ConstableJelly

Aw man, I forgot about Splatoon, and I think that would have been great but apparently there's no splitscreen multiplayer. Good suggestion though!

The most recent detective game I played (if it qualifies as such for you) was Paradise Killer, which surprisingly I enjoyed quite a bit. Again though, the lore has close ties to the interpersonal relationships of all the characters on the island.

That's cool. I do enjoy lore, but more in an "explain it to me on YouTube" kind of way than an "uncover it organically through gameplay" way. I need characters, acts, and arcs to be immediately engaged.

I actually do enjoy a bit of tedium, but it very specifically has to be building to something (I'll swim around breaking rocks as long as Subnautica demands me to if it means getting to build some cool new thing).

Your point about not opening half the map just on the main missions is salient too for the same reason. Collecting for collecting's sake is not enough for me, and too much of this game is just...there.

I don't know if my fondness for any game tanked as steeply as Ghostwire Tokyo. I started out really enjoying it gameplay and traversal, the environmental design and level of detail, the style and enemy design. But it just did not last. I got reasonably swept up in map-clearing activities myself but grew bored of them so quickly I could barely bring myself to finish the game's relatively swift main campaign.

Marvel Midnight Suns. Disregarded it on announcement and launch because I wasn’t interested in the core card-based system. Played a little bit of Slay the Spire, which didn’t catch with me but did suggest I might actually be able to enjoy a card-based system with enough narrative context to keep me interested.

So far, so good. I just completed Act 1 (which prompted me to exclaim “that was only act 1??”) and I’m a little worried that I’m going to tire of the side missions soon and lose steam overall, but it hasn’t happened yet. The characters are fine enough, although they definitely give off MCU fanfic vibes (it’s jarring to me having a Peter Parker voiced by Yuri Lowenthal who is such a little remora sidekick in his characterization). The loop is pretty satisfying, if not a little clunky, and I wish the balance between doing battles and running around the abbey grounds leaned a little less on the abbey stuff.

But it’s a lot of fun and very addictive. I’m saddened that it performed poorly but I bear my part of the responsibility willingly.

I'm not convinced that cameras and Nextdoor are having a material impact on the vague idea of "trust between neighbors," but I admit it's hard to gauge because I only have my own experience, which exists on a potentially wide spectrum.

I'm barely on Nextdoor and was surprised to hear there's apparently a pretty common use of it for public shaming. The potential for petty community conflict does seem heightened by some of these technologies.

Home entertainment is such a closed system that all these companies are just beta testing shitty ideas for each other. Eventually they all do the same thing as long as any backlash was neither too destructive to revenue nor sustained. See endless streaming services price hikes, account sharing lockdowns, or the fact that you just can't buy dumb TVs anymore.