This is a niche recommendation. Desolation Tycoon is the perfect game for anyone prone to moods where they want to play something, but everything feels like too much effort. There are no stressful timers, important decisions, anything to keep track of, and nothing you do matters. Watching your little colored peg bounce across the landscape is quite soothing. Traveling between equally featureless towns is a kind of honest monotony you’d find living on the road.

What is this game’s power is also its weakness. What you see is what you get. There is no strategy or depth here. Character creation is random yet doesn’t change the flavor of your playthrough at all. It makes some things harder, others easier, but you’ll be doing the same thing no matter what. Unlocks change nothing either and is likely why this game features one of the harshest unlock treadmills I’ve ever seen outside of an abusive F2P game. It’s harsh because it doesn’t matter. They’re a trivial bonus, not a feature. Once you unlock something, you’ll likely never see it in the game as it gets added to the big bag of stuff the game blindly shoves its hand into. This is besides the fact you’re offered five possible unlocks at a time, yet may only choose three, with no ability to change your mind later. Getting to this point will have cost you a dozen real life hours at the mercy of random chance, too.

Futile repetitiveness can be appealing to some people, myself one of them. I like this game a lot. But if you’re looking for effective rewards for progress, emergent gameplay, or options to flavor a gameplay loop, you won’t find them here.