Outhold

Outhold is a compact, minimalist tower defense game with the meta-progression of an incremental. Each level is a holdout: you place and upgrade towers around the dwindling fires you are protecting, then survive wave after wave of enemies closing in from every direction. Everything is handled with the mouse, and the clean, flat art style means you can read the whole battlefield at a glance instead of squinting at clutter.

The real game is the sprawling skill tree behind the battles. Every run feeds points back into a web of unlockable nodes, and how you spend them decides your whole strategy — you can pour everything into one tower type until it becomes absurdly strong, or chase the combinations where two modest towers suddenly multiply each other. Roughly ten levels stand between you and the end, with extra challenges once you get there, and failing a stage is never wasted because you come back permanently stronger. It is a game about finding the one overpowered build the level cannot answer. For more classic wave defending, try Bloons Tower Defense 6.