Need some inspiration? Just want to kill a few (or many) hours? This list is a mildly sorted pile of games I've come across and enjoyed. Some are legitimately old, while others were made recently but crafted to emulate the look and feel of older games.
Personal Favorites
These are games I've played to varying degrees. Some (cough Wurm) I've sunk hundreds of hours into, while others I've only briefly tried but was impressed by what I saw.
Multiplayer RPGs
Project Gorgon: One of my all-time favorite MMOs. Charmingly indie. Features include things like getting a permanent werewolf curse and being impacted by the real moon. Psychology is a combat skill. It's delightful.
Wurm Online: or as I affectionately call it, "boomer Minecraft", a surprisingly unironic reference to its lineage and average player age. Also known as "the reason this site gets updated as slowly as it does". Come visit Whispering Pines on Cadence, wave at me (Grimmheart) and let me know you came from RDK and I'll set you up with any supplies I can spare and all the breakfasts you can possibly eat!
Aardwolf MUD: I actually love MUDs but I almost never play them (I blame the ADHD). I've spent more time in Aardwolf than anywhere other text-based universe, unless you count Neopets.
Wyvern: Very old-school 2D MMO. It's possibly older than you, dear reader!
Animyst: I played this game for the first time a while back while stoned out of my mind in the middle of the night. I don't think I could've had a better introduction.
Furcadia: One of the oldest MMORPGs still playable today, and definitely the furriest. Socialize with a rainbow variety of anthros in any number of user created worlds called Dreams.
Improbable Island: This is one of the most unique web games I've ever come across, and I love it dearly.
Singleplayer RPGs
Tales of Maj'Eyal: I used to keep this on a thumbdrive so I could play it in my graphic design class when I finished projects early.
Caves of Qud: You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of a new "retro" game. Born in Unity but ported to Godot after their install fee debacle, the folks at Freehold Games have made an absolute gem. It looks, feels, and plays like an old school RPG but in a much more accessible way than if you were to, say, hop straight into Nethack. Truly can't recommend it enough. If two of your favorite things are Ultima and Dune, need to play Qud, like, yesterday.
Moonring: A love letter to RPGs from the creator of Fable.
Golden Light: You are meat, the walls are meat, that table over there is meat and it's getting up and coming to kill you right now. Insane roguelike. I love it a disturbing amount.
Isles of the Caliph: Loads of dungeon crawling goodness with an intriguing Arabic setting (criminally underrepresented in fantasy if you ask me).
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: DCSS shines as a roguelike, FOSS project, and magic portal I throw too much of my free time into. It's basically a love letter to the genre from years of volunteer contributers. It also runs on seemingly anything. Eventually, I'd love to host a web version on here for y'all to play whenever. It's low on the to-do list for now, but I'm easily bribed. ;)
Simulation
Dwarf Fortress: Strike the earth! This legendary game has probably caused more emotional turmoil with pure ASCII than anything else.
Project Zomboid: An in-depth zombie survival RPG. Aesthetically, it's The Sims 1. Mechanically, it's a dream come true for the apocalypse-obsessed. I've sunk hundreds of hours into this and gotten some wild experiences, from my very first character dying alone in a field during a thunderstorm drunk out of his mind in his boxers to the time my buddy blew up a church full of gnome statues.
What are we calling the genre popularized by Vampire Survivors? Have we picked a name yet?
Halls of Torment: A must-buy for Diablo 1+2 diehards who want to exchange their Vampire Survivors addiction for a different game.
Boneraiser Minions: You're a funky lil necromancer collecting bones, summoning dead things, and knocking around the local villagers. It's another star in the genre rising up around Vampire Survivors.
First-Person Shooters
HROT: Very brown, very Soviet, very boom. Excellent FPS and the only game I know off the top of my head made in Pascal.
Quake: One of my all-time favorite games and an absolute titan of the genre. It's truly a must play for anyone making an FPS of any kind, ever.
Araignees: As if a noxious spider bite wasn't bad enough, this one comes with insidious nightmares as well! Obvious arachnophobia warning for this one.
Nightmare of Decay: It's just you against a whole manor full of ghoulish horrors... so good luck!
Platformers
Outbuddies
From My Backlog
While I haven't personally played these (yet), they're games I've been meaning to get around to and show a lot of promise.
FAITH and Iron Lung: These count under "the entire New Blood catalog" but by all accounts are both phenomenal so I wanted to give them a bonus shoutout even though I haven't gotten around to playing either yet.
