Tossup between how much caffeine I drink and not working out.

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.

About 42 hours. I start getting hallucinatory sparkles at roughly 40 hours and usually go to bed then.

Only done it a few times in my life, but the most memorable one was while in the middle of a 5-day LARP. We were going hard, I was NPCing, and I started seeing shadows in the middle of a fight. I took that as my cue to dip out and crash.

There's a moose loose in the hoose.

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, too, will still be playing Factorio.

Also playing Factorio.

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.

That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies.

You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not.

You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

• Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)

The ball was a colorless wireframe. Color wasn't necessary for the scenario.

The person was genderless. Gender wasn't necessary for the scenario. They looked like a wire frame skeleton of a person.

The ball was roughly the size and density of the smallest size bowling ball.

Table surface was circular wireframe with four legs. Material wasn't filled in as I wasn't trying to model for friction.

My imagination doesn't tend to fill in unnecessary details. Too much wasted processing power. I also don't really envision things. Like, I don't "see" them in my head. I feel out the shapes and weights and other physical properties relevant to the scenario and let my intuitive understanding of physics roll the scenario forward.

Like, I know the ball rolled until it fell off the table, it fell some distance, then bounced off the floor three or four times with a sharp crack, as I filled in that the floor was concrete as soon as I needed to know how it would bounce, and the sound it would make filled in naturally from there.

I genuinely don't know whether how I think qualifies as aphantasia. I don't really imagine visual stimuli, but my imagination is very thorough for sound and feel.

Ooh. I've heard of Frostpunk and Tropico but never played them myself. If they're similar to Rimworld I need to check them out.

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.

Oh, hey! Another Ratchet: Deadlocked fan in the wild!

No wait...

Where do I apply for my "I beat Radahn before he was nerfed" badge?

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.

Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel's back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.

Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I'd only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I've been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that "I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then."

Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven't looked back.

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.

Thank you. That's a flawless description.

This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.

Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it's the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.

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.