**Dome Keeper** is a game I randomly stumbled upon on Steam recently and I've quickly become smitten by it. If you're my age you probably got big into Infiniminer at some point back in the day. Dome Keeper is a mixture of that, as well as a tower defense game, and I've already put quite a bit of time into it in the past few days. The basic loop goes like this: you start off in a dome that has stuck into an alien planet. During the day you leave the dome and start digging down for resources by bumping into them. Then at night you carry those resources back to the dome and defend it from that night's wave of alien attackers using a variety of different weapons and abilities. Rinse and repeat until you find the relic you're looking for underground and escape with it. It's pretty simple, but that's the appeal! Then layers get added on top. You can bring three different resources, and each of them can be used to upgrade your miner and your dome as you progress through a run. Doing so becomes a delicate balancing act: do you spend your resources on upgrading your miner first, increasing their drill and jetpack speed so you can bring more loot back to your dome in a single day? Or do you start focusing on increasing your dome's weapon systems, so you can keep the hordes at bay and last longer? You can even find tech in the underground that can completely alter a run, like a radar that helps you detect iron and water veins, or a garden that lets you harvest mushrooms to drill and fly around the mines even faster. I'm pretty burnt out on roguelikes. I find them irritating and aimless more often than not, a waste of time where I either bang my head against them until I've grinded enough meta-progression to beat them, or memorize the metas and boss patterns until I'm able to beat them. There's usually no reason for me to keep playing, unless the game is super mechanically interesting (it almost always isn't). **Dome Keeper** separates itself from that pack for a variety of reasons. For one, it has difficulty levels, so if I just want to chill out and dig without stressing, that option is available to me. Beyond that though, there's unorthodox stuff, like the ability to change the size of the cave you want to explore. So if you just wanna do a quick 30 minute run, you could rip through a small cave. But if you've got some free time and want to max out your upgrades and get into bigger alien fights, you can pick a large or gigantic map. On top of that, there are a variety of game modes you can try too. The basic relic hunting mode is easy enough to understand and engage with, but you've also got Prestige Mode, which operates more like an arcade game, where you try to collect as many resources as possible and escaping before you get overrun by aliens. A Guild mode has also been added, which adds strange rulesets to keep you on your toes as well, like adding inverted gravity. This combination of factors is what makes **Dome Keeper** so immediately appealing to me and why I've put so much time into it already. It has a simple, easily winnable loop, making it not feel so difficult to enjoy. You're constantly unlocking new stuff that changes how you play the game, without feeling like you needed those things to beat it in the first place. And it strikes just the right balance of requiring me to use my brain to win, but still letting me yap with my friends all the while. It's pretty damn cheap, so check it out and let me know what you think!