I don’t go deep into role play stuff. My character is a character, not me. In games where it’s “pick a man or a woman” only I’ll tend to pick women because the voice actors are often better and you can better “play barbie” with character customization, plus of course the cliche reason.
With games that allow full customization I’ll often make androgynous/non-binary characters with various dials at either extreme trying to break the character builder.
Even their Experimental Gameplay games from before WoG and Tomorrow Corporation are worth playing if you can find them. That includes Tower of Goo of course but I remember there being a lot of fun ones back in the day.
Hey now factorio isn’t complex, just play it a lot and you’ll pick it up… I’m 2000 hours in and managed to finish a game in only 70 hours! I’m thiiiiis close to making train lines without constant crashes. Pretty soon I’ll feel ready to add in Bob’s mods to the mix. It’s… Simple…
Yes and no. The “win” condition is building and launching a rocket to space. There’s minimal additional content after that but it doesn’t stop you from playing. You can always just keep building and improving your factory to keep launching rockets faster and faster. The developer is working on an extension where you keep playing on different planets and in space so pretty soon it’ll take even longer to “win”.
In case you didn’t see already, Portia has a sequel that’s at very late stage early access.
The whole pantheon of Factory games fill a similar itch like some others have mentioned.
I’ve very recently started playing Dinkum which is a bit more Portia/Stardew/Animal Crossing like, with running around to harvest and mine then crafting and selling to buy things to build your island.
A bit less purely crafting but a good game with similar spirit is Graveyard Keeper.
Some of the survival games have decent crafting mechanics. Like 7 days to die you can turn down the zombie part and spend some hours running around and getting material to build a base and fix vehicles and stuff. Also Raft and Volcanoids are some other crafty survival game.