If you don't know, these are basically hard "Optimization Puzzles". You have a 2d map and various potions, enemies, doors, keys etc scattered about. I don't think there is much else like them, to be honest.
The grandaddy of them all might be "Tower of the Sorcerer", which was a fairly early Japanese game:
Battles in these are deterministic and (usually) automatic - you know exactly how much each fight will "cost" you, and that's how you generally think of them. There are generally pickups that raise your stats, but some have experience, gold, and other mechanics.
The real juice comes from figuring out what to do, when to do it, what to avoid, and what order to do things in. Do I kill a few easy enemies to proceed, hoping to find better gear and come back later, I do I kill that tough enemy first, cause I can see a precious boost that will make the easy enemies "cheaper" to kill? Or maybe I'll burn a precious, limited key to avoid the fight while still getting the treasure?
There are so many interesting innovations on the formula, sometimes many modes within the same game.
These really hit their stride in China. It's the home for these games, the same way Japan is home for Wizardries. There are several available if you don't read Chinese, though.
If it sounds cool, another good feature of the genre is that they usually have generous free demos. Tactical Nexus is probably a good one to try if you're curious. It has good QoL features, tutorials, some nice Youtube content, a good discord, etc. and you can grab it free on steam. Oh, and the demo probably has a thousand hours in it, if you become a convert.
DROD rpg is also nice, with a free demo (and recent sequel):
Soulestination is another good bet, with a ton of odd mechanics, and even metagame stuff (like digging into the filesystem of the game to find data, etc):
I'm curious if anybody else has much experience with the genre. Especially if you don't read Chinese - it seems little known outside that culture.
The grandaddy of them all might be "Tower of the Sorcerer", which was a fairly early Japanese game:
Battles in these are deterministic and (usually) automatic - you know exactly how much each fight will "cost" you, and that's how you generally think of them. There are generally pickups that raise your stats, but some have experience, gold, and other mechanics.
The real juice comes from figuring out what to do, when to do it, what to avoid, and what order to do things in. Do I kill a few easy enemies to proceed, hoping to find better gear and come back later, I do I kill that tough enemy first, cause I can see a precious boost that will make the easy enemies "cheaper" to kill? Or maybe I'll burn a precious, limited key to avoid the fight while still getting the treasure?
There are so many interesting innovations on the formula, sometimes many modes within the same game.
These really hit their stride in China. It's the home for these games, the same way Japan is home for Wizardries. There are several available if you don't read Chinese, though.
If it sounds cool, another good feature of the genre is that they usually have generous free demos. Tactical Nexus is probably a good one to try if you're curious. It has good QoL features, tutorials, some nice Youtube content, a good discord, etc. and you can grab it free on steam. Oh, and the demo probably has a thousand hours in it, if you become a convert.
DROD rpg is also nice, with a free demo (and recent sequel):
Soulestination is another good bet, with a ton of odd mechanics, and even metagame stuff (like digging into the filesystem of the game to find data, etc):
I'm curious if anybody else has much experience with the genre. Especially if you don't read Chinese - it seems little known outside that culture.
