Over the last year I’ve immensely enjoyed Dread delusion and lunacid. Both of these are deliberately emulating a style of game from my childhood, however they include the playability of modern games: UI smoothness, rebinds, graphics options, modern tutorial design and so on.

I have found these very engrossing games but they are also relaxing mentally. They’re not very difficult (although lunacid is punishing of failure it’s easy to execute) and the gameplay is simple and obvious. The delight comes in the aesthetic polish drawing me in to mysterious alien worlds.

When I think of simple and very playable games, the sort you don’t have to consult a wiki on or invest ages learning, mostly what comes to mind are the modern trend of roguelite arcadey games which tend to be very difficult and very exciting.

If you’re after something different I’d wholeheartedly recommend these two and I’d also like to beg for anyone’s recommendations for simple/playable exploration centric games while I’m at it.