I only own a MacBook Air and miss my PC days for a more hardcore experience but I find it super hard to find fun games to play (maybe its age...) these days.

The last one I really had fun was: Desperados III - just a good nostalgia if you were into Commandos like games Divinity Original Sin 2 - probably the greatest turn-based RPG SteamWorld Dig 2 Firewatch

Really want to try the suggestions here though like Outer Wilds, Deathloop

Outer Wilds. The best sci-fi exploration game I’ve ever played. A very beautiful & profound experience that leaves you reflecting on life.

If anyone sees this and plays the game, don’t read any reviews or information online! Go in completely blind and you will not regret it.

Couldn’t recommend it more. Simply beautiful game. Definitely agree with going in completely blind, try not to even read the Steam description, discovering the core mechanics was very much part of the experience for me. I was left very empty when I finished it, I wanted more and more; like finishing a fantastic book. Easily one of my favourite games of all time.

I didn’t enjoy the DLC as much as the base game, it felt rather disconnected. Which was disappointing given how connected the rest of the game is. Still a nice story, just not quite as good for me.

Are there any other similar games I may also enjoy? I’ve also played Journey and found that to be similarly touching. Stray was also very enjoyable for me.

Subnautica, Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Life is Strange all similarly left gigantic holes in my heart and left me unable to play other games for a while.

It’s in a different genre, but check out Her Story. It’s a wonderful game that asks for the same curiosity and creativity from the player that Outer Wilds does.

You might look into "The Forgotten City". Similar "world mechanic" and you really get to know the place while playing it. I enjoyed it after also playing Outer Wilds.

What an incredible game. All I want now are more games like this, where exploration takes the front seat and the player decides how to traverse the narrative and landscape. Breath of the Wild is another fantastic example.

But Outer Wilds sure is something special. Make sure to check out Subnautica if you haven't as well.

Outer Wilds is great but it honestly makes my skin crawl sometimes. The game does a great job of making me feel like I made a big mistake when I hurtling past my target planet and into the abyss

Is it available on iOS or macos?

Give Hard space: Ship breaker a try. It's a chore-core set in space where you break down surprisingly believable ships with surprisingly believable physics to a fantastic soundtrack in a kinda-borderlands-precursor universe. It's got a maximum timer of 15m per shift, so it's easy to drop in and out, but you can spend multiple shifts on a particular ship, or just gut the biggest systems and move on every day.

The attention to detail is my favorite part. Good sound of vacuum (dampened and transmitted by touch), good 3d movement and drift, and great attention to pressure and decompression hazards.

Neat suggestion. I like the idea of a finite game loop

Deathloop: I was expecting another FPS, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the story and the characters.

Death Stranding: I've beaten the game, now I'm just trying to collect everything and do all the deliveries. Although stressful, I'm engaging BTs more. The story and the world Hideo Kojima built it's really fascinating.

I've historically played FPS games. Recently stumbled onto Foxhole which is more of a large team strategy game. It's a sort of wargame that emulates multiple aspects of war beyond just the frontline fighting. Imagine an RTS, but you play as a single unit. Every item, weapon, vehicle, etc in the game has to be manufactured by players. Players then have to deliver those to the frontline. There is a whole manufacturing and logistics network outside of the actual combat. There are no combat stats, no killfeed, and very little incentive to play only for solo efforts. Even ranking up requires commendations from your team for playing support roles like medic. Everything is designed around teamwork and long-term efforts towards the war and I really like that. Especially compared to how most games are designed more recently.

What drew me to it was the potential for multiple ways of play. You don't just have to go out and shoot people. You can instead be the guy who digs trenches prepping for defense. Or building structures in a newly captured zone. Being able to switch between them at will. What has kept me playing is the community. Very few games have a player base that will stop what they are doing to explain things to new players. There are definitely goofy players. And probably some trolls. But I've never asked a question in chat and not gotten a serious answer.

While the game doesn't have the same appeal as say, Counter Strike which I thoroughly enjoy, it does have a refreshing style of play. You can play hardcore or casual or anything in between. And sometimes it's nice to just chat with folks while you're pinned down in a trench waiting for backup or a much needed shipment of ammo.

Damn, thanks for the thorough description. It sounds different and I hadn't heard of it. New gameplay styles are always refreshing.

XCOM: Enemy Within with Long War and Long War Rebalance. It blows my mind just how much better the game is with them. This is a turn-based game, but without Long War the game is about carefully activating one enemy group at a time, hoping that RNG is on your side. With Long War Rebalance you don't have to think about defensive positions until the aliens notice your presence, at which point most of them on the map do and a front line forms that you have to break in a timely manner.

Disco Elysium. Robert Kurvitz can write or what, great game. It runs on a toaster, but it's literary aspirations elevate it into a subjective experience you can't reproduce with just an RTX 3090 running hot.

Never heard of Rebalance. Thanks for the tip!

Though, after playing XCOM2, I don't know if I can go back to LW.

I've been playing a lot of BF2042 lately.

My first play thru was very underwhelming and I had walked away from it for months. I had tried to play it like an old school battlefield and found myself getting frustrated quickly (i.e. constantly dying while trying to learn guns/vehicles).

Then, I gave it one more shot after watching some YouTube video about the new season. None of the new content was actually interesting to me, but I was observing some new gameplay techniques that seemed a bit more compelling.

Now, I play but I don't ever fire a single bullet. I use that class that lets you spot enemies with a drone and I let all the other kids do the hard work for me. In certain game modes, this style of play does feel very rewarding as you can guide the front lines via intelligence. In 128 player modes especially. The average time between spotting and seeing the target site explode is usually less than 5 seconds in the most contested zones.

Stationeers, considering the love that games like factorio and satisfactory get around here I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more.

The main aim is to build a space colony within a surprisingly detailed physics system, involving things like atmospheric control, pressurising an environment, growing food etc.

Just today I felt proud for being able to pressurise my working area, not realising that filling an atmosphere with 100% oxygen is a recipe for explosive disaster the moment I turned the furnace on :)

Would recommend for fans of factorio, oxygen not included etc.

I have put a ton of hours into Crusader Kings III. It is less complicated than other grand strategy games, but the real fun is leaning into the generative story aspect and roleplaying as your family throughout generations.

It also has a great modding scene, as most of the game logic is defined in text files in a custom scripting language. If you learn a bit about the language it is very easy to get into, you can just edit files in a text editor and the game will automatically live reload and apply your changes.

I am currently playing a game called "Reventure" [0]. The objective of this game is taking back the Princess from the Dark Lord. The funny thing about the game is that you can select different paths to take back the Princess and it will end with different endings. For example, you are seeing a fisherman during your adventure and somehow you are distracted by what he does. You join the fishing instead of taking back the Princess. The game ends with the story of the fishing :)

Your character appearance changes over time depending on the end of your adventure. Also, there are many items and hidden routes in the game. These make you think about how the journey will end.

[0]: https://pixelatto.com/store/reventure/

I am burnt out of playing video games right now because I played my PlayStation non stop for around 30 days. I found out about this because I made a post on reddit about how I was not enjoying playing video games and people told me to stop playing asap and do other things instead. Great advice, turned out I was actually running away from real life responsibilities.

I guess I've been sort of doing the opposite. Trying to aggressively go after real world responsibilities for a while, and now trying to reconnect with games and chill a bit. Agreed with reddit though.

Same, but every game I buy - I tend to drop after 1-2 days and can't get into anything :(

A good modern GPU could also be an opportunity to replay older games in full resolution & graphics quality. I've recently replayed the Crysis series.

Was it any good, beyond the benchmark?

Satisfactory is the main game holding my attention these days.

Most the time time I'm too exhausted to play anything, and this can be a tough game for that pattern.

Elden Ring delivers the sort of frustration I require to distract me from my IRL frustrations.

10 thumbs up for Elden Ring!

...

don't ask me how I have 10 thumbs. It's embarrassing.

That's a lot of thumbs!

It makes typing reeaaaally troublesome!

I've been playing Apex Legends for the last 3 years, for like 3 hours every days for 2.5 years of those 3, but in the last 6 months since I switched jobs, i've been playing maybe 2-3 hours a week because i got burned out.

Some games i can also recommend are :

Risk Of Rain

Oxygen not included

Overcooked 2 ( goot to play with friends )

and of course, Among Us

Just downloaded Apex, and it might be one that puts my old gpu in its place

Definitely not the most graphics-intensive game by a long shot, but I recently discovered "Octopath Traveler" on Steam. It's kinda like those old-school JRPGs from the Super Nintendo days, but with some interesting improvements in graphic quality like focus and depth, lighting, etc., but definitely hits that "nostalgia" vein pretty good. The voice acting isn't bad either, and it's got some depth and isn't a quick 2-hour campaign that's forgettable for $65 bucks; it seems worth your money as far as I can tell.

Other than that, I'm digging on Dying Light 2, Elden Ring, and recently re-played the Middle Earth games, which helped me understand some of the plot in the new Lord of the Rings series that's "airing" on Amazon right now (I'd have been entirely lost otherwise).

I'm also trying Black Desert again, and over on PS5 I'm re-playing The Last of Us Part 2. Also planning to finally give State of Decay 2 over on xbox a real try for once. Seems to have improved quite a bit since release.

Planetside 2. It's a decade old MMO now but still getting substantial updates. It can be quite frustrating because it has shooter gameplay with an effectively open lobby so the teams can be very stacked and you aren't given any matchmaking to make your first sessions easy. There's a lot of confusing and incoherent-by-design stuff with its massive combined-arms PVP scope. It doesn't have enough player population to be a really complete experience round-the-clock now. As well, there's the usual laundry list of old bugs and accumulated cruft that may never be addressed. But the deeper you go with it, the more evident it is that there is no equivalent game. Battlefield gives some of the flavor(and PS2's moment-to-moment is largely copied from BFBC2), but it's far more tame and controlled.

That's kind of a bizarre description, but it's on the list.

Age of Empires II, in its various incarnations, available on Steam.

They start out at the level of the first expansion, The Conquerors, which really helped game play. Hits that sweet spot, IMHO, of battle + resource management without going into the weeds for micromanaging the different resources.

I'd add that AoE 4 is also pretty fantastic. I love the fact that the campaign starts out with the battle of Hastings, and after each victory they give you the option to watch a history documentary video they produced just for the game, and these videos are REALLY well done! I learned how they built castles from the first one and it's brilliant!

I fell in love with roguelikes (or roguelites, never sure how it’s really spelled).

Hades is one of the best, especially with a controller. Gameplay is amazing.

Risk of Rain 2 scratched the same itch for me. A run takes about 30/40 minutes and it has a great learning curve.

Tekken 7, I have recently started and I really like the complexity of a 3d fighter. Major plus is that its a 1v1 competitive game, so all my losses are on me. I can't blame my teammates nor do i have to depend on them to not lose the game.

Please do yourself a favour and do =not= play online until you're really good. It's a frustrating experience, to say the least. The online players will combo your ass so much you just can't do anything to defend yourself!

I completely disagree. There is no substitute for playing actual opponents. Playing against people is completely different than playing against the CPU.

You need to lose your fear of losing as quickly as possible to enjoy fighting games. (Also you won’t lose as much as you think.)

Tekken in particular you really just need a couple of core strings and learn to block.

Star Citizen! Seriously, makes me feel like a kid every time I boot it up. None of the pay to win DLC nonsense either. If there's a ship or piece of equipment you want, you can just make enough money in the course of playing the game to get it eventually. Plus, it's one of the only games in recent memory that can put my 3090 to good use. The graphics the engine spits out are so impressive, people have started making movies with it and they're not bad!

This is still a thing? What actual gameplay is there in the game now? Last I saw they had a hangar and some crappy FPS demo and seemed like a total money-grab... it's better these days? Is it actually released or still in perpetual early access?

There's quite a bit you can do. This is a fun game play video that shows off a reasonable range of the experience.

https://youtu.be/T3c9zK5Z04I

It seems very broad and very shallow, like an engine proof of concept more than an actual game... how is this the result of ten years of effort?? Mass Effect had three games in that timespan, The Old Republic reinvented itself and added space combat in less time, and so did Warframe...

I know that for the past 3 or 4 years they've basically rebuilt the backend in micro services on K8s, so that they can scale the game horizontally and add the really crazy persistence features they have planned. I think they founded a separate company just to create this new graph database to support the persistence features as well. I think a lot of the delays have come from that work and wanting a game like Mass Effect, but where 100's of people could be playing and interacting with each other concurrently.

I only found SC a couple years ago during the height of the pandemic. I just had a great time flying around in the giant space ships with my friends and I haven't spent much money on it, so it's hard for me to be too upset about the delays.

I love ripping on my friends who play it, but it's graphically impressive and could definitely tax a graphics card. It's hard to separate the idea of the game from the fact that those friends have spent thousands on in-game stuff and the gameplay doesn't look very compelling to me, beyond the graphics.

I certainly haven't spent thousands and I do feel like anyone that's spending $1000's on a video game is pretty far gone anyways to be perfectly honest.

As for the game play, I can only speak for myself, but I mean I'm having fun, so that's enough for me. I also only picked it up during the pandemic, so progress has appeared to be far faster from my perspective than those following along for 10+(?) years.

I guess I don't really understand what the gameplay component actually is maybe. What mechanics appeal to you?

Well last night I played for a few hours with a friend. We met up at a space station and hopped into my 3 person ship, which I had stored a small car in its cargo hold previously. Then we did some mercenary contracts. We attacked some criminals holed up in bunkers on some moons of the planet Crusader. The bunker was guarded at the surface level by a few large automated repeater turrets, so we landed 10 KM away on the other side of some terrain to break line of sight between the turrets and our ship. Then we got the car out of the cargo hold and drove to the bunker and snuck in and attacked our targets, looted, etc.

We made a good deal of cash from this which we can use to purchase new equipment, new ship modules, or new ships.

I also was pleasantly surprised by the mining gameplay. It's a lot more fun than I expected and almost its own mini game.

In the last patch of this year they'll be adding a salvage/scavenging mechanic that let's you extract and recycle raw materials from recently destroyed ships to repair your own ship with or sell for cash. These are a few of the ways you can play and broadly speaking I enjoy most of them. Does that answer your question?

Currently:

- The Spider-man port that finally made its way to the PC. Insomniac nailed the movement and combat on this one to the extent that it already feels awesome to mop up the side missions without even concentrating on the main story.

- Moonlighter. I'm stuck in the DLC and it's becoming more of a grind, but I still like its formula quite a bit. I just miss the music from dungeon 2&3…

Dyson Sphere Program

Build as many Dyson spheres as you can.

Absolutely phenomenal game, I have 200+ hours in

It's great! Took a lot of the lessons learned from Factorio and Satisfactory, etc. to create a more fun and polished experience (and prettier!).

Crusader Kings 3 is a lot of fun. I knew how complex 2 was and didn't think it would be for me, but 3 does a lot of good tutorialization and UI simplification. It's a 4X strategy game with a focus on dynasty building and backstabbing, somewhat like Civilization meets The Sims?

Hunt Showdown is an interesting shooter I've been playing with friends. It's a PvPvE game where you're dropped into a monster infested Louisiana bayou with the goal of killing the boss and successfully escaping with it's head. Dying means your character and their progression is lost, and you're competing against other people. The excellent sound design, use of "sound traps" and quick time-to-kill means it's a very high tension and unique game, with a lot of really interesting mechanics.

I still play (and enjoy) Minecraft SMP even after all these years.

The game I play the most is Apex Legends. It's a Hero-based shooter, but so much polished in terms of mechanics. Everything feels so satisfying, and the skill scale is pretty broad.

I also play Dirt Rally 2, but not so much as I hit a bottleneck. I play with a controller and not a proper sim setup (my current excuse).

I've been playing Dirt 4 with a controller, but god damn is it boring. Do you actually find Dirt Rally 2 fun?

Stardew Valley! It's extremely fun, specially if you have a partner to play with. Feels like a get out from all the worldly stress. I would buy a steam deck just to play it, even though i don't have any other use for one.

I've been on Stardew for a few months. It's a pretty great game.

Magic: The Gathering is fantastic collectible card game on various platforms.

- MTG Arena if you want a Hearthstone-like experience (free, great animations/sounds, but microtransactions or grinding to stay competitive)

- untap.in or Tabletop Simulator for completely free, though a rules engine doesn't exist so you'll need to know the rules properly yourself

- MTG Online which includes a rules engine but you'll need to pay for cards

- XMage which is free and includes a rules engine, but the UX is the worst of the above

I play mostly Arena, with a bit of untap when I want to play Commander/EDH.

I’m not a ‘gamer’ and haven’t played much since multiplayer Quake once upon a time. I recently bought a PC with a 3060ti to experiment with ML, and thought I’d try a few recent games to stretch it. I found a few of the recent big games (Doom, Cyberpunk 2077) pretty disappointing. I tried Factorio (HN’s recommendation) but found it frustrating as the complexity hit a certain level.

Mindustry is my crack-cocaine. It’s wonderful, but honestly, do be careful if you’ve got any trace of an addictive personality and have ever enjoyed tower defense games!

The Yakuza series. As I've gotten older I've started to enjoy narrative-driven games more. I used to play MMOs and multiplayer games but they just can't keep my attention these days.

I’ve started playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon and it’s amazing. I almost stopped playing after Chapter 3 because some cutscenes are way too long (at some point I put my controller down for half an hour, had the time to make sandwiches and eat them, and the cutscenes still weren’t over) but the story is incredible.

Maybe they should make a movie.

I highly recommend Yakuza 0 if you haven't played it, it's by far my favorite!

Wish I could get more into single player story games. But I simply do not get the same dopamine rush that I get from winning against real people online. When I as younger I used to love story games because we didn't have internet back then and video games were a luxury. Now I have all the great story games of our era but it simply does not give me the same satisfaction as online multiplayer games.

Sea of Thieves is fun. It required a pretty big time commitment, so I only play a few days a week (mostly weekends).

The developers do a decent job masking the MVP-ness of the game with mystique and lore. There are certainly improvements that could be made, but overall it’s been a fun experience.

A bonus for me is that it’s relatively kid friendly (excluding some experiences with voice chat, which can be disabled) meaning I can play this game with my kids.

Recently I got back to Baldur’s Gate 1 (not Enhanced Edition, which -to me- is an abomination).

I play Baldur’s Gate every half year or so. Trying to complete the game without dying once with my character. So far I never succeeded. At some point I’d like to complete BG1 and then continue into BG2, ToB.

A short while ago I also played Iratus: Lord of the Dead. Pretty easy to finish to completion, which was quite fun, but not very replayable imo. It’s more accessible than The Darkest Dungeon though …

Perhaps half a year ago I played Lands of Lore 1 (didn’t finish yet). Was a lot of fun.

What's bad about the Enchanced Edition?

For me, the mechanics change too much from the way that I remember playing the game.

I like to play druid single or multiclasses the most in Baldur's Gate. Spell mechanics changed a lot for a few signature spells. For example the entangling roots spell in BG1 was more effective, while EE uses the more annoying BG2 version of the spell.

In BG1, when summoning animals, you'd get a lot of summons, but in EE you'd get very few.

There's possibly some other changes as well, but I haven't verified. For example in BG2 a player will get experience when learning spells or disarming traps and I'd imagine it's the same in EE.

In the end I feel the EE version doesn't align with the vision the devs had for BG1. I'm fine with BG2 having BG2 mechanics (BG2 is an excellent game as well), but I feel it's not appropriate for BG1.

Also, I don't think the NPCs that were added by Beamdog fit the game. The voice acting just isn't as great. Just encountering these NPCs (even when not adding them to my party) annoys me.

Maybe EE just isn't for me since I played the original game and it deviates to much from my initial experience so long ago ...

The same thing that's wrong with every other Enhanced Edition, like Star Wars. Some people prefer the original creative vision, that's all.

Or maybe they just want to save $40 bucks if they have the originals and know about bgtutu.

Disco Elysium is a piece of art! A lot of text, but what a fulfilling experience. It is, sadly only a one timer. For continuous entertainment I can recommend Into The Breach - the best UX of a strategy game I've ever seen. It is replayable for hours and hours, and is great at every moment of gameplay.

Right now Guild Wars 2 and the Yakuza series. Friends and I also try to get in a few rounds of Brawlhalla every few days.

I do have fun with dota2, its not too competitive and there are times in it when you dont have to pay attention/ can relax.

Do also enjoy starcraft 2 but it can stress me a lot.

Did also enjoy the new doom games and also terminator resistance.

Sometimes creeper world 4, its really about micro management. Vampire survivors also fun.

Yeah.

I really enjoy playing Teardown. Not every mission is great in the campaign but some are a lot of fun.

Roadwarden. A little Indie gem, full text rpg in a Fantasy world with a nice pixel style.

It embodies the feeling I got when I was "reading" book "Choose your own adventure books" but with proper inventory management, music and quest book instead of a piece of paper.

I think Counter Strike will be the answer to most of us South Asian folks including me :D

A few days ago I installed Icewind Dale 2 EE (a community project with many improvements) and dived into it. I played BG and PST but was never into the more action oriented IWD. Hopefully this time I can finish it.

Minecraft RTX is awesome.

Elden Ring for me. It's my first From Soft game and I love it. It feels like all the best of BotW and Skyrim plus challenging gameplay (with an admittedly steep learning curve that doesn't need to be that way).

I'm surprised how much I like this game. I normally don't play a games with this setting. But I want to say its probably one of the best games I have ever played. I start hating a boss when I first fight them because its difficult, and and up loving and appreciating the boss design so much when I finally beat them.

Same here. I didn’t think I’d get into it nearly as much as I did. I’m at over 200 hours played. I don’t think I broke 100 hours for factorio.

I grew up a Halo fan so I’ve just been playing Infinite in my free time. I take online really casually now unlike I used to so I’m actually enjoying just playing.

I’ve been playing Halo (competitively) since CE. I feel like Infinite was a huge let down. For how long they had, there’s essentially no multiplayer content. I stopped playing after a couple months. Not sure what’s going on a 343i, but they need to get their shit together and not let such a great game die.

... and they should fix controller advantage vs PC. :)

Great games for an RTX 3090 and some of the best of all time:

- Dwarf Fortress

- Europa Universalis 4

- Caves of Qud

I really don't see any other way I could enjoy them without a 3090. EVGA take my credit card pls

Ultrakill. It's a game that I've been playing untill my eyes start burning.

The skill ceiling not necessarily high, but it's very demonstrable, with things like shotgun switching, parrying, etc.

If you enjoy boomer shooters- or just violence in general, I could greatly recommend it.

To describe it in brief, it's a sort of mix of Devil May Cry, with it's fast paced combat that involves you mowing down grunts (In a stylish manner), and Doom Eternal, where you.... well, mow down grunts?

It's currently being made by one single developer, and is quite cheap on the game scale coming in at less than 20 euros, if you want to spend a good hour and a half playing something and shutting off your brain, I recommend it.

By the way, there's secrets everywhere ;)

Wildlander, a modpack for Skyrim Special Edition. Basically, it's Skyrim with a graphics upgrade, some new content, new survival mechanics, and a different philosophy.

I really had an amazing time recently playing this game called Inside (by playdead).

It's such a simple 2d scroller game but somehow I really enjoyed the whole gameplay and the story.

Noita is a fun “roguelite” game that is different than anything else I’ve played.

2D pixel physics + spell casting

Death comes for you pretty quickly.

Join r/Noita to see fun death gifs

Factorio

I've been playing a lot of Supertuxkart lately. It's a lot of fun and the story mode presents a good challenge IMO.

Cities: Skylines

Islets - brilliant metroidvania.

Songs of conquest - spiritual successor to heroes of might and magic.

Noita whenever I am in a long, no cam meeting.

Borderlands 3 and RetroBowl on Switch and Android.

I am addicted to Clash Royale for the time being.

You better not play Tennis Clash, then.

Replaying the Mass Effect series on Steam Deck.

FPS games: Serious Sam and Left 2 Death.

Minecraft and Last Epoch mainly.

Chess, Baba is You.

civ 6 and the occasional game of Stellaris

FreeCraft.