So I played it for a while several years ago and kinda got bored with it. I got to the bottom of the mine and had married one of the characters, and my farm (such as it was) was mostly automated so not much to do there. I know there are a bunch of story moments but I got tired of wandering around randomly trying to meet the conditions to trigger them. I wanted it to happen organically without looking it up. I just felt like I ran out of things to do and there was no point to keep playing.
At the same time, I want to play it on my Steam Deck because I did enjoy what I did play!
I came to a realization a few years ago that I am too boring to play sandbox games. I need a tightly crafted narrative, I cannot be left to my own devices. After a long time of trying to get into every sandbox game that looked cool, it was such a relief to finally realize that about myself.
Your example about BoTW is really good. I never played the earlier Zelda games and had near-zero interest in them. Then a friend let me borrow their BoTW cart and I absolutely fell in love with it. Still no interest in playing the earlier ones though.
A Steam Deck helps! I can lay in bed after the kid is asleep and knock out a half hour/hour session before sleep. Let’s not talk about the advisability of using devices in bed…
Yeah and it’s almost impossible to find any info about it because of some stupid Warframe thing that uses ‘Eidolon’ in the title. Get out of here with that AAA microtransaction crap game. :-)