Hades is a great example of a coffee break game. You can play through a single run within 30 minutes, but if something comes up and you have to stop mid-run you can save and quit in whatever room you’re in and continue later. As the father of a toddler, I find this particularly appealing these days. I like to squeeze in a quick game during my baby girl’s nap time, and since I never know exactly how long she’s going to sleep for, I need games that can be played in short bursts. I’m starting this new mini-feature series with Hades, because you’re almost always guaranteed to have a good time, no matter how long you play for.
As with a lot of roguelikes, dying and losing a run in Hades is baked into the experience. You’re not expected to finish the game on your first try. It took me about 50 runs before I even made it to the final boss, but each run teaches you something new – whether that’s learning how to use a new weapon, discovering a new god-boon or simply progressing to a new zone that you’ve not seen before – no matter what happens, you’re always making progress.
Zagreus is a fun protagonist, and his relationship with all of the Greek mythological characters grows throughout your play time in surprisingly deep and meaningful ways. The story unfolds gradually, and I found it to be hugely rewarding to return to the hub world and talk to the characters and learn a bit more about their backstory each time I died. It kept the nature of repeating the same dungeon runs over and over feeling fresh and engaging, because there was always some new tidbit to uncover, or a bit of juicy gossip to listen to. The whole story is beautifully self-aware, running a fine line between melodrama and fantastical whimsy. It all looks and sounds great thanks to Supergiant’s signature visual flair and Darren Korb’s excellent soundtrack. Has that guy ever made a bad tune?
I haven’t gotten around to trying Hades 2 yet, but I hear it’s more of the same.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
The Trials franchise is surely the most successful game to ever start out life as a Flash browser game. I remember playing the original game on Miniclip back in the day, and I have played every single iteration since. The game’s core concept is simple – you control a trials bike, and must navigate it across a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses on a 2D pane. It’s the perfect pick-up-and-play game, because it’s easy to get the basics, but insanely difficult to master.
I’ve got an enormous backlog to catch up with, so my gaming time has been pretty varied lately as I jump from one thing to another. I’m squeezing every spare moment I can in between work, life, and fatherhood duties, and enjoying some side-scrolling platform action, blasting zombies in one of the best remakes around, and scaling a literal mountain.
Format: PC
Year: 2001 – present day
If Return to Castle Wolfenstein was my first date with PC gaming, Battlefield 1942 was when she invited me to meet her parents, and the relationship went to the next level. My god, did I really just write that analogy?
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