Tower Defense

Your friend sends you a Roblox link at 9 PM. “Tower defense, it’s easy, you’ll get it in five minutes.” You load in. You place your first tower. It shoots. A little enemy walks down a path, takes damage, dies. You place a second tower. You upgrade the first one. You are, genuinely, having fun. Then wave 15 arrives. The enemies stop dying. Your towers tickle them. You have 400 coins, three upgrade paths, and no idea which one matters. Your friend says “just get the good tower,” which is a sentence that answers nothing. You lose at wave 22, the scoreboard says you did 4% of team damage, and you close the game feeling like you were playing a completely different game than everyone else in the lobby. ...

Dana finally did it. Wave 90, Normal mode, victory screen, the whole loadout on the field. She’d spent two weeks grinding her way there — forty-plus games of the same two early Titans, the same purchase order, the same savings discipline. The results screen was still loading when she queued Hard mode. It seemed like the obvious next step. She had beaten the game. Hard was just Normal with a higher ceiling. What else was there to do? ...