I can’t believe no one said Crusader Kings 2 nor Dwarf Fortress yet. The tutorial in CK II is so bad, it somehow makes thing more confusing, it is much better to just start a game in an easy location like Ireland and learn the game by yourself.
Dwarf Fortress has a tutorial nowadays, but I started playing it many years ago when you had no choice but to alt-tab to the wiki and figure out things on your own.
But when I think of a God game I really mean a game where you literally play as a god and can do god stuff.
In all of your examples the player either controls what each character does or just whoever is is command of the colony. You can’t do miracles and supernatural stuff at the click of a button, you don’t control nature itself, your character is a human like anyone else.
Yeah, it’s sad but not surprising that they ended up being like any other “free” mobile game.
But I always thought that this type of game has a lot of potential, and I’d like to see someone give it a try again, especially if instead of a corporation it was a community project inspired on the fediverse, it would help split costs by having the load be split on many different servers that would cover each a different part of the world, and each region could have its own monsters inspired from the local folklore (this is a feature I really wanted in Pokemon Go, imagine if only Hawaii had the Alola versions of pokemons, and people could trade for them).