If you haven’t played it yet, give a try to Astroneer, a space automation/exploration game with no combat and light survival elements (basically oxygen). Above Snakes is also fairly cool, is an isometric survival game where you build the world piece by piece. I have also had fun playing As We Descend it’s a roguelite deck-builder of sorts, but with some turn-based tactics RPG mixed in. Because you like mmos, I’d take a look at Bitcraft.

Wow what a thread. You all rock! Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I have grabbed demos for most of these and will write a follow-up post at some point with my thoughts on some of them.

But for now… The Last Caretaker grabbed me almost instantly. Highly recommend even after only playing the demo.

Caves of Qud is one of the best exploration games I’ve ever played. It’s a traditional roguelike where the overworld map is the same each time but the world history, factions, and most individual zones are procedurally generated each time you start over.

You play as either a mutated human with strange bonuses like extra arms, the ability to mind control, wings, etc. or a Truekin that starts with higher base stats and the ability to use implant tech to do things like replace your legs with tank treads or your eyes with night-vision goggles.

It’s a deep simulation; all of the NPCs in the game are as fully modeled as the player character, the NPCs you meet are a result of the generated history, and the best choice is often to run away.

It’s turn-based with multiple difficulty levels. I recommend playing on classic, but the other ways are just as valid.

If you enjoy automation, tower defense, survival/building games Rimworld might be of interest to you. Enjoying committing war crimes is optional but a nice bonus!

I’m really into souls games so I’m going to focus my recommendations to games with little combat and also tailor the list based on what you tried and didn’t like so far.

Optional or minimal combat

• Green Hell
• My Summer Car [AI generated paintings]
• Potion Craft
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
• Subnautica [controversy with dev buyout and lawsuit, but a solid game]

Combat required but easy

• Yakuza Kiwami (the other yakuza and like a dragon games are great too but some of them might have kernel level rootkits, and some are available on GOG without rootkits)
• Final Fantasy 12 The Zodiac Age

Exploration focused

• Dave the Diver
• A Short Hike
• Disco Elysium
• The Stanley Parable
• The Talos Principle (1 and 2)
• Stray

Story focused games (non exploration)

• Unpacking
• Venba

Worth trying

• Tropico 6

My favorite game to play when I am sick is Banished, a medieval city building game that was the labor of love of a solo dev. It starts off quite brutally difficult until you learn the best ways to handle the first winters and then it becomes a cozy opportunity for optimization, and a challenge to balance expanding the city as much as you can while supporting the population with agricultural and forestry goods. It’s inspired some other games to follow in its footsteps, and it has a modding community still making content for it.

If you are open to anything, try Wingspan.

It is a bird based card game you gain points for playing birds based on the number on the card, but it becomes an engine building game.

Each turn you choose one: play a bird, gather food, lay eggs, add a bird card to your hand.

Birds have certain “powers” such as each time your opponent lays eggs place an egg on your bird, or each turn used collect food from the birdfeeder.

The game is limited turns so you have to develop a hand of cards that you can play that will be high points, plus give you extra bonus actions to try to accelerate birds played, eggs laid, extra birds captured by predator birds etc.

As cards are laid down into food, eggs, collect cards sections it increases the reward of that section.

You can play online, with friends or against the computer. It becomes addicting in my opinion, because filling each section is difficult and just as you are collecting a good way to build a good reward engine the turns are ending, so you have to plan properly.

I loved minmaxing and grinding around in Grim Dawn and Timberborn. You might too. 👌

Something small: Len’s Island. I had fun with that. It’s pretty light, but has some depth in resource management and exploration

If you want to sink countless hours into it and are looking for automation, building and exploration… maybe X4: Foundations is something for you? It’s basically a giant, fully simulated space sandbox. (And you’d also be supporting a small independent studio, writing their own engine etc.)

A very fun exploration and puzzle game would be Tunic. It has combat which can be pretty tricky at times but in the game’s settings you can make yourself invincible so you can just get through the combat if you’d like. If you try Outer Wilds and like it, I would try Tunic as well.

Both of these games are so interesting because they can be completed at any point, but it’s completely dependent of everything you the player learn while playing the game. But for that reason I would not look into the games more than what’s on the Steam store page, you gotta go in blind.

Mars First Logistics is a fairly tricky building/exploration game where you make and operate robots from parts to explore the world to get more parts. What you get out of it depends a lot on how you play it.

Designing a new vehicle for each task makes it more of a building game.

Trying to reuse/modify the same vehicle for every task makes it more of a driving/operating game.

Choosing tasks based on what you can already do makes it more of an exploration/road trip game.

If you build infrastructure to get everywhere it’s more of an expand/exploit/city building game.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Game about cutting up spaceships with lasers and gravity tools with a bit of a narrative.

It’s not a great alignment for the types you identified, but I like all the things you mentioned and found this quite nice.

If you’ve never tried it before, Dot Age is a fun little time sink made by an Indie dev. It’s a city builder people/resource management type game where you’re trying to build a successful village to survive a coming apocalypse. You have to plan ahead and deal with upcoming ‘bad events.’ A run is like 5-6 hours long and there is a lot of variety between runs thanks to building variants, etc.

Exo Rally Championship: Probably the best rally game out there right now. Rewards carefulness and planning ahead.

Outbrk: Storm chasing simulator.

DinoSystem: Very deep survival simulation with dinosaurs.

Stationeers: Build and automate your own space station. Also features gas simulation.

Brainfuck Challenge: Brainfuck is a esoteric programming language with very few instructions you can learn in a few minutes. And this game is just a collection of puzzles/challenges made to be solved with this language.

shapez 2: Factorio but with shapes and colors

Beton Brutal/White Knuckle/Idols of Ash/Lorn’s Lure: A bunch of precision platformers with no combat whose sole goal is go up/down as fast as you can. Lorn’s Lure would be my favorite of the bunch but they’re all unique in their own ways.

Nubby’s Number Factory: Plinko meets neuron activation