I somewhat agree. Most games that focus on the story end up feeling less like a game and more like a choose your own adventure novel. My agency is little more than choosing between 2 or 3 options. If there is any actual gameplay in there, it’s very samey and gets boring super fast. On top of that, the writing for a vast majority is just awful. And I don’t just mean these days; even the shit I used to like is hard to go back to because it was also fucking terrible.

I prefer games that focus on the action and player agency. I don’t want to follow along in a pre-written story; I want to create my own through my adventure. TOTK is a good example. The story isn’t about Link. Like, at all. All the story bits you get as rewards for things are entirely focused on Zelda and other NPCs, so you basically get two stories in one; the cutscenes and the story you make through your travels across Hyrule. It’s not the best story (though it’s pretty good for a Zelda game), but that’s okay because that’s not what makes it great; what makes it great is all the stuff you can actually do.

There are exceptions, though. I enjoy a good mystery game and, like, almost all of those are just interactive novels. They just also tend to be better wtitten. Sometimes… Sometimes you get shit like Danganronpa which isn’t well written, but it’s also so batshit insane that it’s still fun.

Of course my favorite types of games right now are a strange hybrid of both. I fucking love Fromsoft’s Souls games et al. You can very easily just play and not even know the story, or you can dive into the deep end and piece the story together yourself from all the little crumbs left in vague dialogue, how the world is laid out, and through reading the item descriptions. These games are deep enough in the visuals that you can actually use real archeology techniques to piece together clues about the world that are not implicitly told to the player (and that’s even what Tarnished Archeologist on YouTube does).