Hollow Knight and Vampire Survivors are the ones that managed got me hooked in the last few months

Disco Elysium for certain. Everything about it is perfect from the writing to the music.

Factorio. The factory must grow
And Deep Rock Galactic. For Rock and Stone

A Short Hike is simply delightful. I just started playing it and it feels so genuine and kind, just a cute and happy little game!

If anyone reading this thread hasn’t played it, imma give no further information but just…go play Outer Wilds, ok?

So many.

Hollow Knight, Celeste, Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire and Zachtronics games likely need no introduction. Then there’s also…

Bug Fables. Incredibly satisfying Paper Mario-like which has thrived into its own thing.

Baba is You/Environmental Station Alpha, hempuli games. The former you’ve likely heard of, a logic Sokobon with truly mindbending puzzles deeper within (and a level editor!! god, I could gush about level editors for hours). ESA is an older hempuli metroidvania. If you’re a fan of that genre, it’s among the best.

Caves of Qud – the best true roguelike IMO. It has so much flavor.

Slime Rancher [2], my beloved serotonin game.

Against the Storm, really well polished citybuilder that emphasizes the first few hours of citybuilding. It’s a bit hard to explain here, but I’d suggest looking into it if you’re a fan!

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga, my personal favorite tactical RPG.

I could go on but I gotta draw the line somewhere…

How has no one mentioned Stardew Valley? Where my farmers at?

This is a weird one, because I think the title of the game is putting people off as it’s nowhere near as popular as it should be. However, please give me a chance here to convince you to try it.

Intergalactic Fishing.

You don’t actually need to be into fishing games to enjoy it. The fishing, although about as addictive as most good fishing minigames, is only a small portion of the game.

It also revolves around a similar style of exploration to some space games, such as No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous. While progressing through the storyline you will gain access to undiscovered lakes with their own unique species of fish, and information collected about these lakes can be sold.

Catching fish gives you information about that fish’s likes in terms of lure, along with a few other attributes. You can then use this information to design a lure to suit it. This becomes a puzzle game, as lures are designed by arranging squares on a grid. Factors such as “shininess” and “noise” are infkuenced by putting more blocks near the edges, or leaving more holes and forming irregular shapes.

It’s primarily a sandbox game, but there is a short storyline. Once finished though, the game opens up into an addictive endgame that I don’t want to spoil. Tournaments and contracts are a nice diversion throughout the game and can also net you (sorry for the pun, but fish puns are hard to avoid) a decent amount of cash.

It’s quickly become one of my favourite games of all time.

I can’t give favorites out of everything - too many to choose from, all too different from each other! But some I really like include:

The My Time at Portia / Sandrock games. Super chill crafting life sims for relaxing. Critically, you can increase the length of the day for more chill (in sandrock at least, can’t remember if portia has this too).

Hollow Night

The Sea Will Claim Everything. Left of center folks, especially if you fondly remember Freddie Fish and Putt-putt, in particular should play this. It’s like an indie, wordily philosophical version of those types of games but for adults. It has so much whimsy, and you can click on everything and anything and get a unique little bit of description or animation. I love it so much but don’t recommend it often enough.

FTL FTW.

Alright, not much to go off of but I’ll try based on my playtimes and exclude some very popular games.

• Cook Serve Delicious (1, 2, or 3, my wife and I have probably 400h between the two of us). A fast moving cooking game that tests your dexterity. If you want to understand the flow of the game, I personally recommend trying CSD1 on an iPad if at all possible since the touch controls help you understand the flow of the game, then once you know the flow, you add in a keyboard or controller in CSD2 or 3. 3 is my personal favorite.

• Cassette Beasts (51h). Pokemon always has a special place in my heart and I’ve bounced off other games that try to emulate it. Cassette Beasts hooked me with their creature designs and awesome soundtrack.

• Zero Sievert (33h, Early Access). I haven’t messed around with the big name extraction shooters like Tarkov or Hunt, but the appeal of a single player third person top down extraction shooter with a pretty cool style surprised me at how much I enjoyed it. The only reason I put it down was to save up for whenever it eventually releases.

• Heat Signature (31h). Very run based, but the whole idea is you have to infiltrate ships all over the galaxy and accomplish your assigned objective on that ship. Maybe you need to hijack it, maybe you need to capture/kill someone, there’s a lot of options. The fun really came with weird scenarios where you’d have to find unusual answers like breaking a window to launch yourself into space with your target and get scooped up by your ship, or hack the turrets and lure the enemies into a kill box.

• Griftlands (18h). Card game similar to Slay The Spire where you build up your deck and get progressively more powerful against more dangerous enemies. The part I thought was cool is you can try to negotiate with your enemies just as easily as fighting them. Negotiation has it’s own separate deck you can boost up over time.

• Everhood (12h). A weird exploration and rhythm game with some good humor injected. I can’t even really tell you what exactly happened since it’s been a minute since I played it, but all I know is it got really philosophical and after it ended, I felt almost hollowed out at how beautiful/profound it was.

• Antichamber (11h). A portal-like game that plays with spatial puzzles and navigating an ever shifting labrynth.

I could list out a ton more, I love these smaller and weirder types of games, but hopefully something sounds good!

I enjoyed TechnoBabylon from Wadjet Eye, an investigation set in a kind of cyberpunk retrofuture : it’s point and click, 2D with great sceneries, with some puzzles, and talking comedians reading the text you see on screen.

Edit: also “The Excavation of Hobs Barrow” from the same studio. Pojt and click that takes place in the 19th Century.

A couple I haven’t seen mentioned:

-Satisfactory: A first person factory builder and exploration game that scratches an itch no other game can. Made by Coffee Stain Studios, great all around. Prepare your Excel (LibreOffice Calc?) spreadsheets.

-The Witness: A first person puzzle game by Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid, great game too). Many people think it is boring, or that it takes itself too seriously and that it’s not that smart. But if it clicks with you, it’s an amazing experience start to end, can’t recommend enough.

Recently I’ve delved into Dredge, by Black Salt Game. Its a tiny little fishing game, you play as a fisherman and have to go out, fish, come back and sell before it goes bad.

Nothing out of the ordinary, nope, nothing at IA! IA! RLYEH FHTAGN

It IS a fishing game, I didn’t lie, but with very distinct lovecraftian undertones. Its got it all, unknown deep horrors, esoteric magic, and ancient lore. I managed to work my way through it in 7 hours. At times it felt a little long, but its a beautiful ride with a small, but interesting cast of characters.

Wholeheartedly recommend it.

This is such a difficult question to answer since theres so many ways to categorise your answer. But in terms of sheer time played , Slay the Spire wins out for me. That game just swallows days.