Hollow Knight is a total work of art.

The first title that jumps to my mind, especially when you contextualize it around "restoring faith", is Satisfactory. It's been a very entertaining and challenging game, but also the development team has been exactly what one (typically) wants from a dev team. They've been very transparent about issues, their process, etc. Their interactions with the fan-base have been frequent and open throughout the years of development. Good game + good company. Worth consideration if you like a good factory builder.

I love indie games - here's my favorites list!

Terraria
Deep rock galactic
Factorio
Dwarf Fortress
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free and open source - check it out!)
Stardew Valley
Starbound
Rimworld (I much prefer dwarf fortress, but I found this first and got a few hundred hours in it too)
Battlebit remastered

Balatro - Even if roguelike isn't your thing, try it

Alan Wake 1/2 & Control- if you love creepy atmosphere

Superliminal - unique 1st person puzzle, think portal vibe

Bastion - 1st game from Supergiant, best smash-em-up I've ever played

Anything Supergiant for that matter

Here are 6 good games I wholeheartedly recommend:

• Baldurs Gate 3, speaks for itself.
• Disco Elysium, elevates the whole medium to art
• Hifi Rush, innovation and entertainment
• Snowrunner, ok this one’s just for me.
• The Outer Wilds, very interesting, go in spoiler free
• Return of the Obra Din, puzzle game like nothing you’ve played before

Baba is you, great little puzzle game

I was going to immediately mention Hollow Knight but I see someone already did. Second thought: Tunic. It's been a long time since a game hit me as hard as those two.

For pure fun addictive gaming: Factorio is absolutely nuts. 2D survival craft platforming action: Terraria is still king.

For space empire building check out X4: Foundations, after almost 10 years under development it's absolutely amazing (but a huge timesink haha)

Oh and if you're into semi-hard-scifi basebuilding you could give Stationeers a look. Sunk quite some hours into that one.

If you haven't played it, "Stardew Valley" is, like, ruin-your-life good. And I think part of what makes it so faith assuring and life uplifting is that it was made by one dude who has continuously (for YEARS) released huge, free updates for the game. He's awesome. It feels good supporting him and recommending such a great game to people. :-)

Cyberpunk 2077. It was hated on release but it really has made a comeback after 2.0 was released.

I think cyberpunk really puts so many triple A titles to shame when it comes to the quality of the characters and quests.

• Katana ZERO
• Hades
• Satisfactory

Factorio. The new dlc hooked me into a 5h gaming session at one eve. I cant remember when i did that the last time in my life. Probably with 15? But be warned, the game isn't called cracktorio without reason.

Try rimworld! You don't need any of the dlcs for the first couple of successful runs. Just the base game takes you to I would say 85-90% of the experience (ideology is a good upgrade for later). Side effects include, playing too long into the night, dreaming about the game during your sleep and day dreaming about it during whatever else you doing until you get back to playing.

I've recently gotten hooked on the Yakuza series. The whole series goes on an aggressive sale pretty regularly on Steam. I'd recommend starting with Yakuza 0.

"Return of the Obra Dinn" is the best Detective-type game I have ever played. Pure inductive, yet always logical reasoning. The setting of an Victorian ship, the 1-Bit artystyle, excellent ost and memorable story really elevate this recommendation to a must-play.

On something from this decade, Balatro is great if you like cards and rouge-likes. But it's been so popular I don't think anyone interested hasn't heard of it yet.

Oh, and as others have pointed out and I'd hate myself for not mentioning it, Tunic is great as well. It's a love-letter to the instruction book, and makes one really feel like playing an old game and relying on an instruction book, while not being all that great at reading, like some may remember from their childhood. But with modern game design and what others call Dark-soul mechanics (idk, I have never played a Fromsoft game).

Baldurs Gate. There is so much content. I’m 150 hours in the game, I play split screen coop with my wife. We each have our characters customized to how we like it. It’s AAA quality. Came at a AAA price, but it’s absolutely worth it.

And I say this as a FPS/simulation gamer. Totally different genre but they’ve made this game accessible to all. It’s the only game I’ve ever purchased at full price and my steam account is 12 years old.

I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.

• Deep Rock Galactic
• Tunic
• Pacific Drive
• Gorogoa
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Hand of Fate 2
• FTL
• Styx: Shards of Darkness
• House of the Dying Sun
• Hitman Go and Lara Craft Go
• VVVVVV

The last campfire, disco Elysium, hue

Dave the Diver and Dredge come to mind.

I just finished Carrion recently that was amazing.

Animal Well and Outer Wilds come to mind.

Ooh I notice nobody has mentioned Wasteland 3 - it totally slipped under my radar, it is a fastastic RPG, with a fun story and good combat! :) It's what I'd love fallout to be :)

GreedFall. Old school RPG that flew completely under my radar. It has a 00s Bioware feel to it, before the dark times. The graphics aren't perfect, etc., but it's a really fun game with a decent story (so far).

Let’s go with A Monster’s Expedition Through Puzzling Exhibitions!

Humanity has died through hubris and climate change, and Human Englandland is all flooded. Now it’s the age of monsters! And one monster is touring the now-outdoors old Human Englandland museum, which is an archipelago cause flooding and such. All the bridges washed out, but there’s convenient trees! Let’s go see the museum.

Pushing logs from trees into adjacent water is the point of the game, but it has some of the simplest yet best mechanics about it that I’ve seen in a long time.

OldSchool RuneScape restored my faith in the industry. RuneScape was ruined by microtransactions, but Jagex grew an enormous pair of balls and released an older version of the game and started fresh without any of the bullshit.

To this day it's my favorite RPG. I could write a truly ridiculous amount about why I love it, but I recommend just playing it for yourself.

Roguelite:

FTL - Faster Than Light

Dead Cells

Nova Drift

Hades

RPG:

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Disco Elysium (pirate this game, it was "stolen" from the devs, they wont see the money if you buy this game anyway)

Those are some of my all time favorite, superb quality, labor of love titles. Are you also interested in couch coop games?

Stardew valley is just fantastic and still receiving free updates.

Grim dawn is an amazing diablo2 style arpg. The dual class system means it has huge replayability. Still getting updates and very reasonably priced dlcs.

Kenshi is a unique gaming experience. If you can get past the jankiness it's an amazing open world squad game with no story or objectives as such. The story of your characters emerges from the things that happen as you play. Like getting enslaved etc.

On Android (and probably other systems), Death Road to Canada is fun, funny, challenging, and comes with no BS.

Viewfinder if you enjoy Portal style games

Horizon Zero Dawn is my all time favorite game (a remastered version is coming out next week so might be a great time to jump in). Celeste is a 2D platformer and also really great. Been having fun with Zelda ToTK and Astrobot as well.

I mainly like PvP games and I am really enjoying Valve’s Deadlock

Starsector

Just be sure to switch your A and D keys from rotate to strafe

Play the 1st and 2nd GTA games for free.

Minetest - I think they might have changed the name of this game recently, not sure.

STALKER gamma mod pack

STALKER 2 comes out soon by the way

Play the 2nd elder scrolls game for free!

Map is as big as europe! It's been ported to unity and it looks a ton better then the OG version. There are yet more graphic overhaul mods you can add like this guy did

Baldurs Gate 3

The Planet Crafter

• Timberborn
• Talos Principle (2)
• Shapez 2
• Astroneer
• ...