Schedule I. I did everything the game has to offer at the present moment but i still go back to spend an ingame day or 2 making silly drug mixes, selling, doing dumb stuff like pickpocketing cops… It’s just pleasant.

Love me some Far Cry games

It’s the only time I’ll ever get an Ubisoft game, and usually I’ll pick them up on deep sales

But for whatever reason they just scratch a particular itch

I hated the ending of 5, but it was otherwise alright

6 was whatever, but overall not as bad as the reviews made it out to be imo

I’ve wasted so many hours looking at tiny circles go up in Game Dev Tycoon

Pokemon pinball for the GBA anyone?

Goat simulator and its sequels/DLCs. It’s a dumb shitpost game where you run around and create chaos but I enjoy it without any irony for some reason

Skyrim. I mostly just like to install a fuckzillion mods and not play it, though…

Wrestling games.

Pocket Pool.

Not to be confused with pocket billiards.

Starstruck Vagabond, Yahtzee Croshaw’s game.

It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.

I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.

But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.

I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.

Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.

Sonic 06.

If you try to play it casually it’s absolutely awful because there’s no guidance on what to do and some of the tasks are awful if you don’t know how to skip them.

But if you watch enough speed runs and LPs of the game you start to figure out why the game breaks, how to do the bad parts, and how to intentionally mess with it. And it’s hilarious to do so. It’s like an unintentional broken sandbox. And the best part is even when you’re not trying to it breaks anyway.

Also the physics in the game are absolutely WILD. It’s one of the few games on earth that’s so bad it’s hilarious.

Kingdom Hearts. The writing is equally sappy and edgy fanfic crossover slop. But there’s something so satisfying about the combat, especially after the introduction of the command deck.

Probably Vampire Survivors or Vampire Hunters: Sometimes it’s just nice to play something where you don’t really have to think too hard.

As weird as it sounds: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (The OG one).

On the surface, it’s a shit platformer game for kids, but what makes it interesting is the ways you can break the game and the lively speedrunning community. If you just try to play the game by following its rules, you’re going to have a bad time.

However, if you use cool speedrunning glitches and exploits, it becomes much more fun to break the game in ways the developers didn’t intend. I tend to play from time to time 100%ing it using exploits to reach locked areas earlier, skip entire sections, and play some levels backwards.

Deadly Premonition. What a sloppy mess but damn it’s fun.

At the risk of pissing some people off, Kenshi has a special kind of jank