Hollow Knight is a total work of art.

The first title that jumps to my mind, especially when you contextualize it around “restoring faith”, is Satisfactory. It’s been a very entertaining and challenging game, but also the development team has been exactly what one (typically) wants from a dev team. They’ve been very transparent about issues, their process, etc. Their interactions with the fan-base have been frequent and open throughout the years of development. Good game + good company. Worth consideration if you like a good factory builder.

I love indie games - here’s my favorites list!

Terraria
Deep rock galactic
Factorio
Dwarf Fortress
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free and open source - check it out!)
Stardew Valley
Starbound
Rimworld (I much prefer dwarf fortress, but I found this first and got a few hundred hours in it too)
Battlebit remastered

Balatro - Even if roguelike isn’t your thing, try it

Alan Wake 1/2 & Control- if you love creepy atmosphere

Superliminal - unique 1st person puzzle, think portal vibe

Bastion - 1st game from Supergiant, best smash-em-up I’ve ever played

Anything Supergiant for that matter

Baba is you, great little puzzle game

Here are 6 good games I wholeheartedly recommend:

• Baldurs Gate 3, speaks for itself.
• Disco Elysium, elevates the whole medium to art
• Hifi Rush, innovation and entertainment
• Snowrunner, ok this one’s just for me.
• The Outer Wilds, very interesting, go in spoiler free
• Return of the Obra Din, puzzle game like nothing you’ve played before

If you haven’t played it, “Stardew Valley” is, like, ruin-your-life good. And I think part of what makes it so faith assuring and life uplifting is that it was made by one dude who has continuously (for YEARS) released huge, free updates for the game. He’s awesome. It feels good supporting him and recommending such a great game to people. :-)

I was going to immediately mention Hollow Knight but I see someone already did. Second thought: Tunic. It’s been a long time since a game hit me as hard as those two.

For pure fun addictive gaming: Factorio is absolutely nuts. 2D survival craft platforming action: Terraria is still king.

For space empire building check out X4: Foundations, after almost 10 years under development it’s absolutely amazing (but a huge timesink haha)

Oh and if you’re into semi-hard-scifi basebuilding you could give Stationeers a look. Sunk quite some hours into that one.

Cyberpunk 2077. It was hated on release but it really has made a comeback after 2.0 was released.

I think cyberpunk really puts so many triple A titles to shame when it comes to the quality of the characters and quests.

• Katana ZERO
• Hades
• Satisfactory

Factorio. The new dlc hooked me into a 5h gaming session at one eve. I cant remember when i did that the last time in my life. Probably with 15? But be warned, the game isn’t called cracktorio without reason.

I’ve recently gotten hooked on the Yakuza series. The whole series goes on an aggressive sale pretty regularly on Steam. I’d recommend starting with Yakuza 0.

Try rimworld! You don’t need any of the dlcs for the first couple of successful runs. Just the base game takes you to I would say 85-90% of the experience (ideology is a good upgrade for later). Side effects include, playing too long into the night, dreaming about the game during your sleep and day dreaming about it during whatever else you doing until you get back to playing.

“Return of the Obra Dinn” is the best Detective-type game I have ever played. Pure inductive, yet always logical reasoning. The setting of an Victorian ship, the 1-Bit artystyle, excellent ost and memorable story really elevate this recommendation to a must-play.

On something from this decade, Balatro is great if you like cards and rouge-likes. But it’s been so popular I don’t think anyone interested hasn’t heard of it yet.

Oh, and as others have pointed out and I’d hate myself for not mentioning it, Tunic is great as well. It’s a love-letter to the instruction book, and makes one really feel like playing an old game and relying on an instruction book, while not being all that great at reading, like some may remember from their childhood. But with modern game design and what others call Dark-soul mechanics (idk, I have never played a Fromsoft game).

Baldurs Gate. There is so much content. I’m 150 hours in the game, I play split screen coop with my wife. We each have our characters customized to how we like it. It’s AAA quality. Came at a AAA price, but it’s absolutely worth it.

And I say this as a FPS/simulation gamer. Totally different genre but they’ve made this game accessible to all. It’s the only game I’ve ever purchased at full price and my steam account is 12 years old.