Do you have a game you play over and over, when nothing else fits your mood? That game that is infinitely re-playable, somewhat the same every time and somewhat new and interesting?
For me it’s the games in the Orcs Must Die series. But mostly OMD 3. I play the mode called Scramble, where you have to beat 5 rounds of orcs, and they get harder and harder as you progress. There are random things to make it harder (nerfs) and you can choose 1 thing per round to make it easier (buffs). I’ve probably played that something like 300 times now since I beat the main game + DLCs a long while ago. I go into a special mental state while playing, since I know it all so well, and just zone out for about an hour each time.
Patient gamers, what’s your “I will keep playing this game for the rest of my life” fallback?
I was trying Terraria, which has a lot of creativity possibilities. I was trying to earthwork/terraform a small world (i.e. trying to make it level from ocean to ocean), while simultaneously “voidforming” another small world (i.e. digging out every single “removable” block before Hardmode, which obviously excluded Lihzard temple blocks, Dungeon blocks and Crimson/Corruption altars; for lava, I was using the infinite bucket trick to replicate honey in order to consume lava from the Underworld; I don’t plan on reaching Hardmode for such world). I was taking blocks from the second world (the world to be voidformed) and “smuggling” them into the first world (the world to be terraformed) in order to compensate for the need for additional blocks (e.g. sand, ice, mud, etc) when biomes were generated below ocean level.
Turns out that I was doing this not exactly for fun and enjoyment, but something to “try to keep myself busy and away from bad thoughts”, and that was not really a good goal for myself. By now, it has been weeks since I last played.