Request for service: Dad Game Reviews. Games that are fun to play and more engaging than the mindless idlers and puzzles that are out there today but support meaningful episodes of 30-40 minutes.
Because they generally have this permadeath mechanic, every step in the game is meaningful to not losing, and the game developers are also kind of forced to make every part of the game fun and not too tedious or superfluous, as you'll generally replay them many times.
I currently quite enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which you will need a free afternoon to get into, but after that, you can even have meaningful episodes of 5 minutes. You're not gonna complete a run in 5 minutes, that's rather gonna take 8 hours (though the world record is at less than 30 minutes), but you can load up the game, play a few hundred turns and then save and quit easily in that time.
