Kingdom Come: Deliverance is solid. It’s one where everything is hard and you have to do it manually. Like eating, sleeping, drinking, etc. Most of the game is trying to avoid combat because it’s hard and just kinda wandering around forests hoping you don’t get ambushed

Firewatch. More linear than open, but a beautiful walking sim.

Just finished Kentucky Route Zero. My gf bought it years ago and played all but the last “act”, so we played it together and just finished a bit ago.

I was intrigued because there’s this weird podcast I subscribe to but have never listened to, General Intellect Unit, and they’ve recorded 5 2-hour episodes on the game, one for each act. Their other episodes are in-depth discussions of chapters of books on cybernetics, none of which I’ve read. So I was really curious why they’d devote so much time to commenting on the game.

So anyway, Kentucky Route Zero. I enjoyed it. Not a game so much as “choose how you perceive this story” walking sim. May or may not contain themes related to communism later on, absolutely commentary of capitalism and alienation throughout.

Kinda steep at $25 depending on your money situation, I’d say it’s roughly 20 hours of exploration (not at all open world). I’d say it’s pretty linear, and is 100% a story that you slowly get more details on.

Something to consider if any of that sounds appealing

The fact that killing someone means you have to manually carry their body on your back to an incinerator that’s usually about an hour away or the area explodes is cool as hell.

Just massive punishments for using violence and to top it off he made most of the later game weapons lethal. The difficulty of the game is that it’s constantly pulling you in two directions. One makes it easier initially, but is way riskier and punishes the player, and the other requires you to spend hours building infrastructure and aquiring resources to avoid the baddies. Two different uses of time.