What's your comfort game?

Spending a week installing Skyrim mods and playing the actual game for a week before running into a game-breaking bug that I cannot get around.

Banished
- Yeah! So cozy, that is a delightful comfort game that I forgot about til now

I like games with beautiful open world environments I can just roam around in so Witcher 3, RDR 2, Far Cry 4, Subnautica. I also like games I can quickly jump in play a little and quit, so playing a few quick matches in Dead By Daylight is comforting

Hell Divers 2. Used to be Mario Kart kind of, although I do get competitive there. Also Muse Dash.

Not sure about comfort… but I always find myself picking rocket league up on my steam deck for a few matches. Probably because it’s a bit mindless and lets my brain take a break by only reacting in the moment.

Toy Story 2 on the PS1

Oldschool runescape
- Hell yeah. I wish the Lemmy community was bigger for osrs.

Dwarf Fortress

Final Fantasy XII & Fallout 3 [Steam/GOG]

For the last two years it's been BG3.

The Sly Cooper Trilogy. I still have them on PS2

Alpha Centauri.
I know I’m aging myself, but there has never been anything else like it. The depth, the narrative, the way the gameplay evolves. It’s a masterpiece.
- Nice, and I fully agree: The best turn based 4x Civ I have played so far. Music, fractions and the story are all perfect. The factions play quite different and allow for diverse strategies to win. Surprised that there are not more copy-cats that try to pull it off.

Path of Exile, I just love the game so much.

Lately, it's been Hell Divers. Used to be Mario Kart.
- I can Hell Dive for hours if I'm feeling shitty or for just one mission if I just need a quick escape. I feel like I've gotten an insane amount of value out of it.

Brotato

Minecraft is the one I keep coming back to year after year. Throw in a massive automation based mod pack and I'm set for months until the save lags to the point of unplayability.
- To help with lag for me I ran a server on a separate computer with some extra performance mods then played on my PC. It helps a little but still will eventually lag

I'd have to say Dark Souls, honestly any of them. Once you know what you are doing, where you're going, it's easy to just get lost in playing
- Shame on me, never finished even Dark Souls 1, but damn I had a lot of fun failing and dying. :-)
  
  No shame at all, they're very flawed games and the problems they have do drive some people away. The latter half of DS1 is extremely rough, honestly.
- Ds1 just flows so well. I still get happy when a new run gets the black knight halberd

Factorio
- I turn off biters and play on 100x research because it's calming.
- The factory must grow.

Street Fighter II in basically any edition. Was my entry point in fighting games and to this day it just feels 'right'
Street Fighter III, 3rd Strike (It is that good and to this day one of the highlights)
Slay the Spire
Contra (NES)
Super Mario Brothers (NES) (What an utterly brilliant game)
Castlevania 3 (NES)
Vampyre Survivors (Ok, maybe just pure dopamine addiction)
Sudoku
Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster
XCOM
Open X-COM
Olli Olli
rogue
Tetris
Into the breach ... and Quake
- If you’re into Street Fighter it’s worth checking out 6. Is the first one that really hooked me since SF2.
  The tournament scene for the game is crazy as well. As much as I enjoy playing, just watching some of the high tier matchups on YouTube feels like when the best dudes at the arcade would clash back in the day.
  
  Thanks, you are spot on: Playing Street Fighter 6 casually and even bought a SteamDeck to have a computer with enough power to run it. :-) For me it is the 3rd, after 3rd Strike (ha ;-)) which hooked me, although I have to confess Fightcarde and 3rd Strike are still peak Street Fighter for me. Street Fighter IV never 'clicked' for me, and I didn't like the presentation of Street Fighter V at all.
  Hope we run into each other in an online match, though I hail from Europe so we might not be in the same region.

Kingdom hearts, any one of them really. But 358/2 days is my favorite

Skyrim
Valheim
USED to be Destiny, but after 10 years, I'm just done with it now

League of Legends.
- Holy carp you do. Once I hit about level 20 the culture of that community just went crazy. Everyone was just a complete shithead and cared so much.
  I wish I could have capped myself at about level 10 and hung around with the other casuals forever, but instead I quit once I got enough counseling to put down the mouse and stop running bottom route sup.
  
  The problem is 9 out of 10 games are just misserable... but than that one game hits and it hits different, so good you forget the other 9 games and makes you crave more.
  But I'm clean now... since January I got my League fix only from the eSports...
- so brave

Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age.
- Oh my god I love these games so much. Even bought a snap on bt controller for my phone specifically to play those on the go

Mechwarrior Online

Whenever I’m depressed and have a hard time enjoying a game, I usually go to RDR2 or Coffee Talk.

Anything Zelda. Stardew Valley. Civ 6. RDR2.

Slay the Spire
- Scrolled too far down to find one of my favorite comfort games... bought it multiple times so I can play it on every device I own. Works perfectly on everything from my smartphone over my netbook, laptop to my SteamDeck. Just brilliant game design and I am looking forward to part 2! :-)

Factorio
- i love factorio, but I cannot see it as a comfort game.
  I've got so many things to do, i need to massively increase processing on novice, gleba is a wrek, all my space platforms suck, everything needs to be reworked, and I won't have the tech to fix fulgira or vulkanus until after I ve beat the game.
  very stressful.
  #2 most hours of any game on steam.
  
  I got 355 hours in the game and haven't launched a rocket yet. I just built my first silo like an hour ago. I thought I was like minutes away from doing it. Nope. I have a whole new fucking chain to learn. Oh well. I love it. It's not stressful at all to me. This is the type of shit I live for. My OG answer to this question is SimCity 4. The endless replay value and modding in that game got me well over 5k hours of play. Factorio is the only game since then that has come even close to that feeling.

Squarez Deluxe
It is the best shape-packing game ever in my opinion, or at the top of the podium with the greats. In Extreme Mode I can get lost for hours and hours
A great player needs to have a solid understanding of the core mechanics, because a tremendous amount of creativity necessary. Player needs to conceive and continually rebalance a multi-faceted plan for managing the playfield. By necessity, you'll almost be setting up Rube Goldberg-ian contraptions using the various action blocks, which leads to extremely satisfying moments when you finally get that "one piece" you've been hungering for 30 minutes.
Best of all, the original developer made Squarez Deluxe Freeware! So grab DOSBox and have a crack!

Stardew valley, minecraft and sometimes mass effect 3 multiplayer. I'm still impressed I can regularly find matches in such an old game.

Satisfactory

For now it’s Oblivion Remastered.
Once that’s done I have no idea, probably back to Skyrim.
- Same here. Skyrim was cool when it came out cause graphics but Oblivion is king when it comes to gameplay. Having graphics and gameplay now there's just no contest anymore IMO.

OG Doom and some random WADs.
- MyHouse.wad

I guess Overwatch. Im one of those fans.
I think most of all the history of passionate stories drew me in and kept me. But most of all I like these games to challenge me to stay focused on the current game and what I can do and keeping my tilt in check.
Honestly feels like a mental practice to stay chill even in the most frustrating losing streaks.
But to super chillout maybe sims 4 or stardew valley. :)

Rimworld. It's like having a fishtank, but with really sociopathic fish. Only game I can think of where the #1 enemy you struggle with, that which shapes your core strategy and approach to every problem, is its single threaded performance.
- I really don't mean this as a dunk on Rimworld, but as is tradition with most things in Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress did it first. "FPS Death" was a common end condition for resilient forts. If natural dangers or greed didn't kill you first, boredom would as your FPS crawled down into the single digits or, if you were really dedicated, this could become seconds per frame.
  Rimworld has kind of done it's own thing now with the third or fourth DLC expansion but for a majority of its lifespan so far it could charitably be called a DF clone with a readable UI. Now DF has its own readable UI and Rimworld has cybernetics and psychic magic so they've sort of both become individual titans of their own genre.
  
  Er... isn't DF multithreaded (now)?
  But anyways: while Dwarf Fortress isn't quite Zork I in terms of influence, there's a good reason people are pushing to have it added to the game canon. Tynan has never denied that Tam Adams was an inspiration, or tried to hide the influence DF had on Rimworld's development (hell, the highest difficulty in Rimworld has always been called 'losing is fun'). And while the two games are clearly similar, the core design philosophy is pretty different. Rimworld's goal has always been a compelling story through fairly structured gameplay, where DF has always emphasized emergent gameplay and adherence to the simulation. I've played both since pretty much they came out (oh fuck I'm old...), but rimworld's gameplay loop, core modability and not-awful-UI really won me over for casual gameplay. In their current incarnations, both are amazing games, but the question was "comfort game", and this is my answer.

Angry Birds

Super Metroid, especially on a dark and rainy day

Morrowind.

Either Pikmin or Tears Of The Kingdom! Both are such good games!

Super Mario World. It was the first one to really unlock gaming for me. I go back and play it fairly often.
Overwatch is the weird one. The game just clicks for me, and when I'm in the zone, doing call outs and nailing upcoming enemy ults or pushes just feels so good.

I've played more Team Fortress 2 than anything else. I can always go back to community servers there.
- Man I really wish there was a version of TF2 with all the cosmetics and weapon unlocks disabled.
  
  Valve recently released the source code so that's probably really easy to do now

Red Dead Redemption 2 story. Every time I go back and play through it provides a month+ of joy and comfort.
American Truck Sim is a good one too.

The binding of isaac

Chrono Trigger. Beaten hundreds of times on tens of devices. Short, sweet, doesn’t outstay its welcome but is always, always good.
- Yay, on of my top 5 games of all time! :-) I just cannot play it as a comfort game, when I replay it, I have to have time for uninterrupted immersion and enjoyment of this masterpiece! :-)

Sometimes slowroads is pretty chill. Sometimes subway surfers. Idk

Og doom, Duke nukem 3d and Unreal tournament

City skylines and factorio.

Super Metroid
A Hat in Time
Portal

Dwarf Fortress and Settler 2. It's quite comforting seeing everything working and the dwarfs/romans going forth and Back.
Also Kingdoms and Castles works here well too.
I like the "Wuselfaktor" like they say in german
- Do you know widelands.org ? Should be right up your alley.
  
  I know it. But never got a grip like Settlers 2. But maybe i'll give it another try.
  Thanks for the reminder :)

Kerbal Space Program. I mostly just make fighter jets using the procedural wings and BDArmory mods now.

Project zomboid: walk around, bash heads in, gather stuff for a base you will never build.
I play with infection disabled though - so not to restart after one bite
- This is kind of my answer too. 7 days to die with the difficulty turned down, dying light, last stand aftermath. Still looking for my white whale, someone please come make a non-scam version of The Day Before!

Minecraft
Stardew Valley
Rogue Legacy 2

It's buggy but it's mine, pillars of eternity 2 deadfire
I never really got into the one character party hardest mode min/maxing, but everything else about it is pretty much what I want from an RPG

Train Sim World, currently 5 but TSW updates are like FIFA or Madden so its not that different from previous versions. At least it was a free update.
Just driving a train around, especially if its somewhere I know is really relaxing. Really looking forward to the first Japanese route dropping sometime this year (hopefully).
I do like that you can chose to enable safety systems or not depending on if you want to play on easy mode or very easy mode. It has even less pressure than your average relaxed building game if you ignore the clock.
Downsides, steam engines are pretty bad in the game, I just don't bother with them. Dovetail are pretty useless. Brand new routes are usually overpriced. Some of the routes are bad, really bad, or just plain boring. Very important to read reviews. Everything is DLC.
Upsides, there are frequent sales so if you stay away from the latest content it can be pretty cheap in comparison. If you get a route you like it has a fair amount of repeatability. Some of the DLC overlays nicely with other DLC.

minecraft (playing around with mods is very fun, too)
- Therapy 💚