It might feel wrong to call their last proper sit down at a couch/desk singeplayer experience a "classic", but its older than Half-Life one was when it came out.

That makes me feel old and I wasn't even around for HL1. How's your back feeling, millennials?

writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.

Here i was imagining "valve classic" was somehow a wildly popular game ive never heard of

My only issue has always been that I cannot throw more money at the ape. So I buy the game for gaming-adjacent friends and almost always ~~ruin their lives~~ convert them

And at those prices I’ve bought it at least twice

Not that it should be expected to dish out free content and never charge for DLC. Not every game has the kind of profit margin Stardew Valley has.

Probably only surpassed by Minecraft, although that is of course no longer an indie game today

To be fair, portal 2 was also built when valve valued quality over profit.

I had to settle for Lego Dimensions. Better than nothing. And GLaDOS arguing with HAL 9000 was pretty epic.

It's one of my favorite games of all time, but I don't think Portal 2's basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn't complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn't want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.

Deadlock doesn't look bad

In game time isn't everyone's metric for a good game. Some of my favorite games only have a few hours of content, but those few hours are really good.

I've watched some let's plays of Starcraft Valley, and I'm glad I did because I probably wouldn't like it, and if I had to give it a rating, it would be pretty mediocre.

I think it being so positively rated is that there are a ton of casual gamers that this type of game really appeals to, not that it has a lot to do.

While I enjoyed it, it was also very stressful. I think we just played wrong. We covered every millimeter of the plot with farms or other useful stuff and then proceeded to be busy for more than half the day with just maintenance. At some point this meant that we never got to explore and often barely had time to go to the stores or talk to the people in the village.

Apart from overcooked it was probably the most stressful game Is ever played and it's not supposed to be like that

Are you into dramatic NPCs? If no, you have to play it multiplayer with someone who gives a crap about pixel people.

I tried playing it alone but every system in the game is puddle deep so I was only able to play until winter by myself.

Then I played it with my girlfriend, and I spent 100 fondly remembered hours.