upgrades and unlocks that players can make after each death, and it adds up to keep an otherwise repetitive dungeon crawl feel anything but stale.