Cassette Beasts was an absolutely beautiful game with a banger soundtrack and managed to recapture the joy of playing Pokémon from when I was a kid, something which even Pokémon games can’t seem to do now.
Part of the problem is that there’s no incentive for game companies to ensure that players are of an appropriate age and are gambling responsibly. It’s a Pandora’s box of capitalism in the same way fossil fuels, cigarettes, and big pharma are. Their customers have a demand for their product which is driven by a physiological/psychological/socioeconomic need, so they aren’t subject to normal market mechanics.
I made the change almost a year ago now after all the OGL nonsense they tried to pull and I honestly believe Pathfinder is a much more fun game. My entire table enjoys it more than 5e and they are a real variety of different player types.
Keep in mind that took years of development after NMS released. Don’t expect that this game will be perfect, or even good, on release day. If it is, the reviewers will say as much and we can all be pleasantly surprised and pick it up. But don’t hype yourself up for a game that has almost no information available yet, and is probably still early in development.
The biggest hit for us has been Baba is You because it is slow paced, and combines words and logic and spatial reasoning. Our biggest problem was that its not actually coop, so we would just alternate who played, which can disengage the other person. My partner also thought its aesthetic is cute.
Portal 2 might be fun. It has a co-op mode and is similarly a puzzle game where you need to work out the logic of each level and then sequence your actions in the correct order.
“Lack of data” seems a very strange reason considering we have climate data going back over 100 years for most of the world and meteorological data going back at least a few decades.