I have played THE CURIOS EXPEDITION and RUNESTONE KEEPER. Both turn based. Both using pixelart. Both making my computer overheat.

I don't have the fastest machine in the world. But I'm able to play shooters where I constantly update a complex 3D view in 2160 x 1440 pixel. So games like these should not be a problem at all.

Nothing wrong with cutting a few corners ... but this is really bad coding, this!

IMHO, usually turn-based games dun hv to keep rendering complex images so it's unlikely they are the culprit of ur overheating issues. U may want to google the game & cross-reference overheating to see if anything similar comes up, if not it may be another issue that is causing ur computer to overheat.

If the computer is a laptop, try running in power saving mode.

If it is a desktop, disable any overclocking and maybe see if you can underclock the system. Also, check power saving options to see if you can run in power saving mode.

Some games just waste CPU power, so if you limit the resources the game can use, you can prevent this.

(I had this problem with La Mulana; limiting the CPU frequency solved the problem.)

The art style actually has no effect on performance. And overheating isn't a good indicator for performance problems - in fact, this sounds like a case of the game overperforming (greedy loops are, sadly, all too common in gamedev). If this is the case then you can mitigate the heating problem by having your graphics driver force vsync, or by using power saving mode, as dtgreene suggested.

Yep, it's probably a case of the GPU rendering about a million FPS, because there's no built-in FPS limiter. I've played Runestone Keeper and haven't noticed any excessive overheating or performance problems.

Hm, OK, I just started it up and checked its FPS with Fraps. It displays about 1000+ FPS during the starting screen, but during gameplay it stays in the 120 FPS range. Maybe OP left it in the startup screen or some other menu for too long?

Maybe they used 3D rendering to simulate old school pixel art? One can always create the same effect but with more effort. Don't know if they did it though.

That damn pixel-art. I can run Witcher 3 on high settings, but I can barely run Minecraft :P I think it has to do with Java using only one CPU-core or something like that. I don't know what is causing issues in the two games you played though.

Make sure you are running the correct Java version. I was accidentally using 32-bit Java instead of 64-bit. No wonder it was using less memory than needed. It's also possible to use a java command to assign more memory to MC itself, see screenshot. This should add 5 GB memory to MC (the number can obviously be changed!).

Even 'worse' than pixelart is ascii art. Initially it came as a bit of a surprise when I read how big of a deal it is to take measures to increase the framerate in Dwarf Fortress. But after playing a couple of days, it's totally understandable. The game is incredibly complex in its simulation, and it eats up a ton of memory. In anticipation of some future framerate trouble I've decreased my pop cap from 200 to 100.
I suspect there might be some iffy coding here and there though, for instance, designating a large area for channel digging noticably decreases fps, and the way the game handles water movement can also be a cpu hog, especially with sloshing water and tall waterfalls. Luckily the latter can be completely avoided for the most part.

Early versions of FTL had this problem, and it was fixed later by a frame rate limiter.

you can use msi afterburner and always have the framerate at 60 or whatever

It's bad coding and common with old games and poorly programmed ones. Force VSync on and that should solve your problem. There are quite a few games which will use 100% of your CPU/GPU if VSync is off.

If you want to check if this is your problem, you can check your CPU and GPU usage while the game is running. If they are running 100%, you have a case of the overactive refreshing of frames just because it can...

I wanted to try this game called Tengami which I got from some bundle and launched it. But once it got to the menu I wasn't able to click on anything at all. Turns out that high fps causes this problem, so next time I go in with "Force Vsync on" option in AMD driver settings for this specific application and it doesn't work. So I turn on Fraps and start recording so that it will limit frame rate, and now I am able to click on buttons. Go into the options menu expecting to find a Vsync toggle, I mean if there is such an issue then there should be one right? Wrong, there was none. Never opened that game again.

You didn't miss that much. It's somewhat nice to look at but the gameplay is lacking; a lot of time is wasted on slowly walking and backtracking in landscapes with few interactivity. The game's gimmick is interesting but underused.

Hello, I'm back in the thread now! msi afterburner looks like a fine prog - thanks for pointing this out. Can you tell a bit about how I use it, if I want to limit framerate? Can it also limit the games CPU usage?