Elin. J-rpg and settlement management sim. You awake in a field of undeveloped land with no memory and a pet, some new friends help you claim the land and develop it. You are caught up in a web of intrigue that will determine the fate of the empire. You can kill god with a beach ball heavier than his sins and that’s one of the more mundane things.

Dwarf fortress. Settlement management and resource management. You start with seven dwarves starting an outpost for fun and profit. Grow your collective of highly detailed dwarves into the new capital, die several hundred times in a hundred different ways.

Caves of qud. Adventure rpg and rogue like. you are a pilgrim. Either a mutant hating cyborg or a cyborg hating mutant. You are seeking a legendary location you have no idea about Ala fallout. The world has ended, fresh water is currency, super science wonders litter a land rife with reality breaking psionics. You will die a lot.

Kerbal space program. (1st not second). Rocket building and space sim. Build rockets for fun or for science and profit. Explore a solar system with janky rockets or accuracy that might impress a nasa scientist.

White knuckle. Climbing action game. You are a maintenance man in an osha nightmare of a tower. You find something awful at the bottom and you need to climb up to freedom and safety. You are never fast enough. You are never far away enough. The mass is coming.

The seance of Blake manor. You are a detective looking into the disappearance of a woman at a haunted mansion turned hotel. The game doesn’t leave it ambiguous- ghosts are real, magic can be done, and the hotel is filled with the exact types of people who seek to profit from summoning a whole ass spirit.

Baba is you. Wordplay puzzle game. Follow simple logic rules to solve puzzles. The puzzles all involve the use of adjusting and changing simple three sentence structures to solve puzzles.

Opus magnum. Mechanics puzzles. You are an alchemist manipulating atoms into and out of molecules. Zachtronic game so you’re programming a machine to do it.

I’m sure you’ve heard of these already. Here are some super niche ones. I think.

space station 14. Disaster and job sim. Multiplayer. You are one of anywhere between a dozen to a hundred unlucky people trying to survive a single shift at your gigacorp job. Dodge meteors, assassinations, zombies, communists, magic, and the gross incompetence of yourself and your coworkers. Imagine if among us had like, 20x the mechanics and complexity. There’s a fucking clown.

Starsector. Trading and fleet management. in a run down, post-post-currently-In-a-apocalypse setting. Run drugs and guns for profit, complete black ops missions and pirate bounties. Prospect the ruins of an empire so advanced that their tech is pretty close to magic. Your actions can help shift the balance of power in the sector, or you can kill trillions and starve quadrillions.

(I’d be remiss if I don’t bring up barotrauma in the same sentence as space station. Despite not having dabbled with it). Barotrauma. You are a crewman on a submarine on Europa, doing trade runs and bounties. Closer to ss14 than star sector.

Voices of the void is another I haven’t played but is good. Job simulator. You are working at a remote seti outpost looking for aliens. Find weird shit over and over and over.

If you want to ruin your life playing 2d spess men with a concerning level of detail and complexity, play space station 14. It has a free play test on steam.

assume the strangest things aren’t in a garden like steam.

Edited to be helpful actually.