It seems that every PC game these days has one of three recipes: 1. Timesink + RNG, aka "Why are you complaining? Your time played is so high!" It takes 20 to 50 hours to realize the game is mostly unwinnable, and is engineered to waste your time. Example: Sunless Sea 2. Repetitive task labor, until story end Kill monsters, level up, collect britches, repeat. Example: Elex 3. Minecraft + whatever, aka "ur mom no u" Raise your hand if you even need examples. (crickets) tbh, I've gotten tired of buying PC games to find one of these. It's getting to the point that I don't even want to spend money on them anymore, and reviews are NEVER honest about this. Even on Steam, reviews that lay this out get buried; whether by paid shills, sockpuppet accounts, or devoted fanbois, I can't tell. "Let's Play" style video don't really tell us about games. They show us some person or group entertaining us, with a game as background noise. Gaming magazines have been useless in the search for honest reviews for nearly two decades now. Forum conversations don't help, because every complaint or criticism either turns out to be trolling, or gets face-stomped by fanbois to the point that you can't tell which of these it is until you spend money. Remember when PC games were fun? Remember when games offered different experiences and stories? Remember when their pacing didn't feel like the most boring unpaid labor you could possibly imagine? What happened to those days? So, I'm curious if anybody can recommend newer games (indie, AAA, whatever) that don't fit any of those three categories. Example: Anything from Bioware. Not an example: Anything from CD Projekt Red. The former keeps things fresh by changing locations and substory protagonists, with unique tasks or mechanics for each, and memorable moments. That second part is important. The latter is filled with quests that seem written by a form-filler ad lib robot, that always fits one of a few categories (kill, collect, find), and there is no meaningful difference between locations aside from looks. Even the stories in games have gotten boring. Let me guess. Your RNG + timesink game involves a map, maybe with roguelite elements, resource management, and you're in charge of something looking to make wealth, discover stuff, or establish military dominance. But if you simplify it all, the game comes down to brute-forcing a combination lock while a random number generator robot tries to suddenly kill you. Or in your RPG, the main protagonist is the Chosen One, whose special and unique trait makes them the only one who can unite the people, find the things, defeat the whatever, and save the world. It's open world! Or, in that third category, build a thing and shoot. It's multiplayer! It has what plants crave! Sorry to just come here and lay it out, but this is getting depressing. I just want to relax and have a little affordable fun on the little bit of time I get off from work. Instead, it's a constant short cycle of spend, get disappointment, spend, get disappointment. The problem, industry-wide, is that nobody actually makes games anymore. People just thoughtlessly regurgitate game recipes that made money in the past, to the point that we basically have the same three games with different skins, and that's about it. This has gone on for about a decade now. Point to any other decade where it was like this. See, you can't really, because even platformers found ways to be unique in the past. RPGs offered something in the past, because their creators told a story in a way nobody had before, or pushed the technology to do things we had never seen before. Sims were interesting in times past because they expanded, generation by generation, upon the scope of possible activities and goals. Star Citizen is literally the only game I know of, industry-wide, that is even attempting that. At all. 2008 - 2018 has been the decade when games died. What used to be the trade with the most room for creativity and innovation is now on par with formulaic Saturday morning cartoon toy ads. To game developers: If you really have no imagination, no creativity, and no guts to try anything new, then please quit before you demolish your own industry. Because you will. This golden age of easy design won't last. Today's teenagers will get older, and the generation to follow them won't even bother playing. That's where this is leading, unless you start doing work again and not just labor. The difference is: labor is repetitive, thoughtless, assembly-line rote monotony, and work is the process of performing a task in such a way that you constantly seek to get better at it. You need to start doing work again. And, game developers, if you can't work then congratulations on making money that you really don't deserve, I guess. I mean, I'd want to look back on more accomplishments and a better legacy than that when I get old, but whatever floats your wallet.