Which games do you fall back to when your favorites are out of reach?

If for some reason I can’t play any of my stable of current games — be it World of Warcraft or Diablo 4 or Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty or Baldur’s Gate 3 — I always have something to fall back on. Maybe my internet connection is down, maybe I stupidly uninstalled, maybe I just need a break, maybe the TV is in use because someone’s watching sad dog videos and I have no idea why I’m crying — whatever the rationale is, I always know I have Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to fall back on.

I don’t even know how to explain how much I love ACO. It is a game I can not play for months, and then for whatever reason, pick it back up and play it for a week straight, and then go right back to other games. It’s kind of like a combination of a palate cleanser and an immersive Ancient Greek murder tour, going to exotic placed I remember from my days taking history courses and killing a lot of people by sneaking up on them and then kicking them off a high place.

I’m telling you, I can never get tired of Sparta Kicking people off of things. Yes, it’s a 300 reference, but it’s also just crazy fun.

Now, ACO isn’t the only game I play like this. Kingdoms of Amalur has often been my ‘sorbet’ of games, and back when I still had my PlayStation 4 I’d play Horizon Zero Dawn at the drop of a hat. Finished a book? Play HZD! Had a frustrating time in a WoW dungeon? Killing some robot dinosaurs will clear all of that out. And of course, there are others — I’d put Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Diablo 3 on the list as evergreen games I can come back to again and again.

So now I ask y’all — what are your fallback games? What are the games that have become a part of your gaming rotation, seemingly evergreen games you can play over and over again?