Got a new one to add to the canon: Dome Keeper!
It’s sort of a hybrid between a tower defense game and a Steamworld Dig style mining/upgrading loop kind of game. I find both those genres extremely satisfying on a visceral level I can’t explain, so I was immediately interested when I chanced upon this game on the Steam store.
Basically, you’ve crash landed a cozy little dome on a hostile planet, and you’ve gotta protect it! Every ~5-7 minutes, a wave of monsters attacks and you have to go to the terminal in your dome and kill the monsters before they can break the glass. You start out with just a dinky little laser on your dome, but over time you can upgrade until you’ve got a whole bunch of ways to defend yourself.
To pay for these upgrades, you drill down into the ground under your dome and mine for resources, which you carry back up for processing.
It’s sort of a roguelite structure, but not entirely. The mine’s layout is procedurally generated, as are the monster waves. Aside from that, there’s not enough randomness for a full endlessly-replayable roguelite slot machine experience. Instead, whenever you beat the game you unlock new customizations you can apply to future runs – different kinds of dome with different defenses, new difficulty levels and sizes of mine, a different miner who mines differently, etc. These options do significantly change the feel of the game, but there aren’t very many of them.
But remember, we’re here to listen to music! This game isn’t perfectly mute-able – there’s a very helpful sound cue that announces when a monster wave is about it hit. With sound effects turned off, it’s a lot easier to miss the visual indicator and end up getting back to your defenses too late. I’ve had runs end that way! The game is still completely playable without that, though. It’s just the right level of complexity to allow me to focus on music or even podcasts.
Last time I posted in this thread, I was having a good time with Loop Hero. That game was really fun at first but it wore out its welcome very fast. I have a feeling this one won’t stick around in my rotation for all that long, but I like it a lot and I do think it’ll at least outlast Loop Hero for me.