Okami

The Witness just starts right back off at the beginning unless you figure out the secret ending.

Returnal does this with several of its “endings”, but I haven’t been spoiled on all endings so I can’t say if it strictly fits.

One of Bastion’s two endings is a global reset.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist plays with this in some interesting ways.

Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 both have maintain the status quo endings.

Void Stranger is a relatively recent one. It’s a Sokoban style puzzle game with layers of puzzles and a ton of hidden depth.

It took me 50 hours to feel like I beat the base game and I haven’t even touched the post-game content they added after release. I have a folder full of text files with notes and clues and puzzle attempts and one of the best puzzles involved taking several screenshots and stitching them together in an image editor.

La Mulana is another one to check out. It’s a metroidvania heavy on puzzles and exploration that’s actively hostile toward the player. It’s an exercise in frustration and every inch of progress is measured in blood. Every bit of information is important, and there’s a lot of information to untangle. I haven’t come close to beating it yet and my notes from just the first few floors are extensive.

Path of Exile. Hands down.

I just broke 1400 hours and still going strong. There’s so much to do and so much to learn, and it’s so good at rewarding grinding and keeping you chasing those incremental improvements. It’s 100% replaced RuneScape for me.

I have broken 1000 hours with Cookie Clicker, Guild Wars 2, RuneScape, and Eve Online. I don’t recommend the latter two anymore, but CC and GW2 still hold up.

Honorable mention to Factorio. I’m still in the hundreds but it’s climbing.

I’ve been playing Hollow Knight this week. Working on Pantheon 5 for the last achievement. Made it to Traitor Lord last night. Best run yet!

I played it on 360 and again on the Steam release.

It’s a better Skyrim, and shares a lot of Skyrim’s flaws. Good combat, fun builds, and way too much to do. It was supposed to be an MMO but got cut down to a single player game, so there’s boatloads of content stretched over a massive map.

I still go back and play it every now and then. It’s fun.

I have the remaster, but haven’t touched it yet.

I, too, will still be playing Factorio.

Ooh. I’ve heard of Frostpunk and Tropico but never played them myself. If they’re similar to Rimworld I need to check them out.

Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.

It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.

The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.

Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.

Oh, hey! Another Ratchet: Deadlocked fan in the wild!

No wait…

Where do I apply for my “I beat Radahn before he was nerfed” badge?

Wildermyth is an awesome indie RPG that I’ve had a lot of fun with as a two-player coop game. It’s a turn-based dungeon crawler with a strong focus on role play and party dynamics.

I hear great praise for Across the Obelisk as a coop game from my friends, although I personally bounced off of it. It’s a roguelite deck builder like Slay the Spire, but with multi-player, lots of meta progression, and a heftier time commitment for each run.

Gunfire Reborn is a roguelite looter shooter that’s a blast in coop. I think it’s still in Early Access, but what’s already there is enough for me to be happy with it as a full game. To me it’s a spiritual successor to Borderlands in combat and gamefeel, but without the grinding.

Thank you. That’s a flawless description.

This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.

Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it’s the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.

Hades, yes. That’s a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.

Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you’ve maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It’s still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there’s no more meta-progression.

It just released late last year, and it is one of the finest puzzle games I’ve ever played. It took me around fifty hours to get the ending, and I’ve got a folder full of notes and screenshots from putting together puzzles.

Go in blind if you can, and do your best to avoid spoilers if you need to look up any puzzle solutions. This game has more depth than Outer Wilds.

Throw Void Stranger on that list. It’s a fantastic Sokoban.

Psychonauts (the original, not the sequel, though the sequel is also good) is a Summer Camp themed 3D platformer. It doesn’t quite meet your “low stakes/chill gameplay” criteria as it does have combat and mildly challenging boss fights and platforming, but it nails the rest. It’s easier than Tunic. Maybe worth checking out.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons strictly meets all the criteria listed, but it’s ultimately a tragic story. If “some kind of impact” includes leaving you in tears, check it out.

Okami is a Zelda style adventure set in feudal Japan with immaculate vibes. You play as the sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a wolf bringing light and life to a land ravaged by demons. The world is cold and dark at first, but you bring spring and summer on your heels.

Finally, two favorites from my childhood are the Spyro series and the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series. These are 3D Platformer collectathons and neither of these series are even close to any of the examples you provided, but they are bright and colorful and in my heart they have feelings of Summer Vacation and staying home all day to play video games.

Just Fireball.

Farming? Really? Man of your talents?