Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.

I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.

Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.

People like you are why AdNauseam exists, FYI. If you make the non-adblock experience intolerable and then ban adblockers, people have a nasty tendency to fight back rather than knuckling under. I say that as someone who’ll whitelist ads - or donate to - sites I use regularly that aren’t run by shitheads throwing video ads in my face and selling my data to the highest bidder.

A tip isn’t a story in itself, it’s a suggestion of where to start looking for one. “Hey, I’m off the record here, but some shady shit is going down at my job and you might want to fire off a Freedom of Information request for x, y and z or talk to a and b” is a pretty good tip.

Quite a boring answer from me:

• Steam deck, which gives access to a large subset of PC games and also just about every console up to the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era plus the Wii via emulation (no jailbreaking required).
• Switch, which gives access to a lot of the best WiiU games as expanded ports plus some spruced up versions of Nintendo’s back catalogue.
• PS5, which gives access to most of the best PS3 and PS4 games via PS+.
• Xbox Series S/X, which has backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for some (most?) games.

There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.

It would make me mad too, which is why I already had it in the second line. 😋

Ah, look at everyone recommending action roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is dead, long live the Berlin Interpretation! I’ll happily n’th Caves of Qud and Cogmind as amazing turn-based traditional roguelikes, and I’ll add to that pile the following lesser-known gems:

• Dungeonmans: Very much a no-frills traditional roguelike but also a very good one and probably the closest thing out there to “DCSS but better”.
• Tangledeep: Borrowing more from the Japanese side of the genre, with things like pets and item dungeons and sharply limited healing.
• DoomRL/Jupiter Hell: This is what it sounds like, a turn-based top-down version of Doom where cover and movement are everything. DoomRL is the original free version, while Jupiter Hell is the souped-up Steam version stripped of all trademarks.
• Rift Wizard: This one is weird but amazing - you can only attack via magic, you have a limited number of casts of all your spells, and you need to clear an entire level before advancing. But you have a mostly-free choice of new spells each level, and the goal is to put together something hilariously broken before the game outscales you.

Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:

• Angband: A truly ancient free game whose roots go back to the mainframe days. Still has living variants in addition to vanilla, of which IMO the best are Sil and FrogComPosBand.
• Nethack: Another truly ancient free game from the mainframe days, this one was really intended to be a puzzle an entire university would work together to solve. If you try it today, expect to need spoilers.
• ADOM: The last of the ancient free trifecta, this is less arcane and more story-focused than Nethack but has some truly awful dick moves. Spoilers are an absolute must. Sort of like a proto-Qud. The original is free, but there’s an enhanced tiles version on Steam as well.
• Golden Krone Hotel: A more modern game where you flip between human and vampire.
• Sproggiwood: A highly streamlined traditional roguelike where a given dungeon run will last less than an hour, but there’s metaprogression between dungeons.
• Brogue: A free fantasy roguelike that, like Cogmind, completely eschews experience points.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: A free roguelike immersive sim set in the post-apocalypse, complete with zombie hordes.
• Hydra Slayer: A math roguelike. You can only kill a hydra by cutting off all its heads, and if you don’t cut off all of them then some number grow back. Your weapons do things like halving the number of heads, or cutting off exactly three heads (doing nothing if there are fewer than three).
• HyperRogue: The hyper stands for hyperbolic geometry.