I quite like the whole action roguelike genre that built up around games like Binding of Isaac and Nuclear Throne and metamorphosed into a whole new thing with the explosive birth of Vampire Survivors.
The latest one to catch my attention is Desktop Survivors 98, a retro explosion of lookalike Windows 98 assets and motifs that has you spraying arcs of solitaire cards and blasting stuff out of the recycling bin and making your cursor shoot more, other cursors.
It’s basically the game you imagined the desktop was when you were younger and more bored and clicking around because this particular computer at school or work or grandma’s doesn’t have any games on it and it certainly isn’t going to survive you trying to install/download/run/browse any.
It is, basically, an oddly adorable combination of Vampire Survivors and Rusty’s Retirement. Except it is controlled directly with your mouse and, for that reason, pretty challenging. Like, your little guy moves at mouse speed, right? You dodge at mouse speed, enemies move at a speed to catch your ultra-high-DPI gaming mouse wrist-flicks. It gets kind of hardcore and I kind of love it for that.
I also love it for the many, many references to what operating systems and casual PC games in general were like in the lo-fi days of the mid-to-late ’90s. Weird little pixelated dungeon crawlers. Animated assistants. Desktop pets. The good stuff.
You can find Desktop Survivors 98 on Steam for $5.