Princess Maker 2 is great, and is playable in the browser
I swear to you that, if you don't know what Princess Maker is, it's not the kind of game you're expecting it to be.
In the early 2000s, I had a bad PC and couldn't run that many games (and I played mostly on the PlayStation anyway), so I would dig into abandonware websites to see what treasures they had. That's how I found out about some visual novels of, erm, dubious character (hey, I was a teenager), but also discovered Princess Maker 2 in English, among other things like Betrayal at Krondor (which I actually have never played).
Anyway, Princess Maker 2 seemed very "girly", to say the least, but being a fan of The Sims and reading about what a "raising sim" was, I downloaded it and played using DOSBox.
And I got hooked.
In the game, you're a retired hero who's entrusted by the gods to raise and take care of a young girl. You parent her from the ages of 10 to 18, and every decision you make shapes the type of person she will become, changing the ending. But more than your typical visual novel, where you just choose dialogues and let the results play out, you have to set her schedule — like work and study — and you can't max out every stat because activities raise some of them while lowering others. You have to spend money to feed her and pay for her classes, and can send her to work to make some money back (lol), so finances play some sort of secondary role here. There are plenty of variables to keep track of, which is sort of engaging for people who like spreadsheet games.
But more than that, there are sections of gameplay where you actually control the little girl while exploring and interacting with the environment outside of the city, and there are JRPG battles. This mish-mash of different stuff was novel to me, so I played this game obsessively for a while.
At that time, I was playing Ultima Online on a pirate Brazilian server (I wrote a bit about it here) and chatted in the server's forums and IRC channels. People were always recommending games to each other and, as expected, nobody took the "you all should play Princess Maker 2" seriously.
Until I told them how the girl I was raising was mediocre at cooking, losing a town competition, but good in combat — being able to use a sword fairly well — so I decided to make her brave a peak north of town the following month, reaching its summit and fighting against the War God. She ultimately lost, because it's a fight that's hard as hell, but that seemed to have awakened something in people that now they wanted to check this game out too.
And that's how I got a bunch of nerds competing to see who could raise the best girl and comparing the endings everyone got.
Some months ago, a friend who (as far as I know) had never played the game before posted a screenshot of it, I said "great game", and she replied she was playing on her phone... through her browser. This is the website. Go play it. One session should last from 6 to 8 hours, so it's a great casual game to play without committing a lot of time.
The game is also available on Steam, but I have no idea what's different.