Tobold the game I have played and more than any other for the last couple of years is the deck building game "Slay the Spire". Have you played it? I was surprised not to find any mention of it on your blog. I know you do enjoy the occasional deck builder. It is dubbed "Roguelike" in the sense that you will die many times over but in reality the game has surprisingly deep tactical and strategy layers. The one issue I suspect you would have with the game is that it deliberately sets out to be "unfair" to the player and often your in game defeat will seem to be an inevitable consequence of the games rng. However The top players can win almost every run based on deep knowledge of the game mechanics and probabilities. Even a more casual player like myself can manage a 50% win rate. Have you tried it? What do you think? On th eoffchance you haven't played it yet it is available on just about every platform but the mobile version while complete, does not have the best controls making leading to occasional incorrect card play until you get used to it.
 

@mbp I played a clone of Slay the Spire called Monster Train. Then I didn't feel like playing Slay the Spire as well, although it is in my Steam library of shame.
 

Roguebook is IMHO a better slay the spire clone than monster train is.

I love those kinds of games. Reasonable lenght. Zen like game play. Not too dissimilar to why i like x-come even if the genre is different
 

There's a huge selection of roguelite deckbuilders now - others I've played include Poker Quest and Nowhere Prophet. They've deservedly become a significant genre. Slay the Spire gets the most name recognition because it was the first to become famous, and it's still probably the deckbuilder's deckbuilder.
 

I've been playing Babylon's Fall and enjoying it, but I completely empathize with people who are not. The game feels to me a great deal like a few dungeon crawling titles I played in the old days of the PSP and PS Vita, and it is definitely very niche. I think that two factors are drawing more attention than the game deserves (or wants): the pressure to make it a game as a service, which is blatantly unnecessary for this title, and the second issue is that there haven't been a lot of high profile releases on the new console generation, so people on PS5 (where I got it) are snatching up this game expecting Square/Enix to offer something with broad appeal when BF has very narrow appeal. The fact that it is so similar in many ways to Final Fantasy Origin which also just game out is even weirder.

If we had a market saturated with next gen console releases BF wouldn't be getting this much criticism, but it's GaaS model plus the excessively high profile of being a rare next gen release in the current market is killing it more than anything.....but fans of obscure arpg dungeon crawlers with methodical control strategies are enjoying it. It also doesn't help that it released against so many other better, broader appeal titles in the same time period (FFO, Horizon Forbidden West, even Elden Ring has broader appeal, and all are just generally more fun for the average gamer).