HotS isn’t really dead - you can play it now and it feels as good as ever. We all want to see continued balance patches and more cosmetics and heroes and maps but the fact is that it already feels balanced and has enough cosmetics and enough heroes and enough maps.
That’s not to say we won’t love more or that we may as well stop playing it, but the real question you’re asking here is if the game is dead - it is not dead, and therefore won’t “return”. You just load it up, pick a hero, click Ready - and it’s “returned”.
Contraband Police - it’s like Papers Please, but since it’s in first person, it’s more complex - you have to manage the whole border crossing area with the few staff you have, you have a car that you have to manually drive to a supply shop and to drop prisoners and contraband off at, and you can get ambushed along the way or at your base, where you’re manually be shooting at smugglers with guns you buy.
Shadows of Doubt - A game where you play as a detective in a city and you have to solve cases (sometimes murders) and often end up committing crimes yourself along the way. A lot of cases solved used by matching faces to names to fingerprints to voices to jobs to blood type, eye colour, hair colour, age, and so on. Extremely addictive and often hilarious, despite how buggy this early access game is.
Dicey Dungeons - A roguelike deckbuilder with 6 different classes where you roll dice against cards with different effects and your enemy does the same to you. I don’t love roguelikes and really don’t like deck games but this one is really appealing, and has a great soundtrack. The different classes play through a LOT of different “episodes” where the rules of the game change.
also playing a lot of Heroes of the Storm every goddamn night
I loaded up TF2 a few months ago just for a quick game, expecting to get into yet another round of I’m-so-over-it 2fort.
What happened instead of that was a completely nostalgic get-into-any-map-I-wanted round after round of full servers like I’d never put the game away. Dustbowl, Gravelpit, Steel, trying to re-learn all the maps, finding other players who had long since figured out new clever ways to use weapons and classes that I’d always thought of as sub-standard.
And I’m in a region where there should be less players.