Which games made you go into an "addiction phase"?

Factorio. I blinked and a month went by the first time I played it. It ruins my sleep schedule like no other.

Absolutely love it

There is a reason we call it Cracktorio
I can't enjoy Factorio... It just feels like I'm at work. I don't even think I've finished the tutorial levels yet.
- I resisted it for a while for the same reason. But after a few hours it felt like the best parts of working :)
- Wait, you guys are enjoying it? (Source: 500 hours of gameplay)
After playing Satisfactory I thought I'd love factorio too, but somehow never really got into it.
- Maybe try again? I played satisfactory at first and thought factorio looked stupid, but having a roboport network for the first time felt soo goooooood
- My friend was the same way, largely due Factorio being in 2D. He was able to get into Satisfactory due to it's 3D nature.
- I had the same experience, but the other way around. I started losing interest in Satisfactory after I found out the map was static.
- I played Factorio first and since my friends are "done with Factorio" (not sure what's wrong with them but I think I need new friends) I agreed to play satisfactory with them. It was fun for a couple of hours then it just started tobuild up rage inside of me because of so many strange or stupid design decisions the devs made. When we got to trains and I started building that was when I hit my rage limit and boiled over. My god those stations are huge and the unloading was the most stupid shit ever. Then all the small finicky tricks you can do to slim your builds... And this you want to learn/do since blueprints are small. Don't get me started... Never started the game again after we were done but have a couple of hundred more hours in Factorio since then :)
Your iron plate production is looking a little lackluster there, bud
Have you tried invading and exploiting the resources of multiple planets to keep up your green chip addiction?
Steel pan music

Minecraft, holy shit, I have a singleplayer, creative world that I spent hours every day building on for 8 years or so.

That map is gigantic, and I even saved it from a hard disk crash

Is that a vanilla world, or how have you gone that long without your world hitting lag death? I mod the fuck out of my worlds, so I generally don't get more than 3-6mo before the game starts to become unplayable.
- 100% Vanilla world, no extra tools or mods
Then, if you ever get bored of regular minecraft, the mods come in.

AuDHD means every game is part of an addiction phase. I will binge a game for like 100hrs then drop it out of nowhere. Then return right where I left off anywhere between 6 months and 4 years later.

Then return right where I left off anywhere between 6 months and 4 years later.
Unless the return consists of restarting the game, or trying to play for an hour or two then quit out of frustration because you have no idea what the fuck was going on here, I just can't relate.
- That was me and Hollow Knight's difficulty. I just could not retrieve my competence out of a lack of patience to rebuild it.
Interesting. I have been diagnosed with ADHD since childhood and besides rare Hyperfocus, this doesn't happen for me. But everyone is different, of course.
- You probably need to find the genre that tickles your brain just right. I found that automation games are like crack to my brain. Since you mentioned minecraft and satisfactory, have you played Factorio or Astro Space Colony or Dyson sphere program? Those are games in a similar automation vein and are other ones that gave me the same feeling as the other two (currently playing Minecraft again rn)

I spent over a decade addicted to World of Warcraft. Like, I would come home from work and immediately jump on WoW and do nothing else until bedtime.

Thankfully, Activision buying out Blizzard and then ruining the game made me eventually quit. I've tried to go back, but I can't get into it anymore. It's just no fun.

The last few expansions, I've spent a week burning through the main questline, then I walk away until they announce another expansion. Endgame content is not interesting enough to keep me after the main story is over. I never even finished the last two expansions; I checked out partway into the story. I think I'm officially done buying expansions for WoW and hoping I can get back into it.

Other games that I've been addicted to in recent times have been Satisfactory and Enshrouded. Both base building games that have no end, but rely on your creativity to enjoy.

I have ADHD (the hyperfocus type) and Satisfactory really scratches that itch. Focusing on minute details, trying to make a seamless, efficient, organized factory to produce an end product. And the sky's the limit (literally). You can build hundreds of factories across a massive map and get really creative about style, design, efficiency, etc. it's a really fun creative game.

Enshrouded is the same, except instead of efficient factories, you're building homes, villages, castles, etc. in a fantasy medieval setting. With questing and monsters and magic too! It's been loads of fun and my friends and I have been super addicted to that game for a while now too. I actually just posted a review about it in !games@lemmy.world yesterday.

On a side note, I find it interesting to see Minecraft mentioned a lot in this thread. That game first came out when I was in my 20s (I'm in my 40s now) and it was pretty popular when it first dropped. I played it a bit, but besides running around and digging (mining?) a bit, there wasn't really any direction or goals or anything, so I kind of lost interest. I found out years later there's a whole endgame to it, but without any in-game directions, there was no way I would've ever progressed in that game without online help.

Decades later, Minecraft got a resurgence of popularity with younger generations and now it's suddenly the game of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. One of my baby nephews is addicted to that game now and speaks of almost nothing but Minecraft. Crazy how it can continue being so popular across multiple generations like that.

Maybe it is a good thing that Activision ruined blizzard, if wow was consuming so much of your life. I lost interest in Satisfactory when there was nothing cool to unlock anymore. And I think Minecraft remains so popular because it is the most modded game in history (I think). I am in my early 30s and only play single player modded. Tech mods can make Minecraft incredibly complex, but even without mods it is crazy what people have built in that game (like a working computer and pokemon red, the whole game, just with Redstone and command blocks).
- You're right, the modding community is probably why Minecraft continues to be so popular. Without mods, Minecraft is kind of boring. At least, in my opinion.
well said! I should check out Enshrouded. I just bought Factorio after finally learning it never goes on sale, lol. and then immediately got lost in two other gangs, now doing a fourth Stardew Valley playthru
also fyi there's no hyperfocus type of ADHD; that's just a broad effect of executive dysfunction
- I just bought Factorio after finally learning it never goes on sale, lol.
  I always try to buy games on sale, so I've been avoiding Factorio on principle. Their developers refuse to lower the price because they feel there no point in setting a price for a game, then discounting it every once in a while to draw in new players. They believe it's a $30 game, so they want everyone to pay $30 to play it, period.
  Fortunately, I won a Steam key for it in a raffle, so I got it for free. And I'm glad, because I don't feel it's worth even $30. It's not a bad game, but I personally would've paid $10-15 max for it.
  fyi there's no hyperfocus type of ADHD; that's just a broad effect of executive dysfunction
  True, but explaining the nuances of ADHD in a thread that's not specifically focused on it is complicated. Especially since we're still trying to define the vague differences between ADHD, autism, ADD, and a few other cognitive disorders. Some things are merging under umbrella terms (e.g. ADD doesn't really exist anymore; it's now a form of ADHD) and other distinctions are getting blurry, with too many cross-over symptoms to clearly define. Much easier to just point out that one of my greater symptoms of ADHD is hyperfocus.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Spent years on that one.

I always played wizard 🧙 One of the few great open source games for android.
- For me, the frequency of which character I played is probably huntress>wizard=assassin>warrior. But I kind of fell out of the loop when evan (the dev) introduced a whole new class 😅
is Evan on Lemmy? he seems like a lemmy kinda dude
- He operates /c/pixeldungeon@lemmy.world :D
I love shattered PD!!!

Stardew Valley. I have it on my computer and switch. I even made myself a perfection guide.

I think most here are too generous with the term addiction.

I had to uninstall Hearthstone years ago, because I compulsively played it multiple hours every single day, despite not really having fun playing it anymore. It was either grinding to get cards or tilting on ladder. That's what I would call an addiction.

Edit: After Hearthstone I played a lot of Slay the Spire and after that Marvel Snap. Never more then I enjoyed it, so I wouldn't count those.

I'm not sure if I should tell you to try Balatro, or to stay far away from it...
- I had to put balatro down after spending 4 days straight trying to get conpletionist++. After the few hundred hours it took to get the rest of the achievements. I will get those last damned rare Jimbo's at some point!!
You are right, that is part of an actual addiction diagnosis. It's good that you did the right thing.

Rocket league. Scrolled all the comments and slightly disappointed to not find this one :/

This was a game I was truly addicted. Uninstalled it many times recognising it as an addiction but kept coming back to it. I feel lucky that I could break out of it. It was THAT addictive. Around 1200-1300hrs on that game.

It is a truly a digital esport if there ever has been one.
I have a few thousand more than that and only stopped because my Steam controller could no longer be repaired. The only reason I want to stay away is Epic/Psyonix being exploitive and abusive. Would love a FOSS clone.

Short term: Dishonored and Far Cry 3. I beat Dishonored in a day and then turned around and beat it again. I played Far Cry 3 for like 22 hours straight, took a nap, and then beat it.

Long term: New Vegas. The same problem with Dishonored, where it was so good I had to turn around and beat it again as soon as I got done. The problem being, there's hundreds of ways to play through New Vegas. So I put about 11 full playthroughs with all DLC in on the PS3 version. Essentially back to back to back.

Fallout. I played 1 and 2 back when they first came out. Great games, great writing, seditious humour ad a real feel of a world.

But then came 3, FNV, and 4. Each of those I played through as my default 'helpful stealth archer' character, then a second time as 'evil melee' character, and then again to make sure I had maxed out each faction and got each ending. And then again, because I loved it, and again to collect all the bobbleheads, magazines, etc.

I'm in my late-50s. I'm already slowing down my career in preparation for retirement, and now I work as a freelance consultant which means I have some control over my working hours. I can't wait for Fallout 5. I will be probably take at least two weeks off work to binge the shit out of it.

Less so with Elder Scrolls 6, but I'll be taking at least a week off to play it when it drops.

Fo4 has to be in my top five for hours spent. The settlement building is what ends up taking most of my time, but I also obsessively reworked my modlist until I felt I had achieved a brutal level of realism, which means scrounging up the shit to build my settlements takes long hours of unforgiving scavenging.
- I plqy video games to relax so I often play on easy, but you know I'll do at least one survival runthrough of a Fallout game.
  Ooh, to reinstall or not to reinstall?

I used to play Tetris on my OG monochrome Gameboy obsessively. I would go through stages where I'd put a fresh set of batteries in and play until they went flat in one go. The only limiting factor on my game time was the availability of AA batteries in the vicinity. It got to the point where I'd be dreaming about playing it, and when putting things away I'd stack things Tetris style and get angry when things wouldn't fit together cleanly.

Then one day I just stopped and never felt the urge again. Thank goodness.

This is most likely what happened to you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

Hades, I spent like 6 months playing almost nothing else. Platinumed it and still couldn't get enough, and I'm not even that good at it!ಥ_ಥ I managed to get to 25 heat I think.

It's such a good game

For me, this only happens in story-based games. The most recent was Expedition 33. It’s also the first time a videogame has ever made me cry. What an incredible ride that was.

I love Expedition 33 so much!
Probably game of the year for me. Such a rollercoaster of emotions every time I sat down and played. Still have to play the bits after the story is over.

Modded Factorio. I did 450 hours of pyAnodon's recently and it just broke me. I didn't win the game. I feel like I lost at it and life.

It seems impossible to manage the side products properly. Ridiculous amount of materials that are all interrelated means that if you are low on one thing, it is very hard to fix it because you need the thing to work to make anything.

Too many recipes means it is very difficult to make modular, adaptable designs to copy and paste. Advanced recipes seem better, but they end up just exacerbating the issue even more.

There's a reason it's called cracktorio.
Vanilla factorio had me at “just one last thing” until dawn numerous times.
I had an old housemate who lost his very lenient student job due to being late and missing work multiple times due to the game.
It’s great :)
Pyanodon changes factorio so much. The byproducts are a big issue, and you need to get in the mentality that often it's fine to burn up items just to avoid the logistical nightmare. The biggest change for me is how expensive infrastructure is. You often need buildings that eat up 10 minutes of production just in materials. Scaling up is a challenge also because of how huge he buildings are (both a blessing and a curse) and how expensive everything is. Even conveyor belts are expensive at the beginning.
I played py hard mode until py science 1, then later on I started what was supposed to be an easier playthrough in pyblock, but i still stopped with a few parts missing for logistical science.
I still consider it one of the best mods out there (it's really well balanced), but you should start playing it only with a "I will not finish it" mentality, since it's thousands of hours long.
- Yes and it makes you feel like you should plan everything in advance, but you keep getting new recipes that keep changing the math.
  I was about to get to the fourth science pack. I was tearing down the old factory to build one for the trains while also setting up the trains and upscaling my factories.
  Now I feel like even after 400 hours, I upscaled too fast and maybe in the wrong places and used too many advanced recipes that would stop working at the slightest imbalance.
  Maybe hardmode would actually be a bit easier psychologically if they add enough extra recipes to use everything up so you don't have to burn things or turn guts into biomass and then into subcritical water and rocks into saline water only to dump it into a hole while another side of your factory is low on rocks and you can't make fish because your auog meat warehouse is full of guts and can't make any more lard.
Factorio quite literally made me ill. Had to have my back fixed after a few months playing as i spent many, many hours sitting way too still. This game must come with the health warnings!

The worst for me was elder scrolls: oblivion. I played it on xbox back when it came out. I played nothing else for about 18 months. I must have had thousands of hours by the time it got old.

Morrowind for me.
- Dammit I meant Morrowind! I'm getting old.

Factorio. At my worst, I was seeing conveyor belt patterns in my sleep.

me too. I ended up with only about 3 hours of sleep every night

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.

I can definitely relate to the counter strike stuff. I played faceit and esea for a while and the competitiveness eventually ruined the game for me. Also it was incredibly frustrating to start a regular game just for fun and have an opponent start spinning immediately.
- Yeah, and somehow it just gets worse once you’re just scheduling a full calendar of scrims a week in advance and treat it like work that way. The pugs were at least entertaining in some way, but the rest of it was only ever going to be satisfying if it lead somewhere instead of being a clearly misguided wasted effort from the start

At different times:

Luanti (AKA Minetest)

0AD

Sauerbraten

Battle for Wesnoth

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

and further back:

Action Quake 2

WipeOut 2097 (AKA XL)

really cool games fr
Oh cool, most of them are open source and / or free as well, if anyone wants to try them.

World of Warcraft. I don't even try to think about quitting anymore.

Nothing will ever hook me as badly as Kerbal Space Program did. If I wasn't at work, I was playing Kerbal for five years straight. No breaks, didn't play anything else during that time. Once I got RealSolarSystem and RealismOverhaul working, you couldn't pry me away from the computer. I put in aver 10,000 hours, easily.

That was my crack as well. Before that FTL. Played both even secretly at work, because I couldn't help it.

Civilization, Civilization 2, Civilization 3 and FreeCiv

Just one more turn. Looks up. Where did the day go?

I finally kicked the habit with FreeCiv.

My first Civ game was civilization revolution (xbox 360) back in the day and I loved it, though it didnt get addicted to it.
I bought Civ 6 with all the dlc's last year on a steam sale for like, 7 bucks. I got 200 hours in.. three months?
I played non stop for a good few months all I know. Haven't touched it in a bit, but I love the civ games

I love this thread, so many people passionate about their experiences with games makes me happy.

For a while it was Elite Dangerous. Reached triple Elite, then eventually Odyssey drops and I stopped playing. After Elite was Baldurs Gate 3. Bg3 was the fastest 1000+ hours I’ve ever dropped in a video game

Oof BG3 was so dangerous for me... When I first got it I played from dusk untill dawn, after that everytime I booted up the game, one blink and suddenly 5 or 6 hours had gone by, very difficult game to put down.

GW2. When i first started playing it many moons ago, I couldn't stop playing it! It was so addicting.

George Washington 2? George W 2?
ohhh wait, I got it. Gone Wild 2. I didn't know there was a sequel to that
- Guild Wars 2 :)

I have been consistently playing EverQuest for 26 years now. I'm not sure it's a phase.

JFC I thought I was the only one that remembers that name, but you blew me tf out the water by still fucking playing!

I bought No Man's Sky about a year ago. There's something comforting in the repeated tasks and exploring. I spend entire days just running around accomplishing nothing.

You gotta check out elite dangerous then.
- Elite in VR is a singular, unparalleled gaming experience. I can run minerals in a Type 6 back and forth like bus driving is my job.
- Added to the wishlist

Path of Exile. And by extension Path of Building.

I've only played like 8 leagues (each league is around 3 months long) and I have almost 5k hours :/.

Usually if I decide to play a league, i will make sure I have no obligations for an entire month and then I will take the first week of the league off work.

Have you tried Last Epoch?
- I've heard about it but never played it.

Original World of Warcraft.

I put years into that game. Then I started a family and I just had to quit.

If my gf (now wife) played we'd probably never get anything done.

I played for maybe 4 years... With my GF.
We'd play together for hours nearly every day.
I would play "a bit" before work and end up an hour late. This happened often and we just quit cold turkey. Ended up MMO hopping for like 12 years. Now we don't do MMOs.
- Ha, I met my now-wife on WoW so long ago :D.
  I guess I consider myself lucky I never really got addicted to that point, as in, I never even maxed a single character. (I had a bunch of them in various race/class/faction/server combos though...later found out I had ADHD lmao)
  I mostly treated WoW like a chatroom with a game attached hahaha.
  I totally understand the draw though, like, I LOVE MMOs as a concept but I hate how difficult it is to make an ethical one that doesn't waste players' precious time, or incentivize addiction. I feel like there's an answer buried in how some MUDs operate(d), somehow... before casino psychology was introduced.
  Reconciling the desire to pop into a "meta-verse" (screw you, facebook, that's our word.) to socialize and cooperate with others, against our finite time constraints on various scales, is a difficult challenge.
  I could ramble on and on, but linear level systems definitely exacerbate this. I never played as much as my always-online friends so we'd all start characters and suddenly by next week they're all level 30 and I'm still like 13 and I'm like "K nvm."
  But it's a very human thing to enjoy a sense of progression. Hm...
  I'm glad you were able to break free though! We're similar in our gaming lives. Instead of one monolithic game, we pass the controller on single player games or play co-op stuff, and get a wide variety of experiences. :)

Cracktorio

Morrowind was my big single player addiction. Oblivion and Skyrim were cool but they just never hit quite right.

Multiplayer I was heavy into Halo and Rappelz (some Korean MMO). I woke my brother up by sleep-playing halo, sat in front of the TV wiggling my thumbs on air, and shouted "THEYVE GOT THE FLAG". And would frequently have dreams where the conversation is being held in a floating chat box from rappelz.

Halo 1-3 are some of the best games ever. I played so much of those games and don't regret a moment of it.

It's a toss up between Hardspace: Shipbreaker, My time At Portia and Just Cause 3 for me. Three very different games. Floaty slicey boom, cute engineer mining and grapple fly shooty basically 🤣

Also very much in an "addiction phase" for the demo of G-Rebels which sadly goes away on Sunday 😥

Hardspace. Damn. I cannot stop reinstalling that one.
- Really wish they would have extended that game. So much potential and then they seemed to have given up.

Sadly, Fall Guys. Little did I know when I started playing it when it released for free on PSN that it would become my most played game of all time. Having 8 of us to make 2 complete teams with every night was a lot of fun. It was just an easy game to play, but not think while playing and just talk with friends for an hour or 2 a night. Some of the funniest conversations I've ever had was during this game. This month marks 5 years of playing this on average 5 times a week. Sadly this year we all finally drifted and I barely played the last few months but maybe once or twice a week and with 1 or 2 others on a good night. 5 years is crazy long for me, so I will be shocked if we find anything else that grabs us like this ever again, but im hoping.

Having friends can make any game so much more addicting.

Dota without question. CS along with some rts games like zero hour and CoH used to be up there but it's not even close. Got to a ranked immortal at my peak. Still, was a lot of fun playing with friends and family, so not like it was always a solo activity. Glad I quit though.

Dota without question
Came here to say this. Over 4 years clean now. There were a lot of good times with the squad. And I guess it gave me a relatively high APM which helps at work.

Dark Souls 1 and Hollow Knight

Saying Hollow Knights soundtrack slaps is a big understatement. Love that game. The song Dirtmouth gives me chills everytime.
- Oh me too! The songs for Greenpath and Resting Grounds give me such a peace... and i can't help myself but drop at least a tear every time I hear the Sealed Vessel theme, is just so beautifully tragic.
Oh, I should add Pokemon Unite too, although I'm not very proud of that one...
- I didn't even know that game existed 😅 I guess everyone has their guilty pleasure games.

Minecraft, on a server with friends. We still play it

"at gregtech eu" checks out 😀
- I have never played the minecraft mod :3
  I just didn't check whether something named gregtech exists when registering my domain name
- https://media.tenor.com/lkJ8KBZckhcAAAAC/gregtech-jumpscare.gif

I once calculated my Minecraft hours across all platforms I've played on and it's over HALF A YEAR. I was like mega addicted in middle school, I still play often.

servers SUCK now though, they're all pay to win and have custom texture packs that look horrible :(

the best one I've found (that isn't private) is UltraVanilla, and I actually found it from firefoxes "Minecraft Indy wiki redirect" plugin which crashed once and there was a little box on the side which mentioned the server bc the person that made the plugin is an admin of the server. When I joined the discord I had already interacted with several members from other modding discords.
As far as I know im the ONLY person that checked it out due to that popup lol

I don't play on that server because some friends made a different (private) server.

I've easily got a full year into Minecraft since I started playing back in high school. and that's just active hours, not afk. I've never joined a public server
even accounting for the second account I bought for java and the bedrock account I may have had to buy when my account didn't port over properly, it's still the highest time/$ game I've got
If only I could relive the wonders of beta 1.5 from fresh
Don't get me wrong I think the evolution of minecraft is cool and one of my favorite mod packs was sevtech, which was around 2017, but beta 1.5 hits different when kid me was just spamming random mats into the crafting table to see if it built anything

Project Zomboid. I have over 1000 hours of playtime. I always come back to this game.

have you tried Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead?
- Nope, but I will definitely check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
I tried that game and just couldn't handle the mouse cursor when attacking; the height art for it is just bizarre to me. I also hated various gameplay issues in SurrounDead. I hope ZERO Sievert may scratch this itch.

Dwarf Fortress. I think I have ten thousand hours in the classic game.

Oxygen Not Included for the same reasons. I really like games where you both design, and are affected by, complex ecosystems

Have you played RimWorld
- Nope. I used the fact that it never really went on sale as an excuse to avoid it, which had saved me a half year or so of my life, I think.

Pretty much everything I’ve ever played. Going all-in on a new hobby for periods of time (before cycling to another interest weeks later) is just how my brain works.

But right now? I’m very into playing Surviving Mars. Something about escaping from Earth and creating a new society on another planet just feels so appealing right now, for some reason. Nervously glances at news headlines

We're totally not gonna make it there IRL.

Quake (any), Dyson Sphere Program, Path of Exile. Those are the big three, many others had smaller but intense addiction phases.

Quake (any)
https://xonotic.org/
If you aren't aware of Xonotic check it out!

Splintercell. All. Of. Them.

Even the first one ?
- It's amazing how much those games improved with sequels, but the first one on the OG X-Box was still an incredible experience, especially for the time!
  Still a worthy experience I'd say! I could listen to the voice work of that game all day.
  I even really liked the much more action-oriented Conviction. Never played Double-Agent though. Still have Blacklist on my list.
  I miss when the "Tom Clancy's" monicker was representative of plausible tactical experiences. Sadly I don't think we'll ever see intense thinker-games with Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, or Rainbow Six again. :(
Never played any of them myself but I watched a cousin play Chaos Theory when it came out and the soundtrack by Amon Tobin blew me away; I still listen to it frequently.

So many. To list some that aren't in the top comments:

Foxhole - This one gets to a point where it becomes an obligation. It feels like work that I'm not getting paid for. And still I'll easily get sucked into defending a town or advancing a front for days on end between periods of burnout, checking statuses at work and staying up way past my bedtime, decimating my sleep schedule and productivity in the process.

Don't Starve Together - My partner and I took a week off and were supposed to go camping but we ended up playing this too late the night before we were supposed to leave. We woke up really early to pack the car and it took about five minutes for us to go, "nope, this ain't happening". So instead we spent the entire week locked in our apartment playing DST from the moment we woke up to the early hours of the morning and living off of our camping provisions.

League of Legends - I played a lot of LoL back in its early days. My dorm had awful internet so when I came home for the summer it was pretty much all I would do all day every day. It brought out a bad side of me. Losing felt awful and winning was never satisfying enough. I've been clean from LoL for over 10 years now. Sometimes I still think about downloading it but I've so far kept the strength.

I love that DST story, very cool!
I am awful at Don't Starve Together, but other than the trash multiplayer hit detection I have to say I think it is one of the most mechanically sound realtime survival games ever.
It makes the gameplay loop of 99% of other survival games feel shallow, unfocused, gimmicky and mechanically uninteresting.
I struggle massively with executive function and staying on task so DST kicks my ass though lol.

Most games that spark a Tetris Effect with me, where I'm still playing them in my mind while I've put them down hours ago, are industrial automation games. So the likes of Factorio, Satisfactory, Captain Of Industry.

I was supposed to be working on a project the day terraria released on Steam. I ended up playing it for like 9 hours straight

850 hours on Skyrim and counting.

I seem to have it under control now.

Rookie numbers

League of legends, yes I am a toxic person

Same

Diablo 2, Skyrim, BL2, BL3, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Valheim, V Rising, Oblivion Remastered, D3, and now Helldivers 2. Roughly in order.

Right now I'm really hooked on Lucky Tower Ultimate. I've never been this into anything like it before, roguelites mostly bore me, but this game has such a goofy charm and - for an Early Access game - surprisingly deep explorability. It's my go-to game for picking up my Steam Deck and screwing around for 20 minutes or an hour. I'm still having a ton of fun with it.

Eve online

o7
- 7o

I was in university and had just passed my midterms and as a treat for myself picked up both KOTORs. Mainlined that shit.

I probably have more hours in Diablo 2 than any other game.

I didn't buy the remaster because I value having a life now.

Diablo 2 and Ragnarok Online are tied as my most played games. I did buy the Diablo 2 remaster and it exceeded my expectations in every way and I lost so many hours into it…

Tetris Effect Master Mode

Have you tried Tetris The Grand Master 4? Came out a just a few months ago.

I'm sorry/you're welcome.

Nope and I don't know if that's a good idea. I remember practicing double and triple tspins for hours and hours. 😅
- They will record full replays automatically you can use to practice and there's an "undo" button in some modes where you can trade time to fix a mistake.
  One of usssssss

My most played Steam game is hilariously Tametsi. It's a Minesweeper spin-off with different layouts and shapes and zero guessing required for its ~200 puzzles. Some of the later puzzles require some absolutely bonkers chains of logic to figure out. It helps there's a fantastic YouTube series of videos by innocentive going through puzzle solutions that are some of the most relaxing and entertaining things I've ever watched. He almost always points to the next thing you need to consider first, so you can just pause a video after he mentions where the next step is and follow the logic yourself rather than spending hours hunting for it.

Battle pass shit aside, I really like Apex Legends. Probably has some dark patterns but still I really like their gunfights.

i liked it for the same reasons but matchmaking is ass. i'm either playing against professionals or morons with no inbetween.
either that or the skill floor on that game is way too high for me to really enjoy it casually.
- The hard part is the skill gap - it's not like the pros are a little better than you and you can maybe eke out win. They absolutely dominate you.
  I describe them as gusts of wind because they blow in so fast and aggressively we're dead before we can react
  If Apex could stop that experience from happening I'd honestly still play it
- I kept getting just LASERED then I realized people playing with controllers get aimbot at medium or close range, and I’m using a keyboard and mouse like a pleb.
Once I played counter strike, all other shooter games died for me. I love the comparaison: "if valorant [or other FPS'] was a designer drug, counter strike would be uncut cocaine."
The movement and gunplay is really fun. I dip in and out every so often.

So many, it's generally how it goes for me as I mostly play one game at a time. But some that have REALLY made me dive deep and play many hours a day for long times: Halo 1, 2, 3 and Reach, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, Satisfactory, Forza Horizon 4 and 5, Rocket League. There are many more, these are just what I thought of at the moment.
And the one I still play a ton and see no end in sight is Warframe, such a good game, and both the community and the devs are awesome so even after getting 1,200 hours in two years I'm still giddy about it and have so much fun.

About 20 years ago I played world of warcraft every day and every awaken hour of the day or just about. School was over and I lived with my parents and was "looking for work". Let's just say that I played vanilla so much that I had guild members calling in the middle of the night to get together for world boss killing.

Since then I have realized that is not how to go about in life and last time i really got stuck was with Factorio.

Factorio, Europa Universalis IV, Victoria 3, Baldur's Gate 3 when it was new, and special shout-out to Outer Wilds which hooked me unforgettably

Well I'm old and don't really game anymore, but for me it was the original Halflife. The story sucked me in, not to mention the fact that I was running it on my brand new PC, which I believe was one of the first Pentium IIIs, so I could run it at the max resolution and the graphics were amazing!. I think it was 1024x768, on a huge 17" CRT monitor!

Payday 2 probably takes the gold medal for me. I was once playing casually with a friend of me after work, chatting about the day, and when we were about to finish the level we noticed that we damn near broke the world record for that level, a record made by 4 players.

I only played payday 2 casually because all I would play is hoxton breakout LOL
I was invested enough though to make my own skin mod (pre lootbox) and it was kinda popular

For the entirety of high school I only played Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, and Melee. I have 2000+ hrs in TF2 and probably more in the other two. Then in college I was on the Overwatch team and played in the college league, I have a bit under 5000 hrs in that.

No games I have come close to that kinda play time and none probably will since I have less time to game and I’ve kinda been losing interest in gaming in general.

Community server TF2 was the absolute peak of game-playing in my life. I was laid off from a job in the late ‘00s and just played on a server with a bunch of people I loved for 40+ hours a week. I found a shady key guy I would send money to and he’d give me keys for a buck a pop. Got an unusual towering pillar that eventually bought me an index, a million years later.
Love that game.

Horizon series

Mass Effect series

Borderlands series

Way back in the day it was Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC), Star Wars The Old Republic, then Guild Wars 2

Elden Ring opened up the whole FromSoft catalog for me, im playing Demons Souls now

Dungeon Master on the Amiga 500 was probably the first, followed by the SSI silver-box Krynn series. Moving over to IBM-compatibles, Sim City ate a ton of my time. SC2k, various AD&D games, and eventually FPS games (especially Team-Fortress-Likes) came to eat up wayyyy too much of my time. My first MMO was FFXI and it ate about every waking moment I was not otherwise occupied. At work, I was looking up gear locations, mobs spawns, etc. and talking on forums. I would later go on to work in the MMO space and played a lot of them for work. Rift: Planes of Telara from alpha until the (first?) major revamp was the last game to really do that to me. Ever since, I will get briefly addicated to games, but nothing lasts... and that's probably good with everything else I have going on. I do get super into Skyrim once ever couple years, though, and put an unhealthy amount of time into it.

Have you played Factorio? Based on what games you posted, I think you'd like it.
I'm at like 650 hours and it still feels fresh, challenging, allows for creative and logical thinking

Skyrim, Destiny, Destiny 2, Valheim

Mu online.

I remember one summer break I slept 2 hrs a day and played while eating. Basically my life revolved around that game. I got to top of the server and realized wtf am I doing. I kind of glad it happened because it was the start of breaking free from addiction.

DOTA 2, man. Once you get past the massive learning curve, there is just so much to do in-game. Every match is entirely unique, with constant updates, tournaments, battle passes, and what have you. When I feel like disappearing, I disappear into DOTA.

Valkyrie Chronicles, I legitimately called off work sick for 2 days when the game came out on ps3.

Minesweeper. I've had a period where I played it 3 hours a day. Eventually forced myself to delete it from my phone.

Definitely animal well. When I played it out was the coolest sense of discovery that I had ever felt playing a game, and it kept going for so long. I would play it whenever I had a spare minute, especially if I had an idea for a puzzle. I'm not great at normal puzzle games, my brain just doesn't work like that, but I love exploration and easy puzzles and animal well really scratched that itch for me in a way no other game has.

Aside from that, I wouldn't be surprised if I had like 10,000 hours in Minecraft, since that's pretty much the only video game I like to play, and I've been playing it for almost ten years. Not an addiction though, I only play when I have the time and the desire.

Souls games.

I played Elden Ring a lot and loved it.
- I started a little after Dark Souls 2 came out, pushed by a friend. Liked it after a while, it took a bit to get used to it.
  Then went DS1, loved it to bits. Used to sit by "hard" bosses, put sign down and help random players trough, usually for hours on end.
  Went back to DS2 and did a lot of coop and PvP. Soul memory was a pain.
  Was there at DS3 launch, same plan but started to do invasions too. Still my most loved of the souls games.
  Between DS3 and ER, did demon's souls, loved it too although I find it a bit janky.
  By Elden Ring I was there at launch, doing both the game and coop/PvP. Did the DLC. Have not touched the latest game, Nightreign.
  I kinda need a story, item descriptions, NPCs, lore, figure out stuff, etc. to enjoy a souls game.
  I can understand Nightreign but unfortunately it's not for me.

If we’re talking actual legit addiction, to the point of finding it hard to quit, Skyrim and Pokémon (first four generations). Any other game, no matter how much I love it or how many hours I’ve got, I could put away and not touch for a while. When I first got into Skyrim, I played it nonstop for about 3 or 4 years, hours a day every day. After around 5k hours I finally had a hard drive failure which corrupted a save file and I finally took that as a sign to stop playing. I actually stopped playing video games entirely for a while to make sure I didn’t go back to it. About a year ago I figured I’d reinstall it and play again for a bit, immediately sank 50 hours in and uninstalled it before I fell into that rabbit hole again.

Pokemon is similar, though not as bad. But any time I revisit a Pokemon game I have to go through all the games in the first four gens, get super into it with dozens of tabs on individual Pokemon and stats and such, and then I have to stop myself, otherwise I’d probably do the same thing as Skyrim. As a kid growing up I was properly addicted to that series, and as an adult it still hasn’t gone away.

There’s lots of other games I’ve had tons and tons of hours into, but I could hang them up and move on. Skyrim especially but Pokemon too are actual addictions for me.

RS3 was my go-to, started up on a halloween event prior to pandemic, then decided to test a 6month prenium membership, and then the pandemic hit, and people are staying home anyways, so farmed enough ingame currency to buy yearly membership up until last year, when the bonds jumped in price(in game and irl money) immediately stopped at that point. i was already looking for excuse to quit before, but couldnt stop myself from playing though. although i still have itch to play, i only do it as a matainenace mode now, rather than spend hours and hours playing everyday.

historically: gmod. recently: oxygen not included.

Over two thousand hours in ONI, so I feel ya...
- Some hurdles are so hard to overcome, I tend to give up at one point.
Oh shit, how could I forget gmod. Those were good times.
- I still get sucked back in for a week or so every now and then. I never was much for the multi-player, I like taking big city maps and furnishing all the buildings in them and making up little backstories for everything in my head.

Path of exile for sure. Everytime there is a new league, i put a lot of hours into it.

Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Derail Valley Simulator, Terraria, and Vintage Story.

I didn't expect Vintage Story to suck me in as hard as it did, but now I've clocked in 40 hours since I bought it a few weeks ago.
Great game, though finding an iron vein was a pain.

No Man's Sky. Keeps drawing me in.

Homeworld 1, 2, Cataclysm. Forget the latest one.

Need for Speed Most Wanted.

Horizon 1 & 2

So many more...

Did you play 1 and 2 original or remastered? I'm wondering if the remastered version is worth it and if it makes the HW1 levels more 3D (many of the levels', until near the end at least, elements were still mostly on a flat horizontal plane, which I found to be disappointing).
- Both. The remastered is essentially the same. They took so.e mechanics from HW2 and used them in the HW1 remaster. Like the auto collection. Botherse somewhat, but I figure it's because of the new engine.
  But generally they're the old games with polish.
  That said, Cataclysm just hit different. What a game!

The most severe was Warframe. Not the most hours, but the most hours in the shortest time. 200 hours in 2 weeks. No I didn't do anything else.

Other than that, Runescape, Minecraft, Baldur's gate 3 all have just deleted days. Runescape and Minecraft have deleted months if not a year of time.

i played rs3 for a while, before pandemic i tried out with 6months preminum, then the pandemic hit and said might as well use ingame currency to get yearly prenium, until last early last year, when the prices suddenly EXPLODED FOR in game bonds, thats when i stopped.
- I bailed on RS3 a couple years ago for OSRS, recently liquidated my RS3 bank to fund bonds for my hardcore ironman on OSRS haha.
Buying gf
/s
- Now it's just scammers buying max gear on lv3 accounts, not even fun :(

Subnautica, Witcher 3, Far Cry 4, Metro Exodus, Dead By Daylight so far

Dwarf Fortress.
I would constantly miss meals and sleep to keep playing. Sometimes multiple days at a time. Went like 36 hours without eating or sleeping until someone popped into vent and asked what I was up to and after hearing me talk about the Fortress the asked when the last time I ate was...

Urban Terror, it has such a high skill ceiling. Spent many hours just happily running jump maps, let alone all the thousand of games. Thinking of going back.

Civ, Balatro.

both games have made me look up and go "wtf the sun went down hours ago!?"

Asheron's Call hit me at just the right age. That was my mmo. I remember people going on about WoW like it was the most incredible thing, but it always felt like a hollow world to me.

I tried many other mmos over the years but none of them ever hit like the first one.

I think I was really just chasing that sense of wonder I felt at my first one, which is increasingly hard to capture as you move forward through life.

Monster hunter world, by a long way

I never got used to the slow combat, unfortunately, but that's on me.
- That’s funny, cuz world has crazy fast combat compared to older Monster Hunter games hahaha

Duke Nukem 3D.
Then Quake I and II.
I'm still playing the latter many times a week.

I played alot of quake III arena on LAN 😊
- YOU HAVE TAKEN THE LEAD!
  (YSK: Plumbum is really bad for your health)

Lots, chrono trigger, ffvi-x, Mario 64, basically every yakuza game, sekiro, breath of the wild, a ton more. Embarassing ones sometimes like that power washing game because I got it for free and was like “this will be dumb” then kept going and going and going

Some older games that I’d probably power through now but at the time cheating/save states/youtube wasn’t easily accessible (gamefaqs existed but text based walkthroughs hit much different). Like the ps1 survival horror games: resident evil 1-3, silent hill, Dino crisis, parasite eve, etc. when you know what to do most of those can be run through in a few hours but in 1997 on the original hardware (no save states) and at best a txt file faq to guide you if you get stuck it would take some time to figure it out. Then with ones like re2 that had multiple routes and endings you’d play it like 6-7 times at least

I've always been rubbish at survival horror games but I loved doing the puzzles. I would backseat game on the puzzle sections with my buddies. Then one day my best bud got me a copy of Dino Crisis (no zombies) and woo boy I had so much fun with that game. Good memories.

Minecraft and Factorio.

Both mixed in a little IRL depression and I was living vicariously through Steve or making factories.

I hope you are doing better now.
Wünsche dir ein schönes Wochenende 🙂
- Thank you. I am doing much better but I feel I am always teetering on the edge of being ok and being meh.
  Gotta take the wins where you can and try and have fun.

And Terraria most recently.

All FromSoftware games including most recently AC6. Also Stardew. I've beaten Stardew probably more than any other game and there's a ton of mods that expand the experience.

Sad to say league

Less sad to say hades. Incredible game that I have preemptively already told my partner she won't see me for a week after hades 2 comes out

After ten thousand hours in league I realised there's actually ten idiots in each game not nine
My heart aches knowing I'll likely have to wait an extra year to play Hades II after it comes out. u_u

Warframe, I have more than 3000 hours on it but I haven't touched it in years

Anno 1404, Hades, the recent Hitman series, and now also Satisfactory. Help.

Another answer for me is Super Smash Bros. Melee (but could probably apply to many multiplayer games).

Normally I'd always engaged with it in person, at events. But when I started playing online, it was almost too much of a good thing.

On the Internet, your next match is always 15 seconds away. You get beat, you go 'I can do better, just give me another chance'. You win, you're on a high, you don't ever want to stop.

The game has that perfect push and pull (at least when you're playing someone anywhere near your level) that just builds compulsion. You're constantly engaged in decision making or quick button pressing each moment, and it just feels satisfying.

Timberborn is my drug of choice right now. But every few months I have a No Man's Sky relapse.

Spent 4,000 hours on Dota 2. Finally kicked the habit and Valve goes and drops Deadlock 🙄

Morrowind.

Unfortunately Fortnite. The Jak series. I guess that's it. I'll edit if I think of more.

I've been playing and DMing D&D sessions on Neverwinter Nights for two decades.

The only other game that got me for an extended period of time was Dead by Daylight. (Around 1500 hours)

I've been playing and DMing DD sessions on Neverwinter Nights for two decades
How does that go 👀 ?
- Oh, it's a blast.
  I'm on a custom-built persistent world with a few staff members who build and script. Players just log in with their characters like a mini MMO and when I'm logged in as a DM, they can't see me, but there's a menu where I can make placeables, monsters, items, or visual effects appear, and I can 'possess' creatures and NPC's and make them talk. It's really very cool.

Skyrim, Demon's Souls

Elite. Lode Runner. Castles of Dr. Creep. Boulderdash.

Lode Runner was so cool!!
- We had LodeRunner battles, where one had to play (and survive!) a level that the other player had designed. It was fun designing them, and it was fun trying to solve that one got served in return.

Space Engineers right now. The Scrapyard scenario really gets me.

Team Fortress 2 and Splatoon

I have probably over 3k hours on Splatoon. I can't stop. I'm S+8 fwiw

I always thought Salmon Run looked so fun when my daughter played, but I never gave it a go.

Hitman: Codename 47

Have you tried the recent trilogy since 2016, now rolled into World of Assassination?
- No. I haven't gamed in years. I don't think my elderly computer is powerful enough for it. But I will check it out.

Crash bandicoot 3 was my first heperfocus game. I played that game until I finished all levels, first time I did that my entire life. Second one was Skyrim. I played it so much!! I clocked over a thousand hours on the vanilla game, and I played more modded than vanilla, I can't tell how much I played in total because steam didn't track my modded playthrough. Then there was super Mario Galaxy (I got every star except the stupid thrash bombing one and I'm still so fucking mad about it). My most recent ones are monster hunter world (plus DLC) and current is monster hunter wilds, I've already 100% it and am in the process of crafting every single armour and weapons

Monster Hunter World is a superb game!

I have never left the Terraria addiction. Mods have made that significantly worse haha.

I considered playing calamity, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea. 😅
- In playing around with the idea too. I can beat the vanilla game in my sleep, and I enjoy Thorium's extra content, but from what I understand, Calamity ups the difficulty several notches, so I'm a bit hesitant.

DDRaceNetwork, bcs of the fun ppl i meet all the time. About 1800 hrs.

Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.

Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol

Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I'm still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I've always wanted) and I'm getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD

RuneScape: I can’t believe I played the game after the removal of free trade. It was such a poorly run game, and I’m can’t believe anyone still plays it anymore. It’s unbelievable how arrogant mod MacDonalds was, and that I only quit in 2011 after I got scammed trying to sell the account.

League of Legends: this is another case of really great game, but incredibly poorly managed. Having Phreak be the balance lead just feels like shit, and made me feel like shit because I kept playing thinking it’d get better. This is a very global, very competitive game that was balanced around competitive play and optimizing spectator happiness. You can guess just how fun it was to play a character that was deemed “unfun to watch in worlds” and get absolutely gutted by Phreak’s team. The opposite was also hilariously true… they buffed certain characters so they’d sell more skins or because spectators like watching them. I finally quit after having to swap my main because they nerfed or reworked it and left me playing something else several times.

i played before the pandemic, then became a member year round until last year(albeit sustained from ingame currency instead of irl money). ive seen multiple freakouts ingame, why they are quititng 1 was just blabbing about wasting his life on rs then logged off.
League was one of those global phenomenons that felt so fun to be a part of and try to get good at... Sometimes .
But we'd often just bot-stomp because we'd usually get rekt in matchmaking.
Once they declared their kernel-level spyware, that was the real kicker that helped us quit for good. Ha

Football Manager. A damn spreadsheet game 😭

I get it, I also spent tons of hours in these pointless incremental / number go up games. 😅

First it was Call of Duty in the mid 2000's. Then it was WoW. It all culminated in EVE Online. Untold hours spent in those games.

I have zero game addictions now. It just doesn't hit like it used to.

I'm more into stuff like Dwarf Fortress, Cogmind, and Caves of Qud now.

Old School RuneScape. I don't know what it is, but it's like crack. I cannot stop playing it.

Everquest Online Adventures and then City of Heroes.

For EQOA I had 3 CRT tvs and five PS2s with an account for each one going for a couple of years straight. I worked on the road at the time. I was in a different hotel every two months and lugged that around with me. I was in a guild, led raids, powerleveled my and other people's alts.

City of Heroes was similar. Three accounts, I met my ex wife there, was a prominent member in one of the largest Super Groups in the game. I was there from the first couple months of the game until it shut down.

When I found out about the CoH private servers I went back and caught myself slipping right back to the old ways so I haven't touched a multi-player game since.

Most of them? I have played hundreds of hours of Dysmantle, and before that I played hundreds of hours of Minecraft and before that Raft and before that terraria and before that vulcanoids, and before that ...

Haha, yeah I have my eyes on Balatro, but have refrained from getting it, because of that.

Gemcraft, I always have to make it to the end... even if it takes forever

My latest addiction was Peripeteia but I beat it in about 40 hours so the high was short lived. I really fuckin loved that game and looking forward to additions as it moves through early access.

Star wars galaxies, RuneScape, Minecraft, destiny 2, red dead redemption, dark souls 3, elden ring, bloodborne, and currently dayz

Barotrauma, I checked it out on a free to play weekend a few months back and have been hooked since

Lots of tinkering and the modding community is extensive, best played with friends but the single player is good too

Many in the past, but the most recent is Project Zomboid. That game would quickly take away decades of my life if I let it.

Neverwinter Nights and Planeshift are the two that come to mind

Warframe. I have been clean for years now, but the itch never really goes away

Terraria was like absolute heroin for me.

RTS games for me, particularly WarZone-2100 & Earth-2150.

The fact that you get a base of operations to return to & has Picture-in-picture mode is a unique thing

Have you tried Beyond All Reason?
- No, but played supreme commander

Slay the Spire

There are a bunch of games that I'll get super into, play for a while, then be finished with.

Slay the Spire taps perfectly into every compulsive center of my brain to make me keep playing. Like, we talk about 'addictive' games usually just as ones you like a lot... this is the first time I started to see it closer to actual addictive (though not actually a serious thing for me). It's such a sweetspot for my habits, I feel like I'd just keep saying 'one more run' so consistently, hours, days would evaporate. It kept me busy, to the detriment of doing other things.

You get on a good run, better keep going. You lose a run, might as well just start a new one and see if you have good opening luck. There's rarely a point that feels like "I should stop", until some IRL obligation comes up.

I still go back to it often when I just want an enjoyable way to kill time, or do something while I watch videos/tv on the side.

Other games with roguelike elements tap into this feeling too, like Balatro, Vampire Surviors, or Hades. But STS is where it felt strongest to me.

I respect STS but I LOVE Monster Train (haven't played the second).

How can people play single games for thousands of hours ?

I game a lot and my absolute record is maybe ~400h

Consistent habits.
The couple of games where I got those types of playtimes were either things I had semi-perpetually running for long periods of time (because reasons) and one game that became my "one hour decompression post-work" for maybe three or four years. Turns out if you do a thing consistently for a couple thousand days in a row it adds up.

last one was dave the diver. Loved it

First was RuneScape, that lasted a month or so. Next was Civ V, that was a couple weeks. I learned my lesson.

Rhythm Doctor

Balatro

Mindustry

I have 3000 hours in satisfactory and I refuse to believe it is an addiction

There's many, even from your list. Recently Deadzone: Rogue.

Never heard of it, might have to check it out when I'm home at my PC again. 🙂
- I also recommend gunfire reborn and deep rock galactic.

I spent a full year of my life playing Grim Dawn.

I bet I have thousands (thinking 5000+) hours on the original counterstrike. Steam says I have like 12.6 hours. ¯(ツ)/¯

Civ, and Rimworld. "One more turn" crack in a bottle.

Old School Runescape. I have multiple characters, but started from scratch a month ago, already have 250 hours of play time on it.

on rs3 i played a ton during the pandemic, until it became too expensive (in game currency, and as a principle for the bonds) so i just stuck with doing dailies now. I do stick around longer for EVENTS/holidays.
- RS3 is really filled with way too much p2w, that's why I stick to osrs. There's still bonds of course, and I wouldn't recommend trying to pay for membership through them, but it's a lot better concerning in game currency than RS3.

I saw a lot of factory games in other comments but I didn't see my drug of choice : Captain of Industry. The process chains are really complex and you can't just throw space at a problem. I played for 24 hours straight once without getting up from my chair.

The Cluefinder series, Minecraft beta from 1.4 to 1.6, BOTS, Secret of the Solstice, Realm of the Mad God, Skyrim, Mindustry, FTL, and currently CS2 and PokeRogue. Though I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one.

1200h in PZ and 1000h in Rimworld. This was across many years, but still, I have a job and a family, so I feel like that's a huge chunk of time.

As others have said slay the spire took over a few days off my life as did dicey dungeons, and Stardew valley.

RS, i bought prenium for 6 months then i started playing it all the time(right before the pandemic) then bought ingame bonds with ingame money for a couple years, until early last year i stopped doing prenium for members, only play maitenance mode on the account.

deltarune, tf2, and uh.. hsr or pgr.

I played destiny 2 for six years straight.

I finally stopped playing early this year due to burn out.

Now I'm playing Diablo 4 which is a dead game btw.

I have around twentythousand hours in the counterstrike franchise. I played source semi competively, and was moderator on massive 64player severs. nowadays i play occasionally because CS2 just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Faster Than Light

The Witcher two and three

Morrowind and Skyrim

Back in the day i played Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat where I was a top10 player. Also a ton of Unreal tournament.

Heartstone also comes to mind.

Cant forget minecraft

oh Guild Wars...damn put some hours in as well.

Right now I quite enjoy Mechabellum, and im starting to get too sucked in again.

Gemstone 3 mud back in the late 90’s. Had its claws in me for a few years.

Depending on what kind of addiction behavior you might look at, it's been different games.

For the 'I think about it all the time, and wait for my next chance to get back to it,' an old Minecraft modpack called Per Fabrica Ad Astra was the best. It was the full knapping flint tools through visiting other planets stack, with a good progression tree, so I was thinking about designs for an oil refinery when I should have been sleeping, trying to complete 'just this one last thing' when I should have been going other places, and forgetting to eat because I was making an in-game kitchen.

If you're talking more the 'The world has me beat, so I'm reaching for my...' style, a favorite depressant, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is that. I beat it long ago but I still go back and just do a shift or several when even gaming is 'just too much.'

And if it's more the style of a stimulant, BPM: Bullets Per Minute. It's a great way to hit a high speed flow state. Boom boom chik, boom boom chik

Rust. Its a horribly addicting game thats ruined many lives. Also, Frostpunk.

Operation Harsh Doorstop multiplayer - I can't get enough of Project Reality style semirealistic battlefield games.

Motortown: Behind The Wheel - the driving just feels so damn good...

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead - specifically Sky Islands mod to give the game a more "run based" focused feel. This game has passed an event horizon of environmental richness no other adventure game comes close to, the landscape truly feels alive and it is very addictive in a good way.

Call Of Duty Mobile & Other Battle Royale Mobile Games - such as (now defunct) Apex Legends Mobile or Farlight 84, never spent money on it in addictive way I just find higher level competitive battle royale gameplay fascinating.

You might like Insurgency: Sandstorm
- Yes! No vehicles like OHD has though which is a necessary thing for me to really get into the gameplay loop.

14 years I've been wandering about.

None of them.