Cycle

Cycle is a game where you need to run around the world 7 times, fighting monsters and ghosts of yourself. Each time you complete a cycle you will spawn a ghost of yourself from the previous cycle. You must beat the ghost around the world, and when you kill it you will heal back to full health. This is easily exploitable by simply not moving at the start of each cycle, and indeed if you wait for the instructions to appear the first time you play the game that's probably what's going to happen (in fact, I think that the game was balanced around the idea that the player would stand still for a while at the start).

My opinion: Cycle is very pretty. The gameplay isn't very deep though. If you actually try racing yourself from the previous cycle instead of exploiting it the game is very nearly impossible, since each cycle has more enemies than the last time so it will take you longer to complete. The dev tried countering this by putting in enemies that make you run backwards some but that only works if you've already dealt with the ghost from last time, otherwise you have to jump over them and continue chasing. The only feasible way to beat this game is to exploit this system and while I think the idea was to make sure to adjust your playstyle while running to let yourself catch up next cycle that's far more complicated than just standing still for a few seconds at the start of each cycle. Other than that the game is reasonably fun, kinda challenging towards the latter levels while not being particularly hard. It's interesting and probably worth a try.

Cycle is by Matt Rix. You can find it here.