Hearts of Iron III
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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The binding of isaac
Factorio
The factory must grow.
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
Slay the Spire
City skylines and factorio.
Heavily modded Kerbal Space Program. It's so relaxing building rockets and going on complex interplanetary missions for science
Satisfactory
Stardew valley, minecraft and sometimes mass effect 3 multiplayer. I'm still impressed I can regularly find matches in such an old game.
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.
Minecraft.
If I'm feeling particularly antisocial I'll play Angband or Umoria.
Id say Long Drive. It's fun to drive and listen to the radio, find weird stuff, and laugh at the hilarious glitches
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.
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!
Binding of Issac
OR
Hades
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the switch.
Pokemon Silver/Gold.
Recently, Path of Titans as well.
Anything Zelda. Stardew Valley. Civ 6. RDR2.
Sexy Parodius
It's super fun to get drunk and play through. Fantastic music! Gotta MAME it, though. Unless you actually have a Sexy Parodius machine.
Sudoku, Picross, and the solitaire from Shenzhen IO
The Guardian Legend, for the nes, played on my pc using fceux because my preferred controller is a keyboard.
if I'm feeling bad, it makes me feel ok.
OG Doom and some random WADs.
Balatro
So easy to get a round or two in, on the couch, isn't it? Can be picked up and put down at a moment's notice, too. Not really a "casual" game as you get up in the stakes, but so damn good.
Oh shoot i lost my 45min run, time to queue up another!
Og doom, Duke nukem 3d and Unreal tournament
Noita.
I know that might seem like I'm being facetious but Noita is so difficult and so punishing I find it impossible to take it too seriously. Pretty much every time I've died I've just gone "haha that's what I get" and boom, back at the entrance to the mines.
I'm not particularly zen about things in general either, it's just that my objective is always "screw around until the inevitable happens" because anything else seems like pure hubris.
Super Metroid, especially on a dark and rainy day
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.
Nitpick
I really don’t mean this as a dunk on Rimworld, but
(slightly-patronizingly-phrased linguistic tip: including the 'but' there is an implied contradiction that severely undercuts the sincerity of the preceding sentiment. I believe your sincerity, many people just don't know about that weird semantic quirk.)
(And in a 'hey dude' moment, FPS death was a thing way way before DF. I remember it killing my cities in SimCity 2000, for example.)
- Super Metroid
- A Hat in Time
- Portal
One more vote for the original Doom, running in a modern engine with some of the colossal WADs released over the years.
It loads instantly, gets you fighting in no time. You know the rules, yet you still get surprised by one of these guys with a machine gun.
Compare that to a modern game, where you have to wait for it to update, compile shaders, the studio logo video, the proprietary launcher and the main menu before you are allowed to do anything.
Alto's Odyssey with youtube on my TV, or No Man's Sky with youtube on my phone
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
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