The amount of text bubbles in Pikmin 2 seemed reasonable, and could be accelerated by clicking a button. I think the over-tutorializing only started in Pikmin 3, when Nintendo started outsourcing development to Eighting.
It’s been a while so I might be misremembering this, but I think a similar thing happened to the Luigi’s Mansion series with LM2 when they started outsourcing to Next Level Games.
Never felt like I made progress in Stardew Valley. Graveyard Keeper was ok at the start because all the tasks were pretty close together and time didn’t matter as much, but later in the story it got too busy.
Animal Crossing doesn’t feel like I’m making progress. Enjoyed the original GC one, but that was before getting married.
I did try BotW, and that was fun as long as I was just doing dungeons, but the less constrained parts were much harder for me to justify putting time into because they spanned multiple gaming sessions and I’d always forget what I was doing last time.
Mario’s great, but the kids have the Wii U. :P
Some games I find myself playing more of these days: Donut County, Grow: Song of the Evertree, FF13, Noita, Pixel Puzzles.
Outer Wilds was decent. Its loop is approaching an order that works for me. Ideally I want to do a minimum of 2 loops in the time I have available, to feel like I’m spending my ‘fun’ time productively/getting better, and often I only had time for 1 loop.
As someone who gets random fragments of time for spare time (due to being a key participant in too many family activities to have a consistent schedule–aka, parenting) any game that requires me to optimize a non-trivial activity to fit into a specific amount of time is rarely even worth my checking out. I have between 2-5 hours per week, in increments from 25m to 90m, for gaming. Often I’m exhausted from trying to fit things into my schedule during the day. I don’t need to think about doing stuff for a schedule in my ‘fun’ time.
Ok, but how unskippable is the tutorial?