So at PAX Dylan Fitterer (of Audiosurf fame) claimed he was addicted to this little dungeon crawler rougelike and that he had wasted some 15+ hours playing it. I decided to give it a shot, and holy crap was he right, this game is SUPER addicting. But it’s so much fun!

Each round of the game is short, generally taking under 15 minutes to play. You roam around the dungeon, dispatching the world’s laziest monsters who just hang out in one spot and wait for you to fight them. What’s really neat is the way that you refill health and mana – simply exploring the dungeon gives back health, and as the dungeon has a limited size unexplored territory becomes a resource to be managed. Brilliant! Layer that on top of an especially deep game with lots of replyability thanks to a highly variable set of characters, races, purchasable items, dungeon challenges, and magic spells, and you’ve got a game that can be played over and over again for a long time.

What are you doing still here? It’s a free download! Go grab it now from QCF design and have fun wasting an evening on this!

Got a few hours to kill? Are you really into trial and error? Then do I have a game for you! Grow Cube is a fun and addicting little game in which you add elements to a cube and watch them interact. It seems simple but the combinations possible through trial and error make the game really interesting. It’s also wicked cool to see the little dudes do their thing and run around the environment. While the end goal may not be clear I can assure you that you will know when you’ve won.

If you like the game I’d recommend checking out all the other offerings at by EYEZMAZE, like the Grow RPG. I might do a separate blog post on that one later.

Tower Defense has somehow become its own genre lately, and what an addicting genre it is. The games center around preventing enemies, or creeps, from traveling from thier source/spawnpoint to your sink/base by building upgradable, stationary attack towers. They also tend to have a terrific sense of flow, as it’s all you can do to keep up with the never-ending waves of enemies while building up your defenses. Because of the hightened sense of flow it’s easy to waste hours upon hours playing them, so be careful with this one.

You see, GemCraft is a highly polished TD game with distinct stages, a “level up” mechanic for improving your stats, and a much needed save function as the game is easily several hours long even if you’re good. The most interesting thing though is the importance of color. All weapons (gems) in the game have a hue value, and gems are especially effective against enemies of opposite hue. So an orange gem works well on blue enemies, and a green gem works nicely on red creeps. The game gets really good when you start “mixing” gems to make them more powerful and combine colors, bonus stats, and of course change the hue value. It’s hard to explain, but great once you start playing.

Be warned, the game is highly addictive.