You may be looking for traditional roguelikes! If you search for old BBS archives of when the term was coined, you’ll find surprisingly little mention of integral concepts like “permadeath” and “procedural generation”, instead everyone’s talking about portability and FOSS. Many modern -likes (not -lites) retain that focus on simplicity, and Discord has been very nice for this community: can often talk to the devs weekly if not daily, so the games don’t remain too difficult/easy/solved for too long.
My personal recommendation is The Ground Gives Way:
on the shorter & simpler end for long-development titles
VERY beatable on first run (with patience & after ~15min tutorials), while consistently difficult for reasons other than localized unfair/unpredictable variance
Note that full wins in RLs are def closer to 2h mark or longer, if thinking about every individual decision, especially when reading through monster descriptions to learn the game. I can play a few of these games at 30min pace while maintaining ~90% winrate, but learning exactly when you can spam commands with miniscule risk takes hundreds of hours.
I will also second Brogue, which is only a bit longer & more complex. And echo StS even if it’s not a roguelike, pretty good fit but Ascension-0 or 1 is def too easy, A-20 runs should be closer to what you’re looking for.
You may be looking for traditional roguelikes! If you search for old BBS archives of when the term was coined, you’ll find surprisingly little mention of integral concepts like “permadeath” and “procedural generation”, instead everyone’s talking about portability and FOSS. Many modern -likes (not -lites) retain that focus on simplicity, and Discord has been very nice for this community: can often talk to the devs weekly if not daily, so the games don’t remain too difficult/easy/solved for too long.
My personal recommendation is The Ground Gives Way:
on the shorter & simpler end for long-development titles
VERY beatable on first run (with patience & after ~15min tutorials), while consistently difficult for reasons other than localized unfair/unpredictable variance
Note that full wins in RLs are def closer to 2h mark or longer, if thinking about every individual decision, especially when reading through monster descriptions to learn the game. I can play a few of these games at 30min pace while maintaining ~90% winrate, but learning exactly when you can spam commands with miniscule risk takes hundreds of hours.
I will also second Brogue, which is only a bit longer & more complex. And echo StS even if it’s not a roguelike, pretty good fit but Ascension-0 or 1 is def too easy, A-20 runs should be closer to what you’re looking for.