The Outer Wilds

All due respect to the other recommendations in this thread (The Witcher 3 is in my top 3 favorite games ever), but I get the sense you’re looking for a similar vibe - that self-paced, quiet, almost lonely exploration where, though you do have a goal, the point of the game is to wander the world and discover things. While most of these recs (and most open world games in general, so it’s understandable) have a strong story focus, The Outer Wilds will give you that quiet, unguided exploration BoTW does so well.

(And I know explicitly turned down souls-likes, but Elden Ring also hits that vibe super well. If you’re really stuck for something to play, it might be worth a try with one of the magic-focused builds that significantly reduce the skill needed)

I wonder if this counts as baiting for the states where it’s illegal

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is like Skyrim but with better combat and dar King Arthur themed.

Potion Craft is a game where you run an alchemist shop, entirely stylized to look like medieval paintings.

Buddy Simulator 1984 is a game about a digital companion that likes you too much.

I could give more, but I never see anyone recommend those, and you have a lot of recommendations in this thread already.

“In a world of black people, be white”

I ended up settling on spells in my left hand, sword in my right, dodging like a maniac.

Right up until the last 3 hours where I respec’d into exclusively two-handed sword + heavy armor because

The backwards-compatibility stuff already in this thread is all true, but also they don’t know how to remove some things. Microsoft has wanted to entirely replace Control Panel with Settings since Windows 8 came out, but they gave up. And rewriting the whole operating system from scratch would take decades and still inevitably lose compatibility with some of the random old software mentioned here.

That’s because human perception exists on a logarithmic scale! It’s called the Weber-Fechner law, and it was one of the first studied psychological phenomena, before psychology as a field was even defined.

Interestingly, our sense of the “bigness” of numbers is also logarithmic. This is why there have to be explicit explanations of the massive difference between a million and a billion - our brains instinctively and erroneously think “eh, it’s like double.”

~edit I can’t type~

It’s actually way easier to treat sewage than it is to desalinate water: https://www.waterandwastewater.com/how-is-desalination-different-from-water-reclamation/

Neon White, Cyberhook, and Crumble are all excellent, though you might be looking for a more traditional platformer.

Blue Fire is decent and definitely worth checking out while it’s $4 right now.

Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.

As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.

Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.

Skin color is directly related to latitude. Darker skin means more melanin, which absorbs more light and protects against sunburns and thus skin cancer.

Eye color factors are less confidently known, but darker eyes generally have a better time in bright daylight.

Regarding those two, it’s also worth mentioning that the Inuit people don’t follow those patterns, as while they have less sunlight, they also have to deal with reflected light off the snow.

Hair texture is like eye color in that we’re only mostly confident, but tight curls also probably protect from the sun.

It’s also been posited that epicanthic folds might help against freezing winds, but there’s no real evidence for that.

I’ve found that 99.99% of my spam comes from emails with weird extensions - .xyz, .world, .shop, .best, etc. - so I’ve gotten a significant amount of relief in getting a mail client that lets me block entire domain extensions (BlueMail mobile).

cough https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts cough

Others have already pointed out important things about what the dev has said; I would like to add that the book the game is based on has a number of female characters which are simply not in the game.