One of my all-time favourite "relaxing but slowly ruining my mental sanity" games. I originally bought Mini Motorways with the goal of 100%ing the steam achievements, but after messing around for a bit - somewhere between my first crashout about traffic lights and "just give me one more motorway and I can fix this", I realised I was hooked.

This game became a regular feature in streams and my group's discord calls, screenshared for my friends to watch whenever I died early in another game. Over time, I somehow convinced multiple friends to buy it for themselves - no regrets.

At its core, the game is beautifully simple. You connect coloured houses to matching coloured buildings so that cars can complete journeys. That's it. However, this "simple" premise slowly evolves into a full-blown obsession with optimising routes and increasingly unhinged mid-run mass re-organisation that yes, will always backfire (can't and won't won't stop me from trying it again though).

I've seen some reviews say the game gets repetitive over time, but my experience was the exact opposite. Each map introduces its own flavour of suffering (rivers, hills, railways, combinations of these) and no two runs ever feel the same thanks to randomised spawning. You can play as slow or fast as you want but nothing will stop the game from mocking your neat and organised road networks by spawning a building in the single worst place possible.

All said, I highly recommend if you enjoy getting way too competitive about improving your runs in what should be a relaxing background game, holding your breath while you watch a city "bink bink bink" on the brink of collapse [medal.tv], and slowly coming to terms with the fact that you are extremely bad at urban planning.

Side note: the devs are genuinely lovely and very involved with the community. I've seen them reply to steam discussions before and they have reached out to my business email several times about promotions to do with upcoming new content :) Always super nice to see!

A short, relaxing game about cleaning up and recycling the ocean in an expanding series of biomes, saving animals as you go. Super enjoyable and fully completable (100% achievements) in roughly an hour, maximum 2.

Hard to justify it at full-price, but I bought it 30% off and have no regrets, would recommend!

nominated for a steam award this year C:
absolutely beautiful, relaxing time sink with the pals!

Melobot met and exceeded my expectations having not played the demo, only seeing the trailer and I would recommend picking it up!

You explore the planet as Melobot, an adorable goofy robot who can play various instruments! The plants on this planet have been exploited to harvest dark matter and to fuel a hostile species who have wiped out nearly all the human population. Through the use of music (small rhythm-matching sequences you repeat), you heal the plants and take back nature.
Intermittently you fight bosses which get progressively harder, progressing to a genuinely somewhat challenging fight balancing different cycles and mini-hostiles the boss spawns. That said, nothing felt truly un-beatable even if it took patience or a few attempts.

Maybe it's the fact I (and chat) got thoroughly invested in the storyline and started making comparisons to the real world, but the end cut-scene and final song did evoke genuine emotion and definitely got us thinking! It was a beautiful ending to the game.

Overall I was able to 100% the game in ~4.5 hours without too much struggle, which is why I would recommend picking this up on sale. It was a really good play though! Thoroughly enjoyed C:

Gourdlets are just little guys living their little lives in this sandbox town you create for them. There is no currency, just a catalogue of items and more room for expansion than you'll ever need. You can also decorate inside buildings which I loved!
You can fully customise the gourdlets (name, body colour, accessories) but I preferred to let the game do it automatically - the inbuilt name options were perfect and it added to the 'just lil fellas' mindset for each one that turned up.

I spent roughly 4 hours creating a cozy town and completing 90% of the achievements and then used the game as a 2nd monitor idle while studying to grind the last achievement. Not sure if it was the gourdlets keeping me from getting distracted or the fact that looking over at them whenever study was confusing me, but these fellas helped me get a solid A so I couldn't recommend them more :D

There is also a twitch integration option I haven't messed around with yet but definitely am looking forward to, hugely excited to see that included though!

This game hits hard emotionally, covering mature topics extremely well while maintaining a solid approach to science fiction in the modern day! You play as a researcher who has been trying to find a cure for the neurological disease that is stealing his memory and his family's future. After piecing together memories & snippets of time, you revisit the story through a linear timeline which puts the events in order and concludes the game in a very memorable way. This game deserves an insane shoutout for the accurate scientific depictions and information throughout (so many games get this so wrong!).

My only complaint is that I managed to get softlocked briefly in one of the memories but the frequent auto-saves meant a game restart resolved it without losing any progres. Despite being a puzzle game at heart, you can find mostly everything by just poking around and clicking every clickable option which is nice for a more casual or distracted gamer/streamer.

Super excited to do a second playthrough at some point to explore the alternative ending, there is definitely enough going on in this game that a second playthrough will still hit.