As their name suggests, forever (or evergreen) games are games that don’t have a finale or culmination, as in “The End”. These games have a very high replayability factor (meaning we enjoy playing them over and over again).
Forever games are also timeless. We can pick up these games anytime , be it the day they were released, or a few years later, and play them for months or years. We can even stop playing for a while, pick them up again years later, and they’d still be fun and relevant.
Civilization V is it for me I think. Very cozy, very comfortable. Not playing on the highest difficulty, just playing fun civs with half the brain turned off. Like solitaire.
I also have a save file of Football Manager 2017 that I still come back to now and then. That save got me through some rough times back in 2017 and I played it super intensely then. Formed some strong emotional attachment to some of those pixels.
These days I don’t really play it but I have a hard time letting it go. Sometimes I fire it up and just browse through the menus a bit and then quit. Like checking in with some old friends. It’s really a testament to how unhealthily obsessed I was for a while there, I guess.
If you’d have asked me this question when I was a teenager I’d have absolutely said the FM series as a whole. From 12-18 it was basically the only game (series)I played. On my school holidays me and my brothers would spend 8-9 hours a day just… playing our individual games. We’d walk into each others rooms with questions about transfers or formations, or if we had a vital game we’d all crowd around the others screen to experience what was going on. Absolutely amazing memories that’ll both never be forgotten, but also never reproduced.