There are plenty of games I find that aren't dumbed down or geared for younger audiences but then I find the opposite problem: they're way too in-depth and require way too much time commitment. I picked up The Witcher 3, and that's certainly not a kids game or monetized in stupid ways, but it's also not a game I can play for 10 minutes and then set aside for a few weeks and come back and play again. RDR2 is like that as well. Most of the open world games are, in fact. And games for adults that aren't open world game, I'm finding them to be super difficult. I assume I'm just getting worse at gaming, but it really sucks to be locked down to only a handful of games that are single player, casual friendly, made for adults, not so difficult that I'm throwing my controller across the room, and not nickel-and-dime me to death.

We need a "dad's games" genre.

Here are some worth your time and money. Look to indie games, mostly. Lots of great stuff in that space.

- Spelunky

- Don't Starve

- Factorio

- Oxygen Not Included

- All Zachtronic's games

- Stephen's Sausage Roll

- Stardew Valley

- Faster than Light

- Kerbal Space Program

- Dungeon Warfare (if you're a TD fan)

- Return of Obra Dinn

- Prison Architect

- Mini Metro

- Cities: Skylines

- Frostpunk

- RimWorld

- Darkest Dungeon

- Monument Valley

- Portal

- Journey

- Paper's Please

- This War of Mine

- The Witness

Yeah, I'm feeling that. It's creeping into more traditional genres and publishers as well. I was kinda hyped for BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle until it was revealed that the base $50 game is a "starter pack"; only half the roster is included. For this kind of game it might be defensible to use DLC to negotiate the addition of more franchises contingent on initial sales, but they actually sliced characters from every included franchise, probably in an attempt to jack up the DLC attach rate. So it goes on the hypothetical "maybe I'll buy a discounted 'Complete Edition' someday" pile.