Townscaper - this is my go-to for just kind of chilling out. Just plonking down buildings and seeing what configurations they make is just so relaxing. There’s no points, no goals, no competition, not even any citizens with needs that must be fulfilled. You just build nice cities.
Slime Rancher - the slimes are cute, and just so happy to be alive. There’s something about a bright pink slime bouncing past, with a massive smile on its face as it cries “wheeeee!” that reminds me there are indeed reasons to live.
Maneater - this is a different kind of happy. A cathartic, violent, murderous happiness, as I pop inflatable unicorns, sink yachts, and launch myself at unsuspecting golfers.
Alba is a really sweet game with a photography mechanic. It's short and usually cheap and well worth the time you'll spend with it if it sends like something you'd like.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon. rouge likes are tough as all fuck, but there’s something about the level of detail in this game, and the way I get to build characters that I find very relaxing
Animal Crossing games for me! Just chilling and catching bugs or fishing or whatever is super relaxing. I also like that nothing feels rushed, you can move at your own pace, and make your town/island look however you want.
Someone else mentioned Skyrim and that’s another one for me. I have it on practically every platform and I drop back into it every so often.
The soundtrack, art direction, color palette, and gameplay all come together in a relaxing loop. I have spent hours just drifting along spot to spot, taking care of the spirits in my care until their times came to depart, and still go back to it when I just want to have some time to relax.
As a warning, the game does deal with some emotional tones, so there’s a bit of melancholy mixed in. My wife and I both had times where we teared up because it felt like saying goodbye to someone again. It’s handled well, though. Really gives the feeling of everything being put to rest, and there’s still everything they taught you right there as a reminder of the effect they had.
I remember just sitting there after helping the first spirit depart and thinking - wow. Which doesn’t happen a lot in games, but the combination of the music, the storylines for each spirit and the time when I started playing (early in the pandemic) cemented the game in my mind as a piece of art.
This browser game/toy called Infinite Craft was doing that for me yesterday. It's very neat, you just take different words and combine them to create new things, and then use those to make more things, but its secret is that it uses a low level AI so that if you craft a combination that's never been crafted before it can accommodate that and attributes you as the first discoverer.
You start with the whole basic idea of combining elements like fire and water to make steam and such, but you can relatively quickly end up accidentally creating more complex things, and they dont even have to be objects, they can be named franchises or concepts like Star Wars or Creation.
Eventually I felt like a small kid ripping the limbs off action figures and seeing if the dinosaur head would fit on the Darth vader figure. I ended up first discovering some insane Eldritch shit like Barack Crabwich Vader-car, a part president, part crab, part sandwich, part sith lord cyborg, part car. Or Zombie Muppet Prince Kermie. Or the Jurassic Mecha-Deloreansaur.
It's free and is a ridiculously absurd hoot, I'd recommend it on a PC browser since you get a big space to drag out certain concepts you wanna keep and reuse.
Outer Wilds can get similar when you have transcended beyond the existential dread of lonely death in space. It’s spooky at times, but death is cheap, so you just look forward to the next attempt.
As a newbie, I was rushing to figure out all the mechanics fast enough to unlock the greenhouse in year 1. It was a bit of a stressful optimization game trying to max out every single day.
Since I unlocked it, cash is rolling in so fast I don’t even know what to do with it anymore. I just hit Spring in t year 2 and it’s really chill, now. I’m thinking of selling most of my animals since It’s repetitive needing to pet them and make cheese/mayo every day. I might just cheat and get a couple auto-petters to make it even more relaxed…
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