how can you tell one is blocked by an instance?

I see 4

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s requiem. It’s an older game, GameCube era. I don’t like horror games and this one isn’t true horror. There are some good jump scares and body horror though. I had to stop after a certain scene because of the jump scares. The sanity system is really great.

And it dismisses the time component of self hosting. It’s not going to be zero.

Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.

Nowadays? I’ve never enjoyed mobile gaming. Every time I try, there’s been an absurd paywall or monetization. Once that strikes, I’m out.

It’s not Zelda like, but if you like factory games, Satisfactory is as close to open world as a factory game gets. You land on a planet and have to build a factory to launch things into space for corporate overlords. It’s first person, lots of climbing and building. There’s a tiny bit of combat, not the focus tho.

Master of Magic. I know strategy isn’t everyone’s thing and turn based isn’t either and high fantasy isn’t usually strategy staple, but it’s damn near perfect in execution. There are some minor nitpicks, but the game is definitely a 9/10*s. None of the spiritual successors have ever been so well executed. They always fall flat somewhere.

Deep rock Galactic is my vote. It doesn’t have a narrative, but it does have a very thin campaign. It’s mostly a few voice overs and random missions. However, the difficulty is scalable, if you’re looking for a challenge. The game is incredibly movement focused. Each class has a movement power that’s unique. Gunners get zip lines that are slow but go up and anyone can use them. Scout has a grappling hook that’s fast and unlimited but only they can use it. Engineer makes platforms that anyone can scale. Driller can tunnel thru the rock any direction. The terrain is deformable.

I really like the art style.

Counterpoint. Rimworld is complicated. EU4 is super complicated.

Not op. I saw the good reviews and so I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I am very bad at that game and die all the time. I looked up other negative reviews and some people seem to agree with me that I just need more armor or something. I don’t understand all of the positive reviews and how difficult I find the game to be. I loved MW one and two and three, but I guess this one isn’t for me anymore.

You have a point, but I think WoW succeeds in spite of itself. They promise big things then deliver a fraction. It never lives up to the hype, IMO. I think it’s that there’s nothing better, and if there was, it’d have to be a LOT better because of sunk cost fallacy. 80% of the reason I play WoW is because I have always played WoW. I like my stuff and friends there.

Blizz always has great ideas and then falls flat in execution. I say this as a WoW player. It’s ok. If they can pull off these ideas, which they absolutely have not proven, then this could be good. I remain skeptical.

The pixelated characters against the high-fidelity 3d background is messing with my head.

I do like demos, I’ve bought a few games from them. I bought Factorio years and years ago because of that. I liked the Next Fest on Steam and have wishlisted a few games for when they leave Early Access. I don’t buy ea games (or EA games, lol). The most recent demo game that got me was dotAGE. It’s slightly in the vein of other settler/logistics games but it’s quirk is that you unlock more options for the next game by losing, a la rogue-likes. Also has random events.

Demos work well for me, because I like games based on their minor details. UI/UX is important to me, so the original Dwarf Fortress didn’t work for me. I also like QOL features a lot, 90% of my mods are based on QOL shortcomings, so if a game is just awful then I’ll avoid it. There were a few demos that I quit within 15 minutes because they were too unpolished. (I’m sure they’ll be fine in time, but this was too early for them.)

I play a lot of logistics games, so crafting time and speed and such. There’s always an effective input rate and a maximum output rate. Item takes 12 seconds and crafting machine has a speed of 3.14… So what’s the items per second? Sure it’s 12/3.14 but nowhere does the game show that. Not all games make this sin, but those that do drive me mad.

I’ve stopped playing Subnautica because it’s too grindy/stingy. Sometimes games get better about this further in, but I don’t wanna have to play 10 hours of garbage to get to the good stuff. (side note, I use Skip First Hour mod in factorio for this. Love it.)