Beating the Backlog: Faster Than Light (2012)

Time to beat: 21.5 hours

A sci-fi plate-spinning simulator, FTL takes a lot of the light resource management and story-telling experience of your average board game, and staples onto it a simple but at times maddeningly hard man-manager game. You often have perfect information, but it only takes a single random event, maybe it's a solar flare, maybe it's a saboteur warping aboard your ship, maybe the other ship has a cloak or has launched a firebomb, before you're scrambling to send your little guys from system to subsystem, wrenching on your shields, or venting out flames. You don't know stress until the O2 system turns bright red, and your ships small rooms flush pink like they've been sunburned, as the air dwindles and your crew starts to suffocate.

The perpetual advance of the enemy fleet behind you keeps you from lounging about any of the games point-and-click hopscotch maps, and let me tell you, you don't want them to catch up to you before you are ready. This means you never quite have enough of what you need to make the game easy. The final boss is practically unfair with certain loadouts, but eventually you learn what you need and what you don't and are able to optimize your run within the game's RNG.