I Am Overburdened

I Am Overburdened is a game that's addictive in its simplicity, but sadly a playthrough takes but an hour, and there is no progress and not much reason to replay the game once it's completed.

I Am Overburdened is a dungeon crawling rougelike reduced to the barest of bones. All creatures have four stats - damage, defense, health, and speed. The one with higher speed attacks first, deals (damage - defense) damage, then the other retaliates. Repeat until either side runs out of health. The world has about 30 floors, each being semi-randomly generated and containing 10 or so monsters, with a pick 1 of 3 store after every 3 levels. The monsters get stronger as the floors progress, but so do you by acquiring stat-ups and equipment. Spruce it all up with a few extra effects, and you have basically a perfect description of the game based on which you could make one such game yourself. That's how bare this game is.

I completed the game on the first try, with little difficulty. It was fun for an hour. But then the "Nightmare" mode unlocked, and just like a true nightmare, is was terrible. As far as I understood, you just started with lower stats, but as this is a game with heavy snowballing, that made all the difference. I'm not sure if the developer themselves managed to complete this gamemode, but I did maybe 50 tries, usually not getting even past the first three floors - it felt impossible.
The entire game is actually RNG-based, with some focus on choosing the proper order to kill and gather stuff. The player also has a luck stat, which influences everything from dealing and avoiding damage to finding better loot. It's the one nerfed the heaviest in Nightmare mode, to a grand -5, meaning things like not getting anything from a chest can happen. Through all the tries, luck didn't smile on me enough to snowball enough to get past half the levels, but it kept me trying.

While I Am Overburdened was really fun, I simply can't recommend it because of its lack of content. Were it a free flash game (which are a dying thing these days, being replaced by things that both cost, and are of worse quality), it'd be a nice way to spend half an evening, but among paid games, this simply doesn't meet my quality requirements.