This might not be exactly what you’re looking for (as it can be a little rogue-like), but it’s a game that when I looked for similar things, led me to Dredge: Sunless Sea
You’re a ship captain trying to survive in Victorian era London, after London was stolen by bats and taken to the shores of the Unterzee, an underground sea filled with some very strange creatures, people and locations. This means exploring and finding new trade routes or ways to survive while uncovering the stories of the islands you find, those of your crew, and the larger world.
There’s a sequel, Sunless Skies, where you command a space going train exploring the heavens. It’s a bit easier and has some good quality of life improvements, but I prefer the setting of Seas.
The World Ends With You (or the sequel, Neo: The World Ends With You) is an action RPG that does away with random encounters. Battles are initiated by you scanning for enemies and picking fights in your own, you can even lower your level or string multiple fights together for more rewards. The original is 2D (and best played in a DS/2DS/3DS but if you don’t have one there’s also a single-screen version on Switch) and the sequel is 3D on Switch and Steam.
Since you named Octopath Travellers 2, I’ll recommend Cosmic Star Heroine. It’s an old school turn-based indie JRPG that’s charming, fun and short. As a matter of fact all games by Zeboyd fit that description.
Creeper World 4 is fun and not terribly long. It is basically a tower defense game, but instead of guarding a set path toy build towers to defend against, then push back, physics simulator liquid that kills whatever it touches.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, you play a small group of ninjas (and a samurai) in a top down stealth game. Takes place in feudal Japan and you assassinate your way through the plot.
Superhot. FPS with a weird plot about VR and a rogue computer program. The gimmick is if you stop moving, time stops around you (almost), allowing you to slow down and plan.
Lastly and is a game called Soccer Kids Alpha. It is literally the alpha version of the game so it is SUPER short. It is a turn based soccer game, but without the grid based system that some other games use. The alpha is great and we’ll worth the very short time it takes to finish
I have a similar issue with Diablo 4 at the moment. I’ve been playing on controller on pc. It’s two button presses to skip the intro logos, and a third press will exit the game before even getting to the main menu. The number of times I’ve accidentally closed the game is much too high.
OMG yes!!! D4 has been driving me crazy with this! Especially if I’m playing on Steam Deck, where load times are longer and I have to sit through it all again.
It has a host of other issues besides basic ui problems, my largest pet peeve at the moment is town layouts being completely different. Picking a random nightmare dungeon to run and then porting to town is immediately followed by me opening the map to see which cardinal direction the blacksmith/shop is in.
Cannot speak for randoms, only the Solo Aspect: You can take control of any additional party members (also works in Multiplayer) so playing alone is technically definitely possible. What I can tell you from my brief experience though is that managing the extra characters is somewhat tedious so I don’t think you’ll get the maximum out of the party solo. Playing with only one character is not really something I’d do, there does not seem to be any mechanic balancing out all of the disadvantages there from what I can tell.
I typically prefer to only engage in the specific communities of the gacha games I play. I don’t like or have interest in all gacha games, and the ones I do play are so niche they would just get lost in the void to all the ten million posts about Honkai Star Rail or that FATE gacha game.
I am sad there is no Super Mecha Champions community, but the game is pretty niche as it is, so its not all that surprising. While me posting about it could act as a sort of draw for potential new players, I am not an advertiser nor am I paid to do that. If someone asks, I will mention it, but other than that I typically just stick to the existing Discord.
That being said, if a community for anything doesn’t already exist on your chosen instance, or if one does exist but you don’t like its moderation or whatever, nothing is stopping you from creating one yourself.
You're not totally out of options. Have you tried Heroic Launcher? I haven't really used Lutris since this thing came around, and it seems to do a similar job. But if not, there's a Humble Bundle going on right now with the Steam versions of both games included, and I can confirm that they work great via Steam.
There is no ethical consumption under this system, and there’s absolutely no hope for it.
The only thing we can do is set our own little moral lines so our hands feel a little cleaner, but it’s absolutely impossible to exist in this society while also caring about everything awful going on. There’s just too much of it. If I gave one dime to every cause that should be important to me (based on how I see myself), I would drain my bank account into the deep negatives. You absolutely must prioritize your time, money, and attention to a few specific things that you absolutely can’t sleep at night knowing you’ve supported.
For example, global warming is totally fucked. There’s literally no way to not fuck up and strip away most of the planet’s biosphere, even if everyone woke up tomorrow and said “Shit, we have to go 0 carbon right now!” and accomplished it before lunchtime. It’s too late. We’re just fucked. The best case is we’re fucked well after I die, but even that’s not looking particularly likely. So there’s no point in me moderating my purchases around so-called “environmentally friendly” companies, because there’s no such thing and, if there were one, it wouldn’t matter.
But LGBTQ people (like me) exist right now, and will continue to exist right up until we trigger the greenhouse gas cascade that turns Earth into Venus, and since I know we only have so much time left here, it’s very important to me to not support people who want to make sure LGBTQ people suffer as much as possible in the interim. Fortunately, the organizations that hate gay people are about as subtle as people who do CrossFit, so it’s easy to see them and not give them any money. Am I still giving money to crypto-facists who keep their mouths shut about it in public? Probably, but at least I’m kind of rewarding the behavior of “shutting the fuck up”.
Meanwhile, I financially oppose WotC’s bullfuckery only insofar as it affects me, personally. If One D&D weren’t a giant tire fire that grows with every UA playtest release, I’d probably suck it up and buy it. But since they’re also trying to shoehorn their virtual tabletop with AI DMs as the exclusive method by which people play their game, like some kind of half-assed MMO, I won’t. Not because I can be assed to care about AI or anti-consumer practices, but because it’s obnoxious to me and not fun to me and costs me money for shit I won’t enjoy as much. I simply don’t have the energy to care about WotC’s happy relationship with the Pinkertons, if for no other reason than literally every major company in the world also pays the Pinkertons to do fucky shit all over the globe, and if I care about one company doing it, I have to care about all the other companies openly doing the same thing, and then I’d have to, like, start making my own soap and stuff. Which I just don’t have the energy to do.
What it ultimately comes down to is this: honor is an expensive luxury that the vast majority of us simply cannot afford. Buy what you need to survive, spend the extra on whatever bread and circuses allow you to cope with the impending doom of society, and prioritize your moral focus on only a few things that loom the biggest in your mind, the ones that produce the largest amount of shame and guilt for supporting.
Everything is going to produce some amount of guilt, because it’s all fucked. You just have to learn to set a guilt-filter in your brain, so guilt below a certain threshold doesn’t register anymore. There’s literally nothing to be done about it: Even death can’t absolve us of supporting oppression and environmental destruction. After you die, someone’s going to give shady religious conmen money from your deceased wallet to dig up a big rock, scribble some words on it, put you in an unnecessary coffin, bury you with heavy diesel equipment, tell lies about a bigot-god over your corpse, and then hire someone for minimum wage (at best; more likely, they’ll exploit an ethnic minority from another country to do it for pennies) to mow the grass on top of you for the rest of society’s existence. Or the other option, which involves exactly as many shady religious conmen, but switches out the long-term grass-mowing for a short, massive burst of fuel and carbon to turn you into ashes, the button for which is probably also being pressed by an oppressed wage slave making a few nickles an hour.
BUT, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong, and that things aren’t eternally and irrevokably fucked forever. As a hedge against that, I do two things: I stay employed and budget my money (so I won’t be the guy standing naked in a cornfield waiting for whatever apocalypse or second-coming that doesn’t happen, thus making myself well and truly fucked), and I vote in every single election I ever hear about, from the Presidential election to the August special election to replace the town dogcatcher.
Vampire Survivors seems to fit the bill: no story, a bit of tactics, you level up to get new items, and enjoy killing hordes of enemies at once. After every run you can unlock power-ups for the next run… It’s one of my most played games in the last few months. It’s one of the classic “just one more run” type of games
Well I just picked up Last Epoch last night / Monday! It’s an Action RPG so follows the same format as PoE / Diablo. Haven’t been super impressed with the post-campaign experience of D4, and immediately after jumping into Last Epoch I already feel like it has exactly what I was looking for from D4 in terms of power fantasy and buildcrafting potential.
Its still Early Access which I generally don’t pickup, but someone here on Lemmy recommended it and I have to say, so far I regret nothing!
I initially started Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered a few days ago, but I wasn’t really in the mood for that game, so I ended up going back to The Witcher 3 to start (and hopefully finish) both DLCs (I’m part way through Heart of Stone atm and have yet to start Blood and Wine).
As for feedback, although weekly might perhaps be too often, maybe a “Show us your collection / show us your setup” kind of thread? This could generate some engagement and lead to interesting discussions imo.
Omg thank you for answering the second part of the question 😆. I think I’ll make another post highlighting this question as it clearly wasn’t looked at super closely, but your suggestion is great! I’ll add it to my list :)
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