Hiya! Everywhere I go I primarily lurk, the reason being that commenting just takes way too much time for me. I find it very difficult to put my thoughts into words, and I constantly obsess over small details. As a result, even a simple comment like this can take up to 15 minutes to write.
Gambler_Justice
Karma: 22
Reading this I felt so… excited. This is genuinely good news. Like the childhood you, most of my experience of life consists of not actually meeting people and doing things, but of reading books and what have you. As a result, I had deliberately killed my sense of ambition, because on some level I equated success with unhappiness. The idea that smarter, more successful people are happier as well… that changes things.
Learning Japanese was a very fun experience for me. Why? Because it felt I was infiltrating some kind of secret cult. Learning to actually read all those incomprehensible moonrunes was like learning how to decode their secret messages. It was… exciting.
Reminds me of this quote from Nisemonogatari: http://i.imgur.com/BAb9Yh.png
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.