Games

Too lazy to check all responses but if you want a nice resource building game then Timberborn could be your jam.

So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.

Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).

For finding games on Steam, I've had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I'll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it's led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I'll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.

Sometimes I've had luck with looking at "similar games" to a game, which are shown on that game's store page.

But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.

management / factory games like workers and resources

Maybe Frostpunk would be up your alley?

You might enjoy Sid Meier's Civilization games. I'm partial to Civ 6, but they're pretty much all in the same vein of management games.

The Rock of Ages trilogy is fun

Railway Empire 2 hard to put down once you get going.

Wasteland 3 is awesome and akin to DOS2 and BG3!

Going Medieval is a pretty great building/management type game! It gets updated often with new content too

You build your castle and manage the sims in their daily jobs. There's a great building system, farming, defense against raiders, mining, a good crafting pipeline. It's a lot of fun

Check out Elin.

Basebuilding/dungeon crawling/pixel art/roguelike. Kinda like ADOM meets stardew, but weirder and more Japanese. Weirder how? Here's the wiki entry on the chaos shape race, which you can play as.

VERY in depth systems in the game. Mutations, crafting, prayer, it's a deep game.

Look into Drova - Forsaken Kin. It’s been great so far.

A classic one would be to go for BG1 and BG2
Then either play the enhanced editions with EET or play the originals with Baldur's Gate Trilogy to allow you to play all three games as a singular campaign (as well as running BG1 in the same engine as BG2 if you go for the originals)

Oblivion remaster looks pretty good. Have you played through that game before?

I don't see Bioware titles on the list. Dragon Age series for fantasy, Mass Effect for sci fi. Since BG3 is on the list, I wanted to mention in case you haven't gotten to them yet.

Aviassembly.

Its fun in the way that building airplanes in KSP is fun. The game is small, and the physics are simple, but for $10 its a good value.

If Baldur's Gate 3 is your speed, that game gives me countless hours of trying new ways to change the story and game.

I mean Oblivion Remastered just came out.

It's weird replaying Oblivion but it looks like a modern game. All the original audio is there (along with a few new voices to break up the monotony of hearing the same handful of voices over and over again), and all the locations and gear, but it all feels different. Like it's very familiar, but it's still very different from what we remember. Leveling is a bit different this time around as you have seven or so points to divide among your attributes, rather than picking a couple that would get increased by random numbers. I'd recommend trying it if nothing else than to try out the new polished version yourself.

Although some of the jank has been removed from this version, like there are no more items duplication glitches, but the Bound Armor/Weapon glitch works.

Have you tried Kingdom Come Deliverance 2? It’s really good and difficult. It’s a history simulator with a really kick ass story and the hero is just a guy. I really like it a lot.

At the thrift store today I picked up an original disk copy of Prey (2006) and the thief trilogy.