Anodyne - One-Part Charming, One-Part Unnerving Dungeon-Crawler RPG
Anodyne appealled to me as a pixellated RPG that I paid precisely nothing for. It was in the "Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid" that content makers with Itch.io did a few years ago, so I had access to it for years before I touched it. The whole game is played in squares. You can only see as far as the square that you are in, and you can check what rooms you've so far been in by refering to the network of connected squares that comprise your map. The game starts off mysteriously, as some kind of monk makes vague references to what you have to do. This leaves you to figure out what you have to do, exploring every region until all it's secrets have been found. The first regions you encounter are really quite lovely. You get to befriend some cats, you befriend a cool woman on a motorbike, you see the seaside and the woodland and the nearby hills. After a while, it gets weirder. We get regions that are imaginary, one that's based on the Shining, one in a cir