Its basically a perfect game. It never feels dated and has one of the most horribly catchy songs ever created by man. Its weird that it's so fun, its like as simple as you can really boil down a game, its literally just arranging blocks into lines. But it just clicks with the human brain on some deep level.
That was my only issue with the otherwise excellent Shovel Knight! It had very long levels and only saved once you beat them.
Synfig might be what you're looking for.
Morrowind and Oblivion both have a massive fan following but I think always get unfairly overlooked for Skyrim.
Its tricky, because how much do I really know about people's views who I've never met? Especially more famous people who might just be crafting a public image. They might be hiding aspects of thier views that are bad publicity, or just being controversial to drum up attention.
I've been saying this forever too! Boomers were the ones complaining about thier kids playing them back in the day because of the violence and demonic imagery.
In the 90s people called them "Doom-like"s. I usually just say "90s FPS games". Which I guess could be confusing and make people think I'm talking about framerate, but eh.
I don't know if this helps, but if you use DuckDuckGo as a default search engine in your browser, its easy to look things up on Wiktionary using !wt. And yeah, Wiktionary is awesome and very underappreciated.
Old school FPS games. Doom, Quake, Unreal, etc. They're just simple, cathartic stress relief.
That game ruled, I remember one of the tracks had a huge hidden stunt room you could find.
1 and 2 are some of my favorite games ever. They're sort of like Pac-Man or Tetris, they just nailed such a basic, fun gameplay experience that you can always go back to it and get sucked in.
Also props for GZDoom and Brutal Doom updating them for modern hardware.
OpenMW may as well be a remake, it runs very well and updates everything for modern hardware. Thats probably the way to go if you want to play Morrowind today.
Its just like with idealizing music eras. People remember the stand outs and forget the bad and mediocre stuff so it seems like everything was better in whatever time.
I loved that improvised combat mechanic where you had to use whatever was handy in the environment to fight the vampires.
If you liked Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb wrote a lot of other excellent books set in the same world.
Empire of the Vampire was great if you want something like The Witcher.
It does everything through clever game design, nothing takes you out of the game. No cut scenes or text popping up or freezing everything while dialogue is going on. You're just in that world.
Coconut. It wasn't that I had never had it before, I just didn't like it. But one day, I had a "wait, this is awesome, what is wrong with me??“ moment. I am now fully on Team Coconut.
SNES does have a lot of the better games in lots of great series. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Final Fantasy etc etc etc.
Though the cheat answer is probably PC since its been around for decades can just evolve with whatever is going on.
Seconding Morrowind with OpenMW. It does an amazing job updating everything for modern computers.
I'm like that with OG Doom. Its half nostalgia and half it just being a fun game to play.
I was thinking Soul Reaver too! I think the problem is that it had a handful of mediocre sequels that made people eventually lose interest in the series. But the original game was one of the best on the PS1. I loved the whole improvised combat mechanic where you have to use anything around you in the environment that could hit the vampires' weakneses.
I could see that, both series really work from very good character writing, if thats someone's thing. I loved both as well.
I tried it briefly and it was like if someone made a social media service that was only the annoying aspects of social media.
Some of them are free.
Markor is FOSS and stores notes as md or txt files. I like that feature as well, I can sync it to outside devices and not need any specific app to open them.
Joplin for notes, and Rclone drastically improves any cloud services.