if you're homebound and enjoy exploring game systems, you could do worse than diving into a few rl's
I had seen people playing on twitch, it looked cool. Turn based, RPG, permadeath, difficult. All up my alley. Jumped into it and got my butt whooped for a while but then it clicked. And BOOM i was off, many months later and hundreds of hours later i was done with Darkest Dungeon.
Since then, Slay the Spire baby. Wow that game owns hard. about 300 hours here. It's a deck-building (card game) turn based rogue-like. Recommend it to all!
Sure, the abilities are card-shaped and there are drawing mechanics, but it doesn't really play like a deck-builder at all.
I think the main differentiator for me, and where I thin Slay the Spire sets it apart from normal deck builders, is that the enemies you're fighting aren't playing by the same rules. The enemies don't have cards, or decks or similar abilities.
Because of this, the enemies can be really thematic and varied and have interesting mechanics and don't need to be balanced around playing by the same rules as the player.
As a consequence it doesn't feel like a deck builder to me, the abilities just happen to be card-shaped.
Add in the relics which are one of the more important parts of the run, and really the skills involved aren't at all like other deck building games.
But yes, huge recommendation from me too, definitely the best rogue-lite game in years. (~450 hours played for me, and probably twice that watching it on twich).
Another tricky aspect to the game is that any given card may be great in one deck and terrible in another, to the point where taking it makes your deck worse. Strong players (such as jorbs, whom you can find on twitch) tend to lean very heavily on the card remove feature in order to get rid of bad cards.
There is definitely a luck component to the game but skilled players are pushing that boundary every day. Winning streaks on ascension 20 (the hardest difficulty level) are possible and always growing.
Funnily enough a really thin deck can also be a problem. If you have 15 cards and Nemesis adds 5 burns, you're in trouble without a way to handle that. Instead of thin or fat, the best way to think of it IMO is consistency (draw and exhaust help this).
I really like how each Act tests different strengths and exposes different weaknesses. A20 is tough but rewarding.
On lower ascensions you get far fewer status cards added, and if you're a new player you probably don't have act 4 unlocked.
There's definitely a lot of depth that you have to unlock over time. I sometimes watch Jorbs on YouTube as background noise and he'll often think over a single turn for 15 minutes or more. I don't have that patience.
I finally started playing it recently and am hooked. I’m still working on the zero gold run achievement —- it’s so frustrating making it to the caves and stepping on gold buried behind the snow foreground :( I’m determined to finish it before the lockdown is over, though.