Yea man 100% agree. I feel like most things gameplay wise have been done, and while i love great gameplay i feel like with a great story it really takes it to another level for me.

COOOOOOOOOL POST!

What is happening.

I havent experienced a gaming lull or got bored of gaming.

My main issue is since my life is a whole different now than it was 10 years ago, I dont have as much free time as I used to have.


Nowadays I spend (gaming wise) at least 1 hour during weekdays and 2-3 hours at the most during weekends.

Edit: In a strange twist of fate, I guess I could say I'm playing more than I use to a decade ago technically cause a decade or so ago I was wasting time on forums and MMOs - nowadays mainly playing single player games and not on forums as much.

Your profile says you're 28 years old. That's way too young for you to be feeling over the hill. If anything, you're under the hill. (Kidding!) Feeling old is for people like me in our 40s who they basically never make games about. Clearly you are depressed or something. It's not at all unusual to get into a gaming lulls after many years, especially if you're in a place of severe depression. I've gotten into lulls where I lost interest in...literally everything, including everything I traditionally enjoyed doing. In those periods, I often find myself retreating to the familiarity of things from my past and they don't satisfy like they once did either, but at least I know what to expect from them. That's not an unusual thing. Been there. One somewhat embarrassing secret of mine is that I've actually spent more time this summer on the old internet from the turn of the century, using the Wayback Machine, than I have on today's version. Nostalgia can be quite comforting when you're feeling down.

Anyway, I find your list of recent preferences largely relatable. I've been gaming forever now (yes with the occasional lull) and definitely feel bored by conventional games and often find great value in a strong narrative not totally divorced from reality. My own favorites this year so far are A Space for the Unbound, Pizza Tower, and above all Misericorde Volume One (the only installment currently available). Some there are more substantive and down to Earth than others, but they all share a trait of feeling like fresh experiences to me.

Misericorde is a visual novel in the strictest sense of the term: you turn pages and that's it for your role as the player. It's one of those titles that detractors would call a non-game because it scarcely qualifies as interactive. I don't care. You know why I don't care? Because it's a murder mystery revolving around 15th century nuns. And because it has text like this: "She stood on the threshold, her apologetic smile wavering." That's a brief sample of the narration in Misericorde that I just wanted to momentarily highlight because it really illustrates the quality of the writing here. You don't see lucid descriptions like that in many games. Video game writers rarely seem to have that kind of mastery of the English language and a keen eye to specifics. "Why not just read a book or a graphic novel?", they ask me. Because the story works best in this format. It has a narrator, for example, and it's tough to make that work in a graphic novel. You also wouldn't get the mood-setting background music in other formats and a traditional novel would lack the visual illustrations. In other words, interactivity is NOT actually only strength of the gaming medium.

A Space for the Unbound, meanwhile, is a genre-blending game about the actual, real-life childhood of guy from Thailand complete with a very distinctive battle system and more that I find wonderfully and refreshingly metaphorical and even insightful!

Pizza Tower, the least substantive entry here by far, is about a guy trying to save his financially failing pizza restaurant. It's a crazy 2D action-platformer that, among other things, combines the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog with the larger playstyle derived from Wario Land 4 and integrates it into a landscape that's constantly reinventing itself.

Humanity is next on my list of games to play. Titles I'm most looking forward to later this year include First Suitors (there's my PlayStation exclusive of the year!), Rift of the NecroDancer, Revenant Hill, and Hollow Knight: Silksong. (Don't get me wrong, I'm also quite looking forward to the likes of Super Mario Wonder, Sonic Superstars, and Mina the Hollower, for example, but these occupy a slightly lower tier of my interests.) Your list of recent preferences strikes me as only about a hop, skip, and a jump away from being in the territory of my current mindset.

What? NintendoPie is back????

That statement might've been true a few years ago but it definitely isn't now with all the dad games everywhere. Hell even Guardians of the Galaxy is a dad game.

And yeah I know I'm still like 'officially' young but tbh I do feel old in many ways, cause I don't take good enough care of myself. Like I haven't done regular physical exercise since high school, I don't eat well, I just sit in a chair all day so my body just feels like shit all the time. I certainly don't feel young but really that's on me.

I don't think I ever had any problems mentally, until my physical health started getting worse. From then on it's definitely been harder to find happiness or motivation for things in general. But I wouldn't say I'm severely depressed, maybe a little bit but generally I'm fine. It's not like I don't enjoy anything that I used to, I still went to the cinema 10 times in the past couple months (to see a whopping 2 different films!), and I've been constantly thinking about games I dream would get made someday. I'm still excited for at least a couple upcoming games in Silksong and Metroid Prime 4. But generally gaming hasn't done it for me, and yeah it's obviously a case of me wanting new storytelling experiences, rather than only new gameplay experiences.

I think you should maybe approach games differently. IMO, expecting a good compelling story from a video game is like setting yourself to be let down. I also agree that " new mechanics" in video games is a very overrated thing. Maybe You should try, I don't know, a game like Sekiro ( if you have not yet). A game that really gives a sense of growth and satisfaction when you overcome a challenge. I felt that way in my mid 20's and I got back into gaming after taking that approach.

And I thought me not going to the gym three weeks in a row was bad.

Even in movies these days. Stories are just garbage, and just over the top stupid.  They don't make movies like titanic, God father, shawshank redemption, and seven anymore.