Goat simulator and its sequels/DLCs. It's a dumb shitpost game where you run around and create chaos but I enjoy it without any irony for some reason

Starstruck Vagabond, Yahtzee Croshaw’s game.

It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.

I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.

But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.

I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.

Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.

Deadly Premonition. What a sloppy mess but damn it’s fun.

Mechwarrior 5 Mercs - stomping around the inner sphere with a 1000 to 1 kill ratio

I guess it depends on why you think it's bad, so for me it's Wuthering Waves. I absolutely love that game, but it's "bad" because it's a gacha game and that monetization scheme is absolutely fucking disgusting.

The game itself is actually really good and the story/side stories had me cry like 4 times already lol

Skyrim. I mostly just like to install a fuckzillion mods and not play it, though...

At the risk of pissing some people off, Kenshi has a special kind of jank

Ravenfield is a stupid shooter with bad graphics but it scratches my itch for destruction without a lot of work.

If I have a bad day I throw on some metal and shoot those little stick men.

Probably Vampire Survivors or Vampire Hunters: Sometimes it's just nice to play something where you don't really have to think too hard.

Final Fantasy II - not Cecil's, but Firion's. If I could see people's faces in FF circles when I say that, I bet they'd be looking at me weird. e.e"

Wet. The reviews were pretty harsh due to the length and number of loading screens, but the gameplay was extremely fun. It does end with a cinematic and quick time events which was a bit disappointing, but it's one of the few games I've played through multiple times.

Stranglehold. I friggin love this game. It's the John Woo videogame that is technically a sequel to the movie Hard Boiled and has Chow Yun-fat as the lead. I don't know but I just really dig this game. Similar to it Enter the Matrix I also love. I go back and replay both every so often.

It's also a bit of a comfort type of thing as those came out in the early 00's when I was in my early 20s and still living at home and had more money than I knew what to do with hah.

I don't play them anymore these days, but for me it used to be the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. Dunno what it was with younger me but they just hit for some reason

As weird as it sounds: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (The OG one).

On the surface, it's a shit platformer game for kids, but what makes it interesting is the ways you can break the game and the lively speedrunning community. If you just try to play the game by following its rules, you're going to have a bad time.

However, if you use cool speedrunning glitches and exploits, it becomes much more fun to break the game in ways the developers didn't intend. I tend to play from time to time 100%ing it using exploits to reach locked areas earlier, skip entire sections, and play some levels backwards.

Vanquish is so idiot and the story is atrocious but damn the shooting is good.

super deepthroat

Recently it's been Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yeah, it's a gacha. Yeah it has some absolutely ridiculous gooneriffic character designs that makes me roll my eyes. Yeah it's poorly translated and the story is garbage.

But you know what? The actual roguelike deckbuilder game mode is actually a ton of fun. The characters are well balanced enough that I've never felt like I was behind on power even with comparably "bad" pulls from the gacha. The game has been generous enough anyway that I have a lot of pulls saved up too. And the mutability and variety in the roguelike mode is just amazing. Tons of combos, tons of variations of every card and tons of opportunities to make niche builds work just because you happened to get one specific rare upgrade variation on one specific card while also stumbling upon one specific neutral card to add to your deck and stuff like that.

And all for the price of free? I can't complain.

I still say Enclave was a great game. The reviewers at the time absolutely misunderstood it.

Most of the complaints from 2003 are things people love about the Souls games now...

HD version:

https://cogconnected.com/review/enclave-hd-review/

Pretty much most of the CoD series... But then again I'm mostly a multiplayer guy, and I only really buy CoD games if I like the beta enough. BO7 is something I kinda do like (MP only with the occasional Zombies) but I have to agree with the fact the campaign is absolute cheeks. It's like Treyarch wanted to make a horror game campaign but they're stuck making Call of Duty so they just shoehorned it in. Which sucks, cause I KNOW they're capable of much more, the BO6 campaign was actually quite great.

Can't say I feel guilty about liking these but if we're talking about mediocre games I love that would be:

• Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you're crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven't played D2 yet).
• Kane & Lynch (both games) - they're rough, gritty and don't pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it's thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
• Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
• Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn't make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly "Glad Giraffe" beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
• Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it's actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
• Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It's a bit clunky and far from polished but it's an interesting experience nonetheless.

That's all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.

Far Cry games at least until 4. I like mindlessly collecting 300 map markers sometimes. Funny enough, I don‘t like 5 cause there doesn‘t seem to be a collectibles map that lets me just move up and down the map collecting everything lol

I've been playing the android version of Bit Heroes. It's terrible for multiple reasons but I've been playing it because the game can be played semi-passively, meaning that I can multitask while playing it. In fact, I'm actually playing it right now while I'm typing this comment.