Okami
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Path of Exile. Hands down.
I just broke 1400 hours and still going strong. There’s so much to do and so much to learn, and it’s so good at rewarding grinding and keeping you chasing those incremental improvements. It’s 100% replaced RuneScape for me.
I have broken 1000 hours with Cookie Clicker, Guild Wars 2, RuneScape, and Eve Online. I don’t recommend the latter two anymore, but CC and GW2 still hold up.
Honorable mention to Factorio. I’m still in the hundreds but it’s climbing.
I played it on 360 and again on the Steam release.
It’s a better Skyrim, and shares a lot of Skyrim’s flaws. Good combat, fun builds, and way too much to do. It was supposed to be an MMO but got cut down to a single player game, so there’s boatloads of content stretched over a massive map.
I still go back and play it every now and then. It’s fun.
I have the remaster, but haven’t touched it yet.
Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.
It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.
The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.
Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.
Wildermyth is an awesome indie RPG that I’ve had a lot of fun with as a two-player coop game. It’s a turn-based dungeon crawler with a strong focus on role play and party dynamics.
I hear great praise for Across the Obelisk as a coop game from my friends, although I personally bounced off of it. It’s a roguelite deck builder like Slay the Spire, but with multi-player, lots of meta progression, and a heftier time commitment for each run.
Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite looter shooter that’s a blast in coop. I think it’s still in Early Access, but what’s already there is enough for me to be happy with it as a full game. To me it’s a spiritual successor to Borderlands in combat and gamefeel, but without the grinding.
I did end up picking up Satisfactory before they raised the price for 1.0.
Tried it out and it is fun but I do find it lacking.
The first person perspective is awkward and makes actually building the factories frustrating. The simplicity of the actual factory mechanics and limited resource availability (static nodes with no way to scale production) are a bit boring.
The emphasis seems to be less on making a productive or efficient factory and more on making an aesthetically pleasing factory while lacking any tools to make building the factory pleasant. No bots. Limited, feature incomplete blueprints. No way to unlock the camera and get a good perspective on what I’m building.
The snapping feature is unreliable and I have to constantly jump through hoops to get buildings and conveyors to line up correctly, only to go back over it and find some parts are clipping or it lied to me about where it was snapping.
It’s a very pretty game and I love that it exists, but it doesn’t emphasize the parts of factory games I enjoy. I want to work my way up the tech tree to macro-manage the factory construction. Satisfactory never gets out of the micro-management of construction. It’s way more personal, and that’s a beautiful concept that doesn’t work for me.
Still going to play it on 1.0 release. The factory must grow. I need my fix.
Hades, yes. That’s a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.
Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you’ve maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It’s still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there’s no more meta-progression.
Super Smash Bro’s Ultimate is still the premier Couch Co-Op game for my circle of friends. We also play the JackBox party games and occasionally Mario Party.
I genuinely don’t know what options are even available outside of Nintendo’s fence anymore.
Edit: My reading comprehension is in the garbage today. Baldurs Gate 3 and It Takes Two.
Psychonauts (the original, not the sequel, though the sequel is also good) is a Summer Camp themed 3D platformer. It doesn’t quite meet your “low stakes/chill gameplay” criteria as it does have combat and mildly challenging boss fights and platforming, but it nails the rest. It’s easier than Tunic. Maybe worth checking out.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons strictly meets all the criteria listed, but it’s ultimately a tragic story. If “some kind of impact” includes leaving you in tears, check it out.
Okami is a Zelda style adventure set in feudal Japan with immaculate vibes. You play as the sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a wolf bringing light and life to a land ravaged by demons. The world is cold and dark at first, but you bring spring and summer on your heels.
Finally, two favorites from my childhood are the Spyro series and the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series. These are 3D Platformer collectathons and neither of these series are even close to any of the examples you provided, but they are bright and colorful and in my heart they have feelings of Summer Vacation and staying home all day to play video games.
I was not counting mana cost, no. So it’ll just drop modifiers if it doesn’t have enough mana, and still cast the base spell? That does explain some of the behavior I was seeing. I figured it would fail to cast entirely if I didn’t have enough mana for the full block.
One theory I had, if you can confirm, is that shuffle doesn’t just shuffle spells, it shuffles all spell nodes.
So if I have a 4-slot shuffle wand with: PPMP (P = Projectile Spell, M = Modifier)
I was thinking the cast table could either be:
P1 - 33%
P2 - 33%
MP3 - 33%
Or
P1 - 25%
P2 - 25%
MP3 - 25%
P3 - 25%
Depending on whether the modifier block was a valid place for the shuffle to land.
I was planning to try to build some wand experiments to differentiate which of these scenarios is true. Good to know that mana can be a confounding variable.
Edit: Also, is shuffle fully random or does it draw without replacement like a deck of cards until all stored spells are cast and it can recharge? Just thought of this and realized I hadn’t tested for it.
The issue I’ve been trying to work out is getting modifiers to work consistently. My understanding is that modifiers are supposed to stack and affect the next projectile spell to the right, but they either don’t apply at all or will apply sporadically, and I haven’t figured out what rule I’m missing.
I assume some modifiers just don’t work with some projectiles, but the game doesn’t seem to communicate whether this is the case. I also suspect it has something to do with shuffle, as you warned against, but I haven’t been getting any non-shuffle wands for experimentation, and my starter wand doesn’t have much mana to work with.
It doesn’t help that I can only experiment with builds in the airlock chambers between levels.
The specific issue I remember having last night was that I couldn’t get the pentagon shot modifier to apply to any of my projectile spells no matter what I did.
I did get the flametrail modifier working consistently, so I’m doing something right, but I’m not sure what was different between that and the pentagon spread modifier I was trying.
I’ll back up that Civ 4 has been the best entry in the series so far.
Civ 5 is when they dropped unit stacking, which made combat much slower and more finicky since you couldn’t just build up a massive deathball and tear across the map, and Civ 6 doubled down on that design space by tying city upgrades to individual tiles as well. They’re not bad changes, and they do add more strategic depth to the combat and city-building, but they do make an already slow game substantially slower, since combats that used to be done in a turn or two now require several turns of rotating and repositioning units to get them in and out of the fight.
Civ 4 was the last “pure” civ experience, building off and adding to the previous games without sweeping mechanical changes to shake up the meta.
I’ve started and bounced off Noita a couple of times already. It’s been fun but I do need time to dig in and wrap my head around the mechanics.
I’m stuck on wand building at the moment. I’ve watched a couple video guides explaining how it works, but something still isn’t clicking. None of the wands I’m making have worked the way I expect them to, and I’m not sure what I’m not understanding.
Void Stranger, Chip’s Challenge, and BABA IS YOU are all Sokoban style puzzle games with minimal performance requirements and no need for a mouse.
Siralim Ultimate is a creature collector RPG that will run on a potato and provide endless grinding, if you’re into that.
The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters of the first six games are all excellent if you’re into JRPGs.
Dungeons of Dredmor if you like rogue-likes, or you could go old-school and pick up NetHack or ADOM.
Bunch of games on my Steam wishlist I’m mildly interested in but not willing to pay more than about $10 for, since they’d just wind up sitting in my backlog until I have time to play them. Waiting for a steep sale.
Some of the highlights:
- Cassette Beasts
- Sonic Frontiers
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Dark Souls III
Edit: Didn’t see the “year ago or older” caveat in the title.
Abzu fell kinda flat for me after Journey, but The Pathless more than makes up for it. It seems to be set in the same world as both prior games and has several references to each, so playing the first two does make it more rewarding to play.
I definitely recommend it since you liked Journey. The movement and combat feels great. It’s refreshingly short and focused for an open world exploration game, so it respects your time, and it also has some excellent storytelling with plenty of nice emotional highs and lows. It’s a worthy successor.
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I’m 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I’m pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Outer Wilds certainly was. It was started as a college project and the devs stayed together to finish it after they graduated.
Journey I’m not so sure. I don’t think it’s indie? If it is indie, then I’d put The Pathless up for consideration. That game finished what Journey and Abzu started, and it has some of the best feeling overworld movement of any open world exploration game I’ve ever played. Flawless.
Dust is great, but it’s deeply flawed.
The art is phenomenal, but the writing is cringeworthy. I loved it as a teenager but I have a hard time taking it seriously now. I wish I never replayed it so I could have kept my nostalgia.
The combat mechanics are fun and feel amazing when played as intended, but they’re massively unbalanced. IIRC with two exceptions (enemies that require a parry to enter a vulnerable state) every single fight can be won flawlessly by spamming Dust Storm even on the highest difficulty.
It’s a remarkable game, all the more so since it was only one dev. I 100%'ed it, and it sits in a place of honor in my collection, but it’s not one I’ll ever return to.
I find Subnautica has less replayability than other survival games since the map and questline is static. Once you know where everything is and you’ve seen all the plot beats there’s not much reason to play the game again unless you want to challenge yourself with a speedrun or, as you said, one of the harder difficulties.
I wouldn’t consider creative mode or sandbox mode to be a core part of the game. They’re great for fucking around or as an extended tutorial, but I see them more as external tools than as part of the game experience proper.
Bastion’s story doesn’t necessitate multiple plays. Sure, it’s fun to play through again and try different builds. I’ve also 100%'ed the game.
The important thing, I think, for OP’s question is that it can be finished in one play. It has a satisfying ending from which the player can set down the game and move on.
Void Stranger is a relatively recent one. It’s a Sokoban style puzzle game with layers of puzzles and a ton of hidden depth.
It took me 50 hours to feel like I beat the base game and I haven’t even touched the post-game content they added after release. I have a folder full of text files with notes and clues and puzzle attempts and one of the best puzzles involved taking several screenshots and stitching them together in an image editor.
La Mulana is another one to check out. It’s a metroidvania heavy on puzzles and exploration that’s actively hostile toward the player. It’s an exercise in frustration and every inch of progress is measured in blood. Every bit of information is important, and there’s a lot of information to untangle. I haven’t come close to beating it yet and my notes from just the first few floors are extensive.