Since I've been feeling the pinch monetarily, I've been spending a fair bit of time playing games I never finished the first time around. The last couple days I've found myself kind of fixated on the Deadly Rooms of Death games
Journey to Rooted Hold and
The City Beneath. The games themselves are US$20 apiece, but each one has a free demo.
The games play like nothing else I've ever encountered. They're turn-based, one-hit-kill dungeon delving: you occupy one square, your fucking enormous sword occupies one square adjacent to you, and (most) enemies occupy one square as well. Whenever you move or rotate your sword around your body, every enemy gets to move one square closer. If you can push your sword into the square they occupy, they die; if they step into your square, YOU die—but there's an undo function, as well as the fact that each room is self-contained and you can just restart the current room whenever you want.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU9PI04JSnw(This is an earlier version of the game—DROD itself first appeared in 1995, if not earlier; the version depicted doesn't have Undo. Also the existence of this video kind of makes
the Frocto version unnecessary.)
As horrible as the character designs and art is, I actually think the new versions are pretty gorgeous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rdRFu90hTsCombined with the online high score system, help system
integrated into the forums (which I've been a member of since 2003—making that one of my oldest active online accounts that I still use, from back when I posted under a different name), in-game chat, automatic replay-saving and the ability to import or export demos for any room, and a comprehensive level editing suite—well, the games have given me a lot more value for my money than pretty much anything other than Tetris.
Their "The Greatest Puzzle Game of All Time" claim might actually be true.
