Ask Lemmy

Path of exile for sure. Everytime there is a new league, i put a lot of hours into it.

Elden Ring opened up the whole FromSoft catalog for me, im playing Demons Souls now

Souls games.

The most severe was Warframe. Not the most hours, but the most hours in the shortest time. 200 hours in 2 weeks. No I didn't do anything else.

Other than that, Runescape, Minecraft, Baldur's gate 3 all have just deleted days. Runescape and Minecraft have deleted months if not a year of time.

Timberborn is my drug of choice right now. But every few months I have a No Man's Sky relapse.

Another answer for me is Super Smash Bros. Melee (but could probably apply to many multiplayer games).

Normally I'd always engaged with it in person, at events. But when I started playing online, it was almost too much of a good thing.

On the Internet, your next match is always 15 seconds away. You get beat, you go 'I can do better, just give me another chance'. You win, you're on a high, you don't ever want to stop.

The game has that perfect push and pull (at least when you're playing someone anywhere near your level) that just builds compulsion. You're constantly engaged in decision making or quick button pressing each moment, and it just feels satisfying.

historically: gmod. recently: oxygen not included.

Minesweeper. I've had a period where I played it 3 hours a day. Eventually forced myself to delete it from my phone.

RuneScape: I can’t believe I played the game after the removal of free trade. It was such a poorly run game, and I’m can’t believe anyone still plays it anymore. It’s unbelievable how arrogant mod MacDonalds was, and that I only quit in 2011 after I got scammed trying to sell the account.

League of Legends: this is another case of really great game, but incredibly poorly managed. Having Phreak be the balance lead just feels like shit, and made me feel like shit because I kept playing thinking it’d get better. This is a very global, very competitive game that was balanced around competitive play and optimizing spectator happiness. You can guess just how fun it was to play a character that was deemed “unfun to watch in worlds” and get absolutely gutted by Phreak’s team. The opposite was also hilariously true… they buffed certain characters so they’d sell more skins or because spectators like watching them. I finally quit after having to swap my main because they nerfed or reworked it and left me playing something else several times.

Warframe, I have more than 3000 hours on it but I haven't touched it in years

Gemstone 3 mud back in the late 90’s. Had its claws in me for a few years.

DDRaceNetwork, bcs of the fun ppl i meet all the time. About 1800 hrs.

Minecraft and Factorio.

Both mixed in a little IRL depression and I was living vicariously through Steve or making factories.

Civ, Balatro.

Lots, chrono trigger, ffvi-x, Mario 64, basically every yakuza game, sekiro, breath of the wild, a ton more. Embarassing ones sometimes like that power washing game because I got it for free and was like “this will be dumb” then kept going and going and going

Some older games that I’d probably power through now but at the time cheating/save states/youtube wasn’t easily accessible (gamefaqs existed but text based walkthroughs hit much different). Like the ps1 survival horror games: resident evil 1-3, silent hill, Dino crisis, parasite eve, etc. when you know what to do most of those can be run through in a few hours but in 1997 on the original hardware (no save states) and at best a txt file faq to guide you if you get stuck it would take some time to figure it out. Then with ones like re2 that had multiple routes and endings you’d play it like 6-7 times at least

Duke Nukem 3D.
Then Quake I and II.
I'm still playing the latter many times a week.