Also playing Factorio.

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.

You guessed correctly.

I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.

First time I’d ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.

My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.

It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.

Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.

Still runs fine. She’s a trooper.

Nope. I can’t even tell the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz unless they’re actually running side by side.

Void Stranger, Chip’s Challenge, and BABA IS YOU are all Sokoban style puzzle games with minimal performance requirements and no need for a mouse.

Siralim Ultimate is a creature collector RPG that will run on a potato and provide endless grinding, if you’re into that.

The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters of the first six games are all excellent if you’re into JRPGs.

Dungeons of Dredmor if you like rogue-likes, or you could go old-school and pick up NetHack or ADOM.

How much time have you spent being single?

Most of my life. I’ve had two serious relationships and one complicated one, none lasting more than six months. My last relationship ended in late 2019, so it’s been 4.5 years. I’m 33 this year, and have been single for about 31 years total.

If you’re currently single: is it by choice or circumstance?

Bit of both. I choose not to invest my time, money, and energy into pursuing a relationship, but sometimes that choice feels forced because I don’t have enough time, money, or energy to spare for pursuing a relationship. If it happens, it happens, but I’m not proactive about it because I’m focusing on work and my hobbies. If I ever find myself financially stable without working full time I might have time to actively pursue a relationship, but that’s not in the cards right now for my autistic ass. I spend almost all my free time recovering so I can go back to work.

I joined a LARP community and I go to board game and DnD meetups specifically to meet people and keep my social muscles healthy. Hopefully I’ll find a partner in those circles someday, but no luck so far. The unfortunate reality is that every girl I meet is already in a relationship. I have made a lot of friends, so mission accomplished as far as that goes, but the folks who say that joining hobby groups and hanging out with people who share your interests is the best way to find a partner are full of shit.

Finally, both of my serious relationships ended on good terms because my partner felt I did not communicate enough with them, while I felt the amount of communication they were expecting was too much for me to maintain, which made the relationship a source of stress and anxiety for me. We broke it off, and I’m still good friends with one of them. This is a problem with me that I’m not sure how to fix, and it’s very much not conducive to a healthy relationship. I hope I can find a partner who’s comfortable with that some day, but it’s made me leery of jumping into new relationships.

Do you / did you enjoy single life?

No, but I don’t enjoy dating life, either. Life in general is an unending stream of demands, and I never get enough time to stop, breath, and reset. That’s true while I’m single, and it was true while I was dating.

What are / were the pros and cons?

Pros:

• My living space is my own. Everything stays exactly where I left it, and I can decorate as I please.
• I eat when and what I want. I can cook or eat out as I choose. Meals don’t need to be a production, and if I want to stock up and eat the same thing for weeks on end there’s no one to complain about it.
• My time is my own. I can schedule things whenever and I don’t need to coordinate calendars. If I need to travel for work I can drop everything and just go.
• No fucking kids. My niece, nephew, and soon to be 2nd nephew are plenty.

Cons:

• I’m so lonely. So very lonely.
• Porn addiction. I have a high sex drive, no healthy outlet for it, and it’s an easy dopamine hit for stress and anxiety relief.
• Financial stress. I’m barely getting by on a single income.
• Constantly questioning my identity. I think I’m some flavor of aromantic sex-positive asexual, and I suspect I’m bi and/or trans, but I’ve got no partner to explore my own gender and sexuality with. It’s hard to tell how much is real and how much is my mind spinning off the rails with nothing to latch on to.

Is / was partnership a goal of yours?

Yes. I’d like to settle down with a fellow introvert so we can be alone together.

IT WAS ALWAYS BURNING AS THE DICE KEEP TURNING

Yes.

Ah, yes. Wagering hugs, kisses, and compliments are a fine way to spice up your poker game.

Bunch of games on my Steam wishlist I’m mildly interested in but not willing to pay more than about $10 for, since they’d just wind up sitting in my backlog until I have time to play them. Waiting for a steep sale.

Some of the highlights:

• Cassette Beasts
• Sonic Frontiers
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Dark Souls III

Edit: Didn’t see the “year ago or older” caveat in the title.

I was a child with extensive free time and limited game options. I spent hours mowing grass to grind shells for the machine.

That wasn’t even the worst part. Combing through every NPC looking for the last few kinstone fusions if you missed one was way more annoying.

Minish Cap was my first Zelda. I remember using my allowance to buy the strategy guide back in the day so I could 100% it. Lots of nostalgia there.

I remember having the Batman Forever and Batman Knightfall audio books on cassette back when I was a kid.

I listened to them so many times the voice and cadence of the narrator is permanently burned into my subconscious. I still quote them from time to time without really thinking about it.

The price.

Bought a used '96 Mazda Protégé off a coworker for $700. Ran it into the ground. Scrapped it for $300 when I could finally afford a better car. Definitely got my money’s worth.

I got to learn what driving without power steering felt like after the compressor locked up and the drive belt shredded. Ended up replacing it with a smaller belt just for the power steering since I couldn’t afford to replace the A/C. Drove with the windows down for a few months. Good times.

Yes. I check the organ donor box when I renew my driver’s license. If I’m in an accident then I don’t need 'em anymore. Let someone else use 'em.

But there’s no sense crying after every mistake.

You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake.

One of my Discord servers changed all the channel names for the day.

Nothing else so far. It’s been quiet.

My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.

Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn’t really get anywhere with that.

Eventually I had money and time to put together a “proper” gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I’d had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.

Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I’ve only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.

Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It’s got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.