Gaming

Unpacking, Everything, A Little to the Left, Gorogoa (if puzzles are chill for ya), and Spiritfarer are a few that come to mind.

What about tycoon games ? Old school ones are usually still very playable. Or for something more recent Planet Zoo can be as slow and peaceful as you like

This is my exact genre of choice. I’m only gonna list the games I play, because I can’t name them all.

Just about any sandbox survival game will fit the bill:

• Minecraft (obvi, but needs another mention)
• Satisfactory
• Rust
• Valheim
• Raft (there’s some story to read if you want to actually complete the game)

Then you have the simulators:

• Dreamlight Valley (a lot of story in this one, but once you get past the dialogue and tutorials it’s basically fetch quests and farming)
• My Time at Portia (same with this)
• Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
• House Flipper
• The Sims
• TABS (honourable mention; whimsical battle sandbox with some customisability)

Hades has been pretty fun

Satisfactory.

If you want to "beat" it, then it requires a bit of thinking and planning, but honestly it's such a fantastic go-at-your-own-pace kinda game. It's an open world factory building/sandbox building game. There are objectives and missions, but you have no time limit, and there is some freedom in choosing what you want to work on next.

It's also multiplayer, so you could invite a friend(s) to join and help you explore or find resources. I frequently will watch streams/youtube while playing.

The X3 games, I think?

They may be ancient, and weird, and buggy, and huge time wasters, and frustrating, but hey I have like 500 hours of playtime on them

Celeste can be quite casual and also challenging at the same time.

You can die as many times and the game doesn't punish you, you can save at any point and come back exactly where you lef off later.

Honestly a game called Carto. It’sa very relaxing game where you don’t battle, you don’t die and there is no “fail and restart scenarios”. It’s isometric puzzle adventure game where you can change the level you are exploring by literally going to the map screen and then rotate and move the map tiles around.

The point of the game is to collect more map tiles so you are able to fit them together in a way that solves the level and you move on.

It’s great.

Snow Runner! Very chill if you like driving and nice sceneries. But it becomes Dark Souls real quick.

Kartrider is a well developed Mariokart like game that is basically on all platforms (except Switch obviously).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQjON7OX63M

Pokémon, via emulation.

I'm playing Ultra Moon on the Steam Deck and it's wonderful and chill.

Part of my daily routine is to play Forza Horizon 5 while both listening to podcasts and working out on an elliptical machine every morning. I’m doing it on an Xbox, but it’s available on PC too. This kind of game is totally playable while listening to podcasts and still actually being able to follow what’s going on in the podcast.

I love to play from time to time Banished with podcasts. Once you figure out how to survive then it's just "how much can I build on a map before my PC explodes".
Ostriv seems nice too, but it's still in alpha, so weird things happen like villagers going out to buy candles or soap and returning with shoes.