
I am the survival crafting menace of my friend group—the person in Discord always suggesting we go play in a new sandbox when we haven't even finished building castles in the last. It's like being friends with a sentient Steam Discover, but for some reason I can only recommend games where we're each given a Barbie and a pile of Legos.
This year didn't leave me with a lack of things to talk about, either. If anything, it was almost too busy for even the most enthusiastic of survival crafting sickos. I spent months bouncing between my sandstorm-battered home in Dune: Awakening, then bug-infested dwellings in Grounded 2, and cobbled-together cubicles of Abiotic Factor.