I’ve stopped playing multiplayer games with strangers. I play tabletop RPGs (online, on a virtual tabletop) on Tuesday nights for 3-4 hours with some friends, and it’s an absolute blast.

Even though the stories we tell are goofy and not worthy of a pulp fiction novel, it feels like actual play and engages a part of my mind that’s seldom used anymore. It’s not often a video game can capture a fraction of the fun we have paving our own crazy story. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the closest I’ve seen in awhile.

I just got "Slay the Spire", a deck-building, casual, rogue-like and it's awesome. Can play a little or a lot at a sitting :-)

Slay the Spire is awesome, addictive, and can be played for 5 minutes or 5 hours - great recommendation!

With very limited gaming time available I’ve been searching for other games like that with limited success, apart from Hitman Go, FTL, and Into the Beach. But none of them scratch the itch quite as well.

Give “Hades” a shot. Isometric rogue-lite, once you’re comfortable with the game, a “run” is <30 mins (<15 mins once you’re very comfortable).

> I don’t want to declare “I’ve grown and changed and maybe gaming just isn’t my thing” because I badly want it to be.

Games are not your thing, whether be sure of being grown up or so etching else. And there is no intrinsic value of gaming unless you like it a lot. Forcing yourself into it makes zero sense.

Maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to try different things and chances are one of them will be it.

I'm in a similar situation. Most games just feel like work to me. Here's some complicated thing that I have to learn, watch long-winded cutscenes that are like a very bad movie. I have to figure out what I'm supposed to do, where to go, how to find things. The environment is too complicated, everything looks the same, how am I supposed to navigate this. Now I have to learn some combat mechanics. Get killed within seconds, reload over and over.