"I Was a Teenage Exocolonist" continues to be an experience; I haven't seen all 29 endings yet, partially because I can't bring myself to screw over some of the characters in the ways I would need to to get some of them.
I went through that whole thing waiting for -- apparently -- a Paragon option that never showed up, that would've managed to save them both. It kinda put me off the series.
The new Zelda games are what solidified my hatred of durability. Oh look I finished this quest line and got a fancy sword that's a reference to an older game! Time to put it on a shelf and never use it so it doesn't explode and go away forever.
The one thing they could've done that would have made the whole thing tolerable was if the special weapons from your allies were unlimited. The Eagle Bow, the Boulder Smasher, etc. At least then you would always have one thing in whichever style you liked that you could just use without always worrying about. Instead those are the most expensive hardest to get weapons and they still have fucking durability. It just makes everything worse and every reward less rewarding.
Do huge fucking cliffs and invisible walls count as mechanics?
I know equipment durability does and that can fuck right off.
One thing I love is when the game mechanics are well grounded in the world. A recent good example of this was in Tears of the Kingdom; in one cutscene you actually see Zelda use the Purah Pad to fast-travel out of trouble just like you also can. It elevates it from a gaming conceit to something actually part of the world.
Damned if I know. It's possibly the stupidest decision I've ever seen in a big name game. But yeah sometimes you'll be walking around and just all of a sudden get obliterated out of nowhere and it was because you got mapped by an NPC rocket with damage tied to frame rate. There's YouTube videos of people proving it works this way iirc; I know people used to post testing videos on R.