With gaming often bringing me into a really depressive headspace sometimes with how the markets are developing, whats a game you can always go to and just be lost in, or just be happy with?
Personally i would go for advance wars 1 and 2 on the gba (there is no remake and never will be)
the artstyle, the music, the game-play is just simple, yet effective, a sublime experience of very fun times.
Whats yours?
Minecraft. It’s just a nice game to get lost in.
I haven’t seen anyone mentioning this gem:
Vampire Survivors
OpenTTD is my happy space. It’s relaxing to just hop in and start building some railroads.
Outer wilds. The music is so pretty, and going back to it after you’ve explored it all feels like being on your childhood playground again. Sometimes now I just go out into space and watch how the planets move.
It is still Guild Wars 2 for me.
It is very chill to play and only explore and it also has more challenging content if i feel like it. Best MMO out there. At least for me personally.
If anyone can show me the way to a guild wars 2 community here i would be grateful btw.
Star Wars: Racer - I know every track by heart at this point, have it on my Switch and still play quite a bit. Amazing flow state game.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 - absolute classic and the nostalgia I get from playing is unmatched
Age of Empires 2 - the music is just muah
KotoR - Best Star Wars game ever made next to Dark Forces 2 and Jedi Outcast
Stardew Valley is amazing for this. Minecraft was it for years and years, but Stardew is just like a nice hug. I adore it.
Hogwarts Legacy has also fallen into this category for me now.
Stardew Valley is my go-to. I found Firewatch really easy to get lost in too.
Try not to have an overly rosy retrospection about this. There were plenty of crappy, cash-grabby games in decades past. We just don’t remember them because they were crappy, cash-grabby, and not worth remembering. They hadn’t invented microtransactions yet, but that’s just one more flavor of crappiness.
Bloons TD 6. Just so incredibly addicting, and there’s depth to the different monkeys and how they interact, especially when you think about all the upgrades.
Anyone of my simulation/management games. Whether it’s running a hospital, creating an auto manufacturing assembly line or helping some brave adventurers find oxygen I’m always more at peace with a single player goal driven experience.
Im gonna be “that guy” and say dark souls 1. Subsequent playthroughs of the game are surprisingly relaxing, when you know where everything is and you’re just putting together a build and steamrolling bosses.
For me that’ll be Stardew Valley. I can just zone out to the really nice music. Also a few years ago I used to have Planetside 2 in that rotation. I was kinda bad but with the MMO aspect, I could always run somewhere for the objectives and have fun. Finally, I like Trackmania to discover new tracks and just chill.
Lots of love for Stardew. “The Valley Comes Alive” is, for my money, one of the finest pieces of video game music out there.
I couldn’t agree more!
Stardew Valley actually stressed me 😅. I felt like I was always falling behind. And no one wanted to dance with me at the dance :(.
I recommend Sun Haven then. There’s no stamina and you can adjust the day to last from 15 mins to 40 mins (although passout time is 12am compared to 2am in SDV) but with the 40 mins per day, I felt a lot less rushed
I can see how it’d do that to someone, I know some people that are in it only to optimize their revenue to squeeze out more golds for instance, and that’d be stressing to me. Personally I don’t care about completing the game, at a given time I just try to fill a few objectives, like getting a spouse and finishing the community center bundles, or reaching the deepest in the mines while upgrading my tools… Just free yourself from that FOMO feeling and you’ll be better off :)
Gaming is probably the only sphere of my life where I actually experience FOMO. There are several games where I can’t resist trying to do EVERYTHING, only to get burned out and leaving the game before I finish it. If I’d just concentrated on the story, I’d probably have actually finished in half the time, but instead I walk around trying to achieve everything.
I can understand to an extent, to me it’s appears a lot in open world games such as Skyrim and to a lesser extent Zelda BotW/TotK. Or maybe it’s a hoarding issue hehe ^^’
I’ve been enjoying this game on the phone. It’s really chill and perfect for playing in short spurts.
Exactly! I myself have it on Switch and PC, and I don’t regret buying it twice cause that was damn cheap given it’s (almost) a one man game!
Portal. I’ve played through it enough times that I can complete it in a little under 20 minutes. I’m not very good at games but there are a lot of fun and easy tricks to run through it quickly. Playing it a bunch of times is relaxing and fun for me.
Over the past years I’ve played a lot of relaxing indie- and open source games. The ones that really stuck with me were Eqilinox (Steam), Endless Sky (homepage, open source) and Veloren (homepage, open source).
Bonus game which just came to my mind: Slime Rancher (Steam) was a really fun, too!
