Just as a quick catch-up, here are some more specific comments on games I’ve played in the last year or so:

• Vampire Survivors: This game was a bit of a craze for a while, and I was late to the party, but I got addicted to it for a while as well. With a bajillion things to unlock, it has that just-one-more-run quality that has you realizing that you sat down to play it for an hour and it’s been four… I finally shook it when I got to a point where I can just get near-infinite upgrade eggs and brute force past any challenge, but it was still a good 70-odd hours of fun to get there.
• Super Lesbian Animal RPG: Despite what the name might make you think, this is a pretty wholesome (PG-13 at worst, for swearing) JRPG story about a group of LGBT friends trying to find their way as young adults, prove themselves, and work out their relationships, while saving the world from an ancient evil, of course.
  
  It’s an RPG Maker game, with the limitations that implies, but the author’s put a ton of effort into customizing it and fleshing out the setting, characters, UI, etc. with her own work, so it doesn’t really feel like one. There’s a bit of extra depth to the combat where you have to build up ‘star power’ points to use more powerful attacks, so you can’t just unleash all your best attacks at the start of the fight. Which can sometimes feel a bit tedious because that generally includes multi-target attacks, so you have to spend a turn just getting the points to use one of those… But it’s not too much of a problem because it’s not very grindy overall; the level cap is pretty low and you only fight monsters by running into them on the overworld.
• LOGistICAL: Earth: A kind of puzzle game where you have to unlock industries and roads around the world by delivering goods from sources to places that want them. And when I mean world, I mean the whole world, as it covers 50,000 towns and 590 different industries. It’s hard to get a good sense of progression with this one; you start out focusing on a few small areas, trading resources and unlocking industries and all that, but you can’t really “complete” a region because there’s a deliberate global interconnectedness to everything that forces you to keep expanding and exploring to find new industries and routes because you can’t satisfy everything locally, but there are also barriers to keep you from exploring until you figure out the ‘puzzle’ to deliver what they need.
  
  I’ll play in a region until I reach a point where I feel stuck and then switch to another one I’ve unlocked, and I’ve gone through probably a pretty typical sequence, going through New Zealand, eastern Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, the western US, South Korea, North Korea, and the start of Russia. It’s starting to feel like I’m running out of options though, and that the key to progress is hidden in some singular town or road or something that I’m overlooking because there are ten thousand icons on-screen. There’s a spot in Russia where I could break out if I just had Bricks, but I only have access to one truck and some sand, but I could turn the sand to bricks if I build the Brickworks there, but to do that I need to raise an existing Brickworks to level 3 somewhere, which I could do in Germany, except for level 3 I need Machinery, and I do have Machineworks somewhere, but they need Engines as an input and I haven’t even discovered them yet so they’re in some other country and who knows when I’ll actually find them and when I do I don’t currently have a way to transport them to Germany… It’s…still fun in its own way, but it also feels like it’s constantly on the verge of “okay, that’s enough, had my fill of that”.
• Kitsune Tails: Haven’t gotten very far in this one yet, but it’s a very cute take on a Super Mario World-like platformer. And either it’s surprisingly difficult in some places, or I’m just getting old…
• Thank Goodness You’re Here: This one has been described as a ‘slap-em-up’, since that’s basically your only way to interact with the world, by running around and slapping things. It’s basically an extended British comedy sketch, centered around you “fixing” peoples’ problems. A bit short at 3 or so hours, but very funny and well worth it if you like that sort of thing.
• Balatro: eh, it’s alright

Those actually aren’t the games where I’ve spent the most time, but those will really deserve posts of their own…

(No, seriously, Balatro didn’t really grab me in the same way everyone else seems to be obsessed with it. *shrug*)