Games

Dark Souls, no sense of management besides managing to not die, but it’s single player (with optional online interactions) and is good. Hard but satisfying when you get it. Lots to explore in the world.

I would like to recommend Dave the Diver, Inscryption and Curious Expedition (first one). All of them are superb indie games. It might not be the genres you're asking for but I would still highly recommend them if you want to try something new.

A Plague Tale: Requiem

Thank me later

Oblivion Remastered is really good.

I think you might like 'Rogue Trader', even if you don't know anything about the 40K universe. Cool story, choices and fights.

Don't worry too much about not knowing the background lore. The game contextualizes a lot in dialogues and even little mouseovers. But be careful, if you like SciFi, you might fall into the awesomely rich and grim rabbit hole, that is Warhammer 40K.

The Emperor protects.

Shall I recommend WarZone-2100 ? It's free

Some further suggestions I haven't seen mentioned in all these comments yet, surprisingly:

• Foundation
• Manor Lords
• 0 A.D. (FOSS and impossible to get ripped off, AoE clone)
• shapez / shapez 2 (the first one is only $2)

And maybe a little more casual, but still similar vein as city management:

• Mini Metro
• Mini Motorways

Out of all of these, I think I've played Mini Motorways three times as much as the rest, combined. I dunno why, I just love it.

• Factorio, I know you said you couldn't get into it, but try peaceful mode, it's a great game even without enemies
• RimWorld, it's an excellent colony management game
• Dwarf Fortress, this is the big boss, it's really hard to start, but it's the most complex simulation game out there. If you can get into it, it's infinite hours of fun.

Have you tried persona 5? Great jrpg I think the new clair obscur expedition 33 looks really good for single player too

Leaning more into the management style of games, might be worth checking out Two Points Hospital (spiritual sequel to Theme Hospital), and the more recently released Rwo Points Museum?

I got no clue if this would count as something you'd be into, but I've been having fun with Skyblock Zero on Luanti.

Idon't know how quickly you could finish it considering I play purposefully inefficiently, but it's a space themed with a quest line to follow where the only limited resource is your time. Spawn on a voxel, keep clicking to gain resources, and build out from there. So far one of my only gripes is storage in the game is only drawers instead of chests, so I constantly have machines and my inventory filled.

Dyson Sphere Program is great, never played satisfactory but I hear they are similar.

Terraria.

Os there a specific genre of games you are looking for?

Naturally we need to know which suggestions "won" ASAP

I wanted to recommend go, but you said single player... there's always Katago to play against.

I guarantee you'll never truly 'beat' the game!

management / factory games like workers and resources

Maybe Frostpunk would be up your alley?

Ksp2 was severely botched by Take2.. but if you're into the genre you might want to check out Juno.

In addition you might want to keep an eye out for KSA which is currently in early stages of development. As there's no official website yet, I try to keep on top of any dev updates and nuggets of information so I can update the lemmy community.

Stardew if you want a comfy game to play Timberborn for colony sim

Too lazy to check all responses but if you want a nice resource building game then Timberborn could be your jam.

Going Medieval is a pretty great building/management type game! It gets updated often with new content too

You build your castle and manage the sims in their daily jobs. There's a great building system, farming, defense against raiders, mining, a good crafting pipeline. It's a lot of fun