It just released late last year, and it is one of the finest puzzle games I've ever played. It took me around fifty hours to get the ending, and I've got a folder full of notes and screenshots from putting together puzzles.

Go in blind if you can, and do your best to avoid spoilers if you need to look up any puzzle solutions. This game has more depth than Outer Wilds.

Throw Void Stranger on that list. It's a fantastic Sokoban.

I specifically mentioned both Spyro and Ty because both series have remasters available on Steam. The Spyro: Reignited Trilogy in particular is phenomenal. They did a really good job making the updated graphics look just like my nostalgic memories of the game.

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.

I would flip my gender to female and ensure that my hair would match my Dad's hair color. Fix my chronic pain and IBS if I can, assuming those are genetic. Fix my singing voice. I ended up the shortest of my siblings, so double down on that and drop a few more inches off my height. I'm 5'8" now, so 5' even to 5'4" seem nice. My grandma's that height, so the code is in there somewhere.

Just Fireball.

When I chop onions I will just grab a few pieces to snack on raw while I cook the rest.

Edit: I completely missed the latter half of the OP.

I haven't done much experimentation. I know caffeine calms me down and helps "grease the wheels" in getting my brain to function. Alcohol helps ease my social anxiety and helps me relax and unmask around my close friends.

I haven't found any diet that specifically eases autism symptoms, but meal-prepping when I do have energy does help for the times when I don't.

Original off-topic post below./edit

When I'm not trying to lose weight I just cut sugary drinks out of my diet. My biggest rule is that if I go to the fridge for any reason I must pour myself a tall glass of water and drink that before I get to enjoy whatever snack/drink/meal I went to the fridge for. I don't drink enough water of my own accord, and this helps offset that.

I live alone, so I don't buy any food I don't have a plan to eat. I can't stand food just sitting uneaten. The recipes I've come up with for meals require simple fractions of products I know I can get at the store, so I can, for example, buy exactly enough ingredients to make my favorite stir fry recipe four times and have nothing left over.

When I do try to lose weight, I've found the keto diet has been most effective for me to actually stick to it and enjoy it. Even when I'm not strictly keto, I still stick to keto snacks and drinks, and just let carbs be in my meals. I have very little self-control around snacks that are in my house, but I have plenty of self-control at the store, so I just don't buy unhealthy snacks to have at home. Left to my own devices I can and will eat Girl Scout cookies by the sleeve and drink a 2-Liter of soda in one sitting. When my friends visit for board games and leave their snacks here they will be gone within 24 hours. The recent popularity of seltzer waters like La Croix have been a godsend for sating my soda addiction, since I can get the mouthfeel of soda without the carbs or the carcinogens in "diet" soda.

Skill based games aren't incremental. If you get your toolkit at the start and gameplay consists of learning how to use it effectively then there's no incrementing at all.

Examples would be platformers like Mario and old-school shooters before skill trees and gear unlocks became popular like the Halo trilogy. You're just as strong with access to the same tools at the beginning of the game as you are at the end.

A lot of modern "action" games have polluted this by incorporating unlocks and skill trees and other popular lite RPG elements, but incremental progression isn't "the basis of games", as you put. It's made an appearance in a lot of games because it's easy to implement and it's a consistent and cheap dopamine hit to keep players playing, so it's very attractive to AAA studios looking for player retention.

Also not the point of this sub, as others have mentioned. This is for numbers go up games.

Farming? Really? Man of your talents?

That makes a lot more sense now. Thank you. I know where to look for troubleshooting next time I play.

I was not counting mana cost, no. So it'll just drop modifiers if it doesn't have enough mana, and still cast the base spell? That does explain some of the behavior I was seeing. I figured it would fail to cast entirely if I didn't have enough mana for the full block.

One theory I had, if you can confirm, is that shuffle doesn't just shuffle spells, it shuffles all spell nodes.

So if I have a 4-slot shuffle wand with: PPMP (P = Projectile Spell, M = Modifier)

I was thinking the cast table could either be:

P1 - 33%

P2 - 33%

MP3 - 33%

Or

P1 - 25%

P2 - 25%

MP3 - 25%

P3 - 25%

Depending on whether the modifier block was a valid place for the shuffle to land.

I was planning to try to build some wand experiments to differentiate which of these scenarios is true. Good to know that mana can be a confounding variable.

Edit: Also, is shuffle fully random or does it draw without replacement like a deck of cards until all stored spells are cast and it can recharge? Just thought of this and realized I hadn't tested for it.

The issue I've been trying to work out is getting modifiers to work consistently. My understanding is that modifiers are supposed to stack and affect the next projectile spell to the right, but they either don't apply at all or will apply sporadically, and I haven't figured out what rule I'm missing.

I assume some modifiers just don't work with some projectiles, but the game doesn't seem to communicate whether this is the case. I also suspect it has something to do with shuffle, as you warned against, but I haven't been getting any non-shuffle wands for experimentation, and my starter wand doesn't have much mana to work with.

It doesn't help that I can only experiment with builds in the airlock chambers between levels.

The specific issue I remember having last night was that I couldn't get the pentagon shot modifier to apply to any of my projectile spells no matter what I did.

I did get the flametrail modifier working consistently, so I'm doing something right, but I'm not sure what was different between that and the pentagon spread modifier I was trying.

I'll back up that Civ 4 has been the best entry in the series so far.

Civ 5 is when they dropped unit stacking, which made combat much slower and more finicky since you couldn't just build up a massive deathball and tear across the map, and Civ 6 doubled down on that design space by tying city upgrades to individual tiles as well. They're not bad changes, and they do add more strategic depth to the combat and city-building, but they do make an already slow game substantially slower, since combats that used to be done in a turn or two now require several turns of rotating and repositioning units to get them in and out of the fight.

Civ 4 was the last "pure" civ experience, building off and adding to the previous games without sweeping mechanical changes to shake up the meta.

I've started and bounced off Noita a couple of times already. It's been fun but I do need time to dig in and wrap my head around the mechanics.

I'm stuck on wand building at the moment. I've watched a couple video guides explaining how it works, but something still isn't clicking. None of the wands I'm making have worked the way I expect them to, and I'm not sure what I'm not understanding.

I just finished both Borderlands 3 and God of War (2018) so I'm in gaming limbo again.

Leaning toward Stardew Valley, Noita, or finally buckling down to finish Far Cry 3.

I had one 5e campaign set in L5R where all PCs were technically human, but I let the PCs pick whatever race statblock they liked and reskinned their racial abilities as supernatural techniques passed down within their individual clan or family line.

I did not have the L5R splatbook at the time so I was just manually reskinning the PHB and the monster manual to the L5R setting. Worked great.

I like the smell of ammonia. I use ammonia based cleaners almost exclusively. Bleach smells like nothing to me, like if TV static was a smell.

I dislike strong perfumes, and I hated doing laundry for a long time and would put it off as long as I could before my grandma introduced me to scentless detergent. I don't use scented dryer sheets either. I shouldn't be able to smell my clothes after a wash. It's gag-inducing.

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.