There's this really fun game on itch.io called Forward! You basically choose between two cards every round. Some cards are monsters; other cards are items that increase your health, gold, or attack power; a few cards are special events or wild cards. Ring of Pain is basically Forward! with a surrealist horror vibe, a few added elements, and a $20 price tag. It's another game that would be fun for short mobile sessions, but honestly, I don't see the point in buying it since you can play Forward! for free.

Ring of Pain is consistently identified as a card game, because enemies and items appear as, well, rectangles that quite honestly look an awful lot like cards. But I think this sort of misses what's actually going on: Ring of Pain is a one-dimensional dungeon crawler. At each given moment, you only have two choices of where to go: left or right. This leads to a kind of quick, frictionless pace that feels really effortless to dive into. This doesn't mean the game doesn't have depth; the game adds a lot of wrinkles and complexity through both deterministic and randomized variables thrown in and offers more kinds of junctures through equipment and path choices. Still, there is sometimes a feeling that there is something lacking, not necessarily in strategic depth, but in ideas. The narrative felt to me to be yet another pseudo-psychological puppet show and at a certain point it felt like the game didn't have much more to surprise me with. It felt at the end to be a numbers game. That's fine, but it does dull the experience. Ring of Pain is good fun, and a creative twist on the dungeon crawl. It's a nice diversion, but unfortunately, that one-dimensionality isn't just spatial.