I love music more than I love video games, but I can’t just sit in a room and stare at the wall and listen to an album. My fingers need to be doing something! Over the years I’ve moved from game to game to fulfill this purpose. The point is the music, but the game occupies the rest of my brain so I can really enjoy the music.
A perfect game for listening to music needs to have the following qualities:
Completely mute-able: I should be able to play the game just as competently and get just as much enjoyment out of it without any of its sound or music.
Precision Neuro-Excitement: The game should completely use up the portions of my brain that are not focused on the music while never touching the portions of my brain dedicated to the music. If a puzzle game requires too much attention and heavy logic then my brain can’t pay attention to the music. If a game has heavy narrative or a lot of reading involved, that can make this more difficult too
Extreme replayability: I should be able to put this game on and fuck around in it many, many times without it getting too old. Cuz I have a lot of music I need to catch up on! Puzzle games and rogue-lites tend to work really well for this.
The Fun Factor: Give me fun or give me death. Even a game I’m only partially paying attention to needs to be a good time!
GAMES TO BUST YOUR EARDRUMS TO: These are the best ones I’ve found.
Spelunky
Picross
Sudoku
FTL (there are a lot of text boxes, but once you play enough you come to know what they are without really having to read them)
Risk of Rain (though this game is honestly kind of bad, and levels are way too long, it’s great for zoning out to)
It doesn’t fit any of your criteria, but I got really familiar with Quake 1’s CD player console commands, and a lot of albums from that era (very early 2000s, I was a Q1 late bloomer) are linked long nights of playing deathmatch. It’s probably the very reason I love that Locust remix album more than any of their actual releases–those short songs looping don’t work as well.
That reminds me that when I played Persona 4 I used to mute the interminably long dungeons and listen to cool tunez. That worked OK but didn’t really exercise as much of my non-musical brain as I wanted it to. It was low-cognition enough that podcast listening felt like a better fit.
I mean I think about any puzzle game would work here. I used to slap down the music and leave the SFX and do my own music during things like overwatch or fighting games which was fun.
Clustertruck whose sound FX don’t really interfere with my enjoyment of music and whose sound track I have no idea what it sounds like because I immediately substituted my own. But you could mute the FX and probably be just fine.
I’ve just started getting into Slay the Spire and can’t recommend it enough. I’m actually worried about how into it I’ve become. I’ve stayed up til 3am two nights in a row playing. Last night I had fever dreams of applying buffs and debuffs and playing cards… It’s a deck-building run-based card game and I’ve been enjoying playing it while listening to podcasts.
some of my most treasured memories of listening to music were while i was playing doom. i’ll always associate early flaming lips with playthroughs of the old doom games.
Souls games reward listening to the audio way more than they get credit for, but once you get the gist of each level, they become amazing music/podcast listening games. The lack of music in the stages mean you can listen to your thing on speakers, while still hearing all the grunts and wails and footsteps without any cross-pollution. You don’t have to rely on sound cues when you know where the ambushes and traps are. And then you can just mute the sound for boss fights because the boss fight music has been rubbish since at least Dark Souls 1 anyway