I want to throw out Mario Bro 3, Tetris, Dr Mario, and Sonic Mania. Just pick up and go, no long term commitment, always fun solo but you can add a friend anytime. Simple but rewarding game play loop.
I have played the absolute shit out of Doom as well, basically all the official WADs, Master Levels, Sigil, you name it. I have tried myhouse.wad, but i was too big of a dum-dum to reach any of the secrets so I just quit and watched some youtube videos on it.
My first reaction on seeing the title was to name a games that just have fun core mechanics where replaying the game is basically just doing more of the same fun thing, so ULTRAKILL means I’m on the right track.
Prodeus is a pretty good doom clone. Not as in-depth as ULTRAKILL, but nonetheless has fun weapons and your basic doom (eternal) movement/mechanics. Blasting your way through enemies is as fun on the first level as the last. And the Quake games hold up extremely well, and the mechanics are so simple and powerful that you can really have fun replaying and getting better.
Stealth games are also very fun for this. The Splinter Cell series (especially Chaos Theory) are very fun to try to perfect/improve on. Dishonored and Thief as others have mentioned. And Midnight Club is the best racing series for this. You’ll have to emulate it, but it’s worth it. Completely open-world, and learning the city layout over time is very satisfying.
Sniper Elite 4/5 are my favorite stealth game. Huge maps with a lot of ways to approach combat, the way they use noise works really well, and who doesn’t like exploding a grenade on someone’s chest into a truck engine to disable that too?
Hitman (I honestly have no clue what they’re calling it now; it was 3 when I bought it) also has a passable rogue-lite mode now. The missions don’t have the same hand crafted polish as the real missions, but you start light and earn your way up to gear, with varied challenges to unlock currency, and potentially alert future targets on future maps if you’re sloppy. If you like stealth, hitman’s brand is a little different, but it’s solid overall.
Factorio and RimWorld immediately come to mind. Even with the base unmodified game, you’ll likely get several weeks of gameplay out of Factorio. Then if you dive into modding, you’ll never put it down. Multiplayer is really nice too. And their big DLC just got announced, and is planned to drop in a few months. So now would actually be a great time to dive in, because you’ll get access to the DLC about the same time that you’ve burned through the content on the base game.
Super Metroid. The game really opens up if you spend a bit of time learning alternate routes and sequence breaks. Many of them are kind of easy too. Besides all that, I just feel weirdly cozy in the depths or outside in the rain. It’s also a shortish randomizer if you go outside of the vanilla experience with like 100 places to check.
One of my favorites is Invisible Inc. Top down tactical game but focused on stealth instead of combat. Its a cyberpunk setting with a stylized art style. You run a corporate espionage outfit, that’s just been doublcrossed and exposed. Your supercomputer only has a few days worth of juice so you’ve got to a few days to get to the bottom of it and rebuild your agency enough to survive.
The levels are procedurally generated and sunce each campaign is time limited you really have to work with what you’re able to find each run. You choose two agents to start and can find up to two more to round out your group as you go. They all have different abilities and synergies with each other so lots of combos to explore.
There’s also an endless mode thats fun as well, and is different than the campaign since you don’t have a time limit. You have time optimize your agents and have time to get your ideal gear loadouts. They also throw more security measures at you as the days progress.
Its super well balanced, and i can’t recommend it enough
bin.pol.social
Aktywne