The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
Yeah, it’s a real sore spot for the community too - people often have 2 or more accounts due to various account types like mains who have no restrictions, ironmen who can’t trade and gotta get everything themselves, group ironmen which is ironman but co-op in a 5 person group and other modes that add additional limitations.
Old School Runescape - an amazing game with so much content and depth in the end-game, as well as great experience in early-to-mid-game. However, the game is insanely grindy and it sometimes feels unbearable to actively train a skill for 20 hours straight in order to do a single task, or to go unlucky on a boss and spend 50 hours killing it over and over just to not get what you wanted. It does feel really good when you do finish a difficult grind, though.
Pathologic 2 - it’s a really stressful game, but I think it’d be perfect for the criteria. The choices matter aspect are intertwined in both how you spend your time (it’s limited and you can’t be everywhere at once), and in quests (the more traditional choices, like pick A or B or C). Don’t want to spoil any more but it’s amazing, you don’t need to play the original.
Besides it, I’ve also heard good things from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, though I haven’t played it personally.
I think they were/are getting funding from some US military defense sector, the same one that was funding a lot of pro-american propaganda films. So even without taking the actual campaign/story of COD games into consideration, it’s definitely in their interest to make a propaganda game.
Disco Elysium definitely, as it’s probably one of if not the best written games available right now.
If you want something with more gameplay, you should definitely take a look at Pathologic 2. New content will be released relatively soon for it too (as in a different playable character and story), so it’s probably a good time to give it a shot.