What's your comfort game?

Hearts of Iron III

The binding of isaac

Factorio

The factory must grow.

Dwarf Fortress and Settler 2. It's quite comforting seeing everything working and the dwarfs/romans going forth and Back.

Also Kingdoms and Castles works here well too.

I like the "Wuselfaktor" like they say in german

Slay the Spire

City skylines and factorio.

Id say Long Drive. It's fun to drive and listen to the radio, find weird stuff, and laugh at the hilarious glitches

Heavily modded Kerbal Space Program. It's so relaxing building rockets and going on complex interplanetary missions for science

Satisfactory

Stardew valley, minecraft and sometimes mass effect 3 multiplayer. I'm still impressed I can regularly find matches in such an old game.

Factorio

i love factorio, but I cannot see it as a comfort game.

I've got so many things to do, i need to massively increase processing on novice, gleba is a wrek, all my space platforms suck, everything needs to be reworked, and I won't have the tech to fix fulgira or vulkanus until after I ve beat the game.

very stressful.

#2 most hours of any game on steam.
- I got 355 hours in the game and haven't launched a rocket yet. I just built my first silo like an hour ago. I thought I was like minutes away from doing it. Nope. I have a whole new fucking chain to learn. Oh well. I love it. It's not stressful at all to me. This is the type of shit I live for. My OG answer to this question is SimCity 4. The endless replay value and modding in that game got me well over 5k hours of play. Factorio is the only game since then that has come even close to that feeling.

Minecraft.

If I'm feeling particularly antisocial I'll play Angband or Umoria.

League of Legends.

so brave
Holy carp you do. Once I hit about level 20 the culture of that community just went crazy. Everyone was just a complete shithead and cared so much.

I wish I could have capped myself at about level 10 and hung around with the other casuals forever, but instead I quit once I got enough counseling to put down the mouse and stop running bottom route sup.
- The problem is 9 out of 10 games are just misserable... but than that one game hits and it hits different, so good you forget the other 9 games and makes you crave more.
  
  But I'm clean now... since January I got my League fix only from the eSports...

minecraft (playing around with mods is very fun, too)

Therapy 💚

Super Mario World. It was the first one to really unlock gaming for me. I go back and play it fairly often.

Overwatch is the weird one. The game just clicks for me, and when I'm in the zone, doing call outs and nailing upcoming enemy ults or pushes just feels so good.

Project zomboid: walk around, bash heads in, gather stuff for a base you will never build.
I play with infection disabled though - so not to restart after one bite

This is kind of my answer too. 7 days to die with the difficulty turned down, dying light, last stand aftermath. Still looking for my white whale, someone please come make a non-scam version of The Day Before!

Binding of Issac

OR

Hades

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the switch.

Pokemon Silver/Gold.

Recently, Path of Titans as well.

Anything Zelda. Stardew Valley. Civ 6. RDR2.

Sexy Parodius

It's super fun to get drunk and play through. Fantastic music! Gotta MAME it, though. Unless you actually have a Sexy Parodius machine.

The Guardian Legend, for the nes, played on my pc using fceux because my preferred controller is a keyboard.

if I'm feeling bad, it makes me feel ok.

OG Doom and some random WADs.

Noita.

I know that might seem like I'm being facetious but Noita is so difficult and so punishing I find it impossible to take it too seriously. Pretty much every time I've died I've just gone "haha that's what I get" and boom, back at the entrance to the mines.

I'm not particularly zen about things in general either, it's just that my objective is always "screw around until the inevitable happens" because anything else seems like pure hubris.

Super Metroid, especially on a dark and rainy day

Og doom, Duke nukem 3d and Unreal tournament

Alto's Odyssey with youtube on my TV, or No Man's Sky with youtube on my phone

Rimworld. It's like having a fishtank, but with really sociopathic fish. Only game I can think of where the #1 enemy you struggle with, that which shapes your core strategy and approach to every problem, is its single threaded performance.

I really don't mean this as a dunk on Rimworld, but as is tradition with most things in Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress did it first. "FPS Death" was a common end condition for resilient forts. If natural dangers or greed didn't kill you first, boredom would as your FPS crawled down into the single digits or, if you were really dedicated, this could become seconds per frame.

Rimworld has kind of done it's own thing now with the third or fourth DLC expansion but for a majority of its lifespan so far it could charitably be called a DF clone with a readable UI. Now DF has its own readable UI and Rimworld has cybernetics and psychic magic so they've sort of both become individual titans of their own genre.
- Er... isn't DF multithreaded (now)?
  
  But anyways: while Dwarf Fortress isn't quite Zork I in terms of influence, there's a good reason people are pushing to have it added to the game canon. Tynan has never denied that Tam Adams was an inspiration, or tried to hide the influence DF had on Rimworld's development (hell, the highest difficulty in Rimworld has always been called 'losing is fun'). And while the two games are clearly similar, the core design philosophy is pretty different. Rimworld's goal has always been a compelling story through fairly structured gameplay, where DF has always emphasized emergent gameplay and adherence to the simulation. I've played both since pretty much they came out (oh fuck I'm old...), but rimworld's gameplay loop, core modability and not-awful-UI really won me over for casual gameplay. In their current incarnations, both are amazing games, but the question was "comfort game", and this is my answer.
  
  Nitpick
  
  I really don’t mean this as a dunk on Rimworld, but
  
  (slightly-patronizingly-phrased linguistic tip: including the 'but' there is an implied contradiction that severely undercuts the sincerity of the preceding sentiment. I believe your sincerity, many people just don't know about that weird semantic quirk.)
  
  (And in a 'hey dude' moment, FPS death was a thing way way before DF. I remember it killing my cities in SimCity 2000, for example.)

One more vote for the original Doom, running in a modern engine with some of the colossal WADs released over the years.

It loads instantly, gets you fighting in no time. You know the rules, yet you still get surprised by one of these guys with a machine gun.

Compare that to a modern game, where you have to wait for it to update, compile shaders, the studio logo video, the proprietary launcher and the main menu before you are allowed to do anything.

Lawn mowing simulator.

Super Metroid
A Hat in Time
Portal

Morrowind.

I've played more Team Fortress 2 than anything else. I can always go back to community servers there.

Man I really wish there was a version of TF2 with all the cosmetics and weapon unlocks disabled.
- Valve recently released the source code so that's probably really easy to do now

For now it’s Oblivion Remastered.

Once that’s done I have no idea, probably back to Skyrim.

Kerbal Space Program. I mostly just make fighter jets using the procedural wings and BDArmory mods now.

I haven't been playing it much, but Chuzzle Deluxe and Mahjong (the match 2 tiles, clear board version).

I don't know the exact specific version of Mahjong my grandma used to have on her laptop because it's generic and has 3 trillion different clones/versions of it, but the reason I haven't gotten rid of the KDE version on my laptop is because it reminds me, in a way, of a long time ago when I'd spend time with her. Same with Chuzzle.

I had a pretty good time earlier on my laptop just spending a little bit of time in the zen chuzzle mode and it was great. 10/10 would recommend.

I also learned earlier today that there was a Christmas skinned version and there's a non-EA Chuzzle 2 mobile game out, but as of now the Christmas version isn't available ( as of May 15, 2025 ) unless you pirate it.

Factorio, GregTech: New Horizons, Oxygen Not Included, RimWorld and lately Obenseuer and Vintage Story

It's buggy but it's mine, pillars of eternity 2 deadfire

I never really got into the one character party hardest mode min/maxing, but everything else about it is pretty much what I want from an RPG

Oxygen Not Included is the big one for me. It lets me get inventive, which is something my brain needs sometimes.

Minecraft
Stardew Valley
Rogue Legacy 2

Minecraft

Chrono Trigger. Beaten hundreds of times on tens of devices. Short, sweet, doesn’t outstay its welcome but is always, always good.

Guild Wars 2, it can be extremely cozy in places. Beautiful environments, it lets you run around and just stumble across something to do, and you can get in a groove doing a map meta with a series of events leading to a big boss fight with 50+ people all participating and then you can just run off later harvesting leeks or whatever. I can just zone out watching a show on my other monitor while working on a collection or an achievement or getting flax or something.

Gemcraft

i miss gemcraft, which one is your favorite? i really got into chasing shadows, but couldn't get into frostborn wrath.
- Oh I'm currently playing Frostborn and am enjoying it. I will say it just sort of puts you in the game with no tutorial for a lot of things it should tell you.
  
  I always end up going back to Chasing Shadows at some point though, nostalgic fun!

Half-Life 2 and the Bungie era Halo games. I normally replay them all at least once a year. Steam workshop support for both of them has also been great.

You might like ADACA. Its got two campaigns, one inspired by Half Life 1/2 and early Halo and the other inspired by STALKER.

Its one of the few games that I would consider to actually be Half-Life 2 -like in the same way that so many indie shooters now are Quake, DOOM, or Build-engine -like.

The only unfortunate thing about it is that its from the era where 3D indie games had no textures (think SUPERHOT almost, but not as extreme), but you can eventually get used to that and look past it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 story. Every time I go back and play through it provides a month+ of joy and comfort.

American Truck Sim is a good one too.

Stellaris

Anno 1800 👍

The Binding of Isaac. I've been playing it off and on for about a decade. Something about it just lets me zone out and forget the world while I play.

Man I wish I could like Isaac like that. I'm not good at it at all. Every time I try to play the game it turns into an angry sweat fest as I take tons of stupid avoidable damage and don't find any fucking keys for the third floor in a row

I've watched a thousand hours of Northernlion and I could probably tell you every item in the game on sight but my sticky notes look like sad trash.

Don't even get me started on the challenges, I fear that list, but I want half those unlocks to get all my other unlocks.

Creaper world. I like putting it on random and listening to audiobooks. It's great for destress.

3rd gen Pokémon, but it only works in the spring

Rimworld with the difficulty turned way down. And lately, running shipping missions in Endless Sky.

I don't think I really do comfort games...I'm very much a "I'm done with this, on to the next thing" person when it comes to games. But maybe vampire survivors or FTL. Or JRPGs as a comfort genre.

Snowrunner. Similar concept, much slower.

I second that, sat me the goal to 100 percent that game.... With seasons.. With about half an hour playtime a week...

So i am finished when i am retiring
- Ha! You’re not wrong there. 400 hours in and I’m up to Ursk.

Dark Souls 3.

Monkey Island 1 to 4.

Too much magic can be dangerous. M'aiq once had two spells and burned his sweetroll.

Helldivers 2, difficultly 4. Gonna roam around and shoot some bugs.

Victoria 3. Start as a small nation, out-compete your neighbours. Sell cars to the french. Profit.

Splatoon

Contra, Mario 3, and Planetary Annihilation.

The common thread seems to be one you have the basics and have gotten past the ego-based need to "accomplish" something like beating the game, it becomes more about enjoying the process, regardless of outcome.

Maybe not a bad idea in general.

For a while it was ets2/ats, but now it's usually BeamNG because I can just go around doing nothing and stop whenever I want instead of feeling like I have to finish the job

World of Warcraft Classic and Stardew Valley.

beamNG.

There is no sadness. Only smashed cars and bent metal.

Steam World Dig 2 and The Wandering Village

Rocket League, believe it or not. It's one of the more toxic games out there, and the amount of bugs is staggering at this point, known shit too. But I keep playing, hours every week. Been doing so for ten years now, can't stop.

Slay the Spire, on ascension 20, I lose most runs... I think I enjoy torturing myself

You're better than I for even getting that high up. I gave up somewhere around A7. Now, I enjoy watching streamers play StS, but almost never play it anymore, myself.

Am I allowed to have more than one?

The games I go back to when I want to just have some peace of mind would be Rimworld and Crusader Kings 2 (specifically the Game of Thrones mod).

Probably LOTRO or Enshrouded.

INFRA

Pretty much any rouge like..... But only for a few months at a time...... Maybe I have ADHD.....

Animal Crossing Wild World! I like New Horizons a lot too, but there's just something about Wild World that's cosy in a way no other game has been able to replicate for me

Elden Ring. Somehow failing my way forward helps. Also, going back and slaughtering creatures that used to one shot me

Skullgirls, Slay the Spire, Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary

Not sure what a comfort game is. I love TES, but when I just want something easy on the mind I'll pick an AARPG. Path of Exile is a good one. Clear a map, loot, repeat. No complicated moves or exploration required. Etc.

It used to be Astroneer, but now I think I'm on Peglin or Vampire Survivors (or Spell Brigade if I have friends online).

They're both just so mindless and relaxed for the most part. Also typically short and sweet with a definite end so it feels wrapped up.

Mining on a planet/moon in Star Citizen. Very chill, you get some beautiful views and monkey brain can see balance go up.

These days? Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns

It's the best RTS game I've every played for my level of care about units and willingness to invest myself in tech trees (which is very little). I hate min/maxing stats so let's get some units and brawl instead of tuning upgrades just right, or being forced to place buildings instead of paying attention to the overall strategic situation.

ss14!

Ditto for ETS2 / ATS. I don't play them enough. With the Road Trip update coming out soon, it'll be even better. I've been craving a solid driving sim that's not racing. A leisurely drive through the Nordic landscape would be great.

Other than that, if I have the energy and wherewithal to stand, Skyrim VR, sometimes it's nice to wander without worry.

Ridge Racer Type 4 for the Original PlayStation