If it’s about saving money? Minecraft. It’s been around for an age, but it has so many variations through modding, you get years of play for the one price.

If it’s about mechanical quality? Spelunky. It’s smooth and nearly completely glitch-free. It’s elegant in its simplicity to enjoyability ratio. It has enough variation to make every run a bit different, but not so much that every run is just wild blind choices and (un)lucky draws.

If it’s about story quality? Pacific Drive. It goes on sale fairly regularly and goes below $10 on steam. The story and gameplay are nicely intertwined, well written, and well voice-acted.

Gothic 1 got overshadowed - especially in the west - by The Elder Scrolls, but to this day it remains the most immersive RPG I’ve ever played.

• Before Oblivion’s “radiant AI” it had full schedules for every NPC. They sleep, eat, go to work, sit around the campfire talking, …
• It has a full open world (admittedly smaller than Vvardenfell) with no loading screens except when going underground. That includes houses: everything is one world.
• NPC reactions that make sense: start to sneak and they’ll ask what you’re doing. Draw your weapon and they’ll draw theirs and tell you to put it away. Enter their home and they’ll chase you out.
• Animals in the wild are not just there for you to get XP. They eat, scavenge, hunt, and sleep.
• Speaking of animals, they’re also not constantly in a “must murder the player” mode. Non-aggressive species will warn you not to get close, and only attack if you don’t back up. Others may stalk you, seeing you as prey. They just make sense.
• Stealing also makes sense: if nobody saw you do it, you don’t get in trouble. No loot ever gets a red “don’t buy me I was stolen” mark on it.
• And so much more.

If I sound like I’m picking on The Elder Scrolls, I kind of am. I actually do like TES, but I wish more games took inspiration from Gothic.

There’s also a remake, which is too recent for patient gamers (and for me), but it’s getting good reviews. And there are sequels and spinoffs, some more liked than others.

You should play Morrowind! We’ve got:

• A handcrafted, in depth alien world to explore with surprises literally around every corner
• divine apotheosis disease that turns you into a zombie shambler
• catgirl booba
• self-appointed divinity and all around man of mystery Vivec whose main claim to fame is that he canonically, as an in-game Elder Scrolls character, managed to access the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and assign himself the ‘deity=true’ variable
• The Pain Glove ™
• Furry fulfillment fantasy where you can become a big buff wolfman and run off into the wilderness
• Wizard fulfillment fantasy where you can rack up all your stats into the millions by abusing loopholes in magic research, and then craft the potion seller’s strongest potions concentrated to a point that they could knock out God
• “I cast Everyone In This Town Dies Instantly”
• being sexually propositioned by a Daedra
• being sexually propositioned in order to recieve a promotion
• leaping sixty miles in a single mighty bound and then splattering yourself across a rock face in one shot because you forgot to account for landing your mighty leap
• Selling swords to a crab
• selling a merchant an enchanted shirt of “Fire Damage 1pt per second, constant effect” and then waiting for him to keel over dead so you can loot his store with impunity
• an entire province full of rogue wizards where “I’d like to see you stop me” is the whole of the law
• dream daddy Dagoth and his castle-stomping giant robot
• caves made out of meat
• trying to fight the luckiest man of all time and being literally unable to land a hit on him without abusing the actual fabric of reality
• The Boots Of Barry Allen
• “That’s a good argument. Unfortunately,” Weakness to Magic 100%, 10 seconds. Weakness to Fire 100%, 10 seconds. Fire Damage 100pts, 10 seconds.
• lockpicking your way inside the government treasury and making off with all the contents
• The Corpse of Peke Utchoo
• “Listen, this is very important. I need you to stab me in the face.”
• ‘mines’ full of bugs where the ‘miners’ harvest the bug eggs in order to eat and sell (this is the primary food source of the region)
• smuggling Dwarven artifacts
• smuggling drugs
• radical abolitionists as a joinable faction
• lizard people
• “Yeah so, to complete this pilgrimage you need to go drown yourself in the sewers. God says so.”
• the joys of property ownership
• having enough strength score that you hit someone once with a longsword and the weapon instantly shatters in your hands, but it’s okay because their entire skeleton exploded
• having 100% magic resistance and watching enemy spells just ping off of your shiny pecs with zero effect
• skill trainers that are sometimes actively hostile to you. The greatest enchanter in the land is a daedra worshipper that lives in an old Dunmer stronghold. He ain’t gonna be happy to meet you. You want to learn his secrets? Do something about that.

…and more. This is just what I pulled off the top of my head in 20 minutes of thinking about it. I love this game, it’s peak elder scrolls in my opinion and nearly peak early-2000’s gaming in general.

It’s a little crusty though. I grew up playing it so I can deal, but the modern gamer is going to struggle a bit. I’m going to give you some tips for the most common complaints.

“The combat sucks! I can’t hit anything!”

The combat is roll based, like D&D. You wouldn’t expect your D&D wizard to competently cleave someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and you shouldn’t expect your Nerevarine to do it either with 30 AGI and 40 Long Blade. Chance to hit is determined by Agility score and weapon skill, and damage is determined by strength score and weapon skill. Make your AGI nice and high at character creation and pick a major skill weapon that you like and stick to it. Using gold to gain skill training goes a very long way towards competency in Morrowind and at low skill levels, it’s cheap enough to make it a regular part of your shopping. If you find a really cool axe and you only have 5 in your Axe skill, go get some training with it before you try and take it out into real action. Failing any of that, the “Fortify Attack” effect from the Warrior birthsign or the Orc’s Berserk power adds directly to your chance to hit. 10 points gives you 10% added on top after your normal to-hit calculations. Doesn’t add any damage though.

By mid to late game, with relevant stats and skill levels at 70 or 80+, missing melee strikes in combat will become kind of rare, even without fortify attack boosts.

“The leveling system sucks! You have to optimize everything with meta knowledge!”

Morrowind is a hilariously unbalanced game, you definitely do not need optimal levelups to succeed. If you do want to get optimal level ups, you are going to need to perform some strange cheese using meta knowledge. But as a casual player, just making the skills you want to use your Major/Minor skills and leveling up normally as you gain experience is plenty fine, you’ll be totally okay.

One caveat to that though, is that your HP total is dependent on your endurance score, and it is not retroactive. Getting your endurance high, or maxed, early in the game is usually a primary goal for most experienced players so that you get the maximum amount of HP per level up. I do recommend this. However, there are many other ways to get around this if other stats are more important to you, such as max HP boosting potions or enchantments, or just one of many ways of avoiding being hit in the first place (shield spells, flight, concealment or stealth, killing the enemy dead in one shot from 50 meters)

“I don’t know where to go!”

Just read, bro. People give you directions to get places. You don’t have quest markers but you do have a quest journal that will let you go back and read the exact dialogue of the quest giver whenever you want.

There are a couple of occasions where people will give you bad directions, or the place you’re looking for is just hard to locate. For those, UESP exists. I’ve been playing this game for 20 years and sometimes I still have to look up specifics on some places, the game is that big. I’ve run this game probably two dozen times and I usually find at least one thing I’ve never seen before each time.

Cyberpunk 2077 was probably my biggest patient gamers win… I usually practice just to wait for a sale because my backlog is big enough already, but giving this one time to cook, drop the dlc, and then go on a steep sale? I think I got it for like $20 USD and it got close to 500 hours in it by now…

Runner up would be No Man’s Sky…another one that just keeps getting better the longer you wait. Only downside is they keep announcing new stuff…so it’s almost like they keep resetting the clock.

I have recently picked up Tactical Breach Wizards again. If you like turn based strategy games but XCOM’s percentages and imperfect information makes you rage quit then Tactical Breach Wizards is the game for you.

It presents all the information to you and allows you to undo your moves within each turn so there are absolutely no surprises and missing a 99% shot. It makes it feels more like a puzzle game and there are optional challenges to keep things interesting. I personally like the art style and the writing isn’t too shabby either. Pretty funny.

Outer Wilds (not Outer Worlds!) is a brilliant game that is hard to advertise without spoiling stuff. It is from the genre sometimes called metroidbrainia, where finding the puzzle solution through in game hints to progress is the game mechanic. So its possible to finish the game in 20 minutes, if you know what to do. But getting there usually takes you 20 hours.
Now to why its great:

• the story is at its core a mixture of enlightenment thinking and celebration of curiosity and the human spirit. It does have a lot of sad points, but ultimately it is a celebration.
• I love the characters. Part of what makes this game so great are the variety of different personalities you can experience.
• the DLC is one of the best ever, where they managed to catch the spirit of the main game again and added to it, without contradicting themselves, which I honestly didnt think possible after finishing the main game.

Planescape Torment walked so that Disco Elysium could run. PT plays in the planescape setting of D&D, a world where belief is the foundation of everything, so with high enough stats, you can debate somebody into believing they don’t exist and they will vanish immediately.
You are in Sigil, the central city of the multiverse, directly in the middle of neutral. Neutral between the planes of Good and Evil but also between those of Chaos and Lawful. This neutrality needs to be enforced of course, which is the job of a nice woman called the Lady of Pain, which has the iron throne as headdress and cutting you down on the spot is the nicer treatment for offending her.
And I didnt even tell you of the protagonist, the Nameless One. You wake up in a morgue, update your journal all the time and try to find out why you can’t die. A former You was smart enough to try and give you some instructions via tattooing them onto your skin. So you take your wisecracking flying skull buddy and start looking for answers.
Yes, this game is weird and a lot of text with bad battle mechanics, but the good kind of weird and you don’t play PT for the fights, you play it for the world, the stories and the characters. For example the chaste succubus with a brothel for intellectual debate and no that is not an euphemism but 100% what it is. Play the game if you don’t believe me! This is sneakily a recommendation for Disco Elysium as well, but PT is the more patient game, so I wanted to highlight that one more.

EXAPUNKS

Your body has been infected by a Phage that turns your flesh into random bits of circuitry. Left untreated, you’ll gradually lose bodily function as your nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and organs turn into useless computer parts. There’s a drug that halts the progress of the disease. And it only costs 300 dollars.

A day.

For the rest of your life.

Don’t like that deal? Then print out a copy of the underground hacker zine that’ll teach you to all of Alternate Universe 1997’s technology to your will. Including your own body.

Hope you like writing Assembly code.

Depends on how patient you truly are. I can recommend Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines from the heart. I don’t even like vampires, nor do I like noire, but this game… It somehow sticks together and it’s a masterpiece. Not the most polished or bug free, but the story, world building, characters, music, atmosphere, everything’s serves the game so well it’s still on my recommend list even some 20 years from its release. Not a small feat.

Got to say, Hyper Light Drifter, if you are into Zelda-like open world endtimes sword fighting.

What I loved most about it how the style just fit the game so well. Especially the sound design. One part of the game is finding those hidden “computerchips” in the ground and you get hints on where they are by listening to them humming softly in a rhythm. Then pulling them out of the ground makes a real satisfying sound effect.

The guns also mostly have really great sounds, shooting and reloading the laser sniper rifle felt awesome, but the best one is that tiny pistol you get beating this samurai boss.

Sorry, don’t recall the right names of things anymore, hopefully it is clear what I mean.

There are so many games i want really everyone to experience like Beyond Good & Evil or Psychonauts.

But i’m a racing game enjoyer at heart. So i’m going to namedrop NFS 3, 4 and the Test Drive Unlimeted PS2 version. The last name drop is no joke. Its the very best PS1 racing game physics which happen to be on a PS2 i ever experienced but on a ridiculously big map.

But the ultimate arcade racing game is imho Midnight Club 3. I grew up with the NFS games on PC. Through the years i went hardcore on racing sims. Have been an elitist. But this game pulled me back to the fun(complete lie, but i was told to sell the game to you, but i truly believe it would have been good enough to actually do that). But seriously i never had a PS2 when MC3 was relevant. Emulation of the PS2 took a really long time to render MC3 flawlessly. But now in 2026 its just great. You should really check it out if you have any itch to play a great arcade racer. It does so many things which feel so fresh to this day. So many events have unique scripted things happening. Its crazy that this still stands out over 20 years later.

This is the guide i followed a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-GHRo49XJc

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (plus DLCs): Nothing else comes close to the item variety and more importantly the item combinations and synergies you get in this game. Sure, there are a bunch of items that are just stat boosts, many other games stack these. But in Isaac you also get stacking and synergies on weird weapon and item effects that can sometimes lead to almost game breaking outcomes. And then you still manage to die.

Because of this Isaac excels at the “just one more run” style replayability.

Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky have already been mentioned, and honestly there aren’t going to be any real better examples than those two. They are the poster children for patient gaming for me.

My favourite patient game is probably Withering Rooms, which benefitted a lot from a long Early Access period. With the sequel entering early access yesterday it’s the perfect time to check it out!

I discovered, by playing Dishonored, that Arkane Studios made some nice games. I bought Dark Messiah and Arx Fatalis and have been enjoying them.

I’d recommend Dishonored, it’s quite fun. You can go with the stealth route or the maximum carnage option, you choose.

Strider 2014. A metroidvania with some fun movement mechanics letting you stick to almost any surface, but the most satisfying thing is that no matter how fast you mash the attack button, the game keeps up with you, and the faster you slash, the more damage you can do. The gravity switching mechanics in the late game are also super fun.

receiver 1 and 2 are fantastic games for total weirdos. if the idea of operating every moving part of a pistol with separate keyboard keys appeals to you even slightly, check em out ^^