Don't Starve

When you tell them you're playing a game called Don't Starve, friends might infer from the title that you're knee deep in a gritty, realistic simulation, desperately trying to keep some poor, isolated soul on this mortal coil. They'd be quite wrong in least one of those respects, however. 

Although a large part of Don't Starve is managing your hunger, sanity and health, the quirky setting, 'emo etch-a-sketch' art style and ability to build elaborate machines and fortifications should you survive long enough, mean hard boiled realism is firmly off the table here.

There's no tutorial to speak of; your character, Wilson, is unceremoniously dumped into a forest and you have little choice but to work things out for yourself from there. Your most immediate concerns are making a fire, as getting caught in the dark means instant death at the hands of unseen assailants, and to find food to stay your grumbling stomach. After a few minutes of foraging, it quickly becomes apparent that crafting the tools you need to survive from the randomly generated woodland resources around you is going to be the key to your survival. Everything you pick up has multiple uses - flowers can be eaten to stave off your hunger, or made into a pretty garland to help prevent Wilson going insane from the crushing loneliness of his predicament, for example. 

Once you've crafted a pickaxe and found some gold, you're able to construct a science machine, and from there craft all sorts of elaborate contraptions to make your stay in the middle of nowhere a little more bearable. Should you stray far enough from the starting area, you'll also begin encounter all manner of strangeness in the form of hyper aggressive anthropomorphised pigs, worm holes to distant corners of the forest and garden gnomes that will resurrect you in death. 

There's no real objective here, save for outlasting your previous self and unlocking a handful of different characters, but the Don't Starve's resource balancing gameplay is simple, yet nuanced enough to warrant many a wasted hour in its Tim-Burtonised, unforgiving wilderness.