Social Anxiety Survival Horror. You’re a guy at a friend’s party trying to avoid conversations while putting in an appearance with your friend so they know you were here. You can deflect conversations with small talk you pick up by eavesdropping, but it won’t work on drunk people, so you also need to run and hide. Your ex-partner eventually shows up and is hunting you down to have a frank conversation about your relationship, which is instant game over.

100% science based dragon MMO

SimEarth remake with a proper geologic and climate model.

All the newer games in that mode feel like they’re all about growing the predefined lifeforms.

SimEarth was more about making the planet to support the lifeforms.

An urbanism focussed city builder where you start with an existing city in the current car-centric style, possibly including a couple of dozen kilometers around the city so rural problems are included as well and have to transform it, with realistic building project times, into one that is more walkable, has safe bike paths, good public transport,…

In particular I would also like it to take verticality in to account both for transport (people and bikes and trains have a harder time going up and down than cars, boats need locks,…) and for buildings (stores at the bottom of a building, residential above,…) and that accounts for the huge amounts of space car-centric cities waste on parking as well as the ongoing infrastructure costs for maintenance and replacements of all that infrastructure in sprawling cities.

Basically “Not Just Bikes” the game.

A driving (either racing or GTA-style) game that generates the roads from real-world geospatial data/street view imagery similar to how Microsoft Flight Simulator does.

NOTE: Someone probably has developed it, but I’m too poor to buy a decent computer.

I’ve been wanting the shittiest, most grindy military logistics game possible for a bit now. Like, “oh you didn’t upgrade your Sock factory? Fuck you now your platoon has trench foot” type Grindy.

I want to feel pain

Mirror’s Edge-style gameplay (specifically first person) for experiencing Spider-man’s first few weeks of having powers, including the time prior to having built the web-shooters. I have wanted this ever since the teaser trailer for the first Andrew Garfield movie.

A Rockstar Open World Pirate game.

Black Flag was getting there, it had good vibes, but unfortunately they had to make it an Assassins Creed game and Ubisoft doesn’t know how to do it right anyways. Rockstar does.

Factorio-like game where you focus on sustainability rather than being the bad guy in an alien landscape. Need wood? Better replant or there won’t be anything for higher levels of the game. Need metal? You can get it, but only in a few places and then you need to think about recycling what you have.

A spaceship captain game with an AI crew that follows your orders, and is focused on problem solving and exploration rather than combat and resource gathering. Kind of like ongoing episodes of star trek, but in game form.

A game where you play a reporter in a pre-internet open world, digging through meetings, documents, connections and surveillance to get information to create stories.
You could have relationships with people too, and test them. Go with a private story on someone that will get big views and make the rent but piss them off, or keep it private and maintain your relationship to access their connections to try for a bigger story.

A game similar to the Expanse and Firefly. A space exploration, trading and combat game where you fly around a single solar system in a small ship and can also land on planets (please not procedurally generated though. Just make fewer places you can visit, but design them).
Oh, and with realistic Newtonian physics. Even if that means combat will be largely about who can fire the most missiles. But it would also mean you can avoid enemies altogether by planning the right planetary slingshot, millions of miles before you’d meet them.

Outer Wilds comes close, but I’d love something more gritty, realistic and on a bigger scale.

First person city planner, probably in vr where you can plan something out and then see your city grow as you walk around it

Battlefield: Titanfall

Honestly? Just a modern, improved take on an old WiiWare game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.

There is nothing all that special about MLaaK on the surface: It’s just a management sim with a Final Fantasy theme to it. Place buildings. Get soldiers (well, here ‘adventurers’), send them out on missions. Get resources, invest them. In fact taken as a management sim it’s very barebones and not that great?

The thing is, no video game ever has, in my eye, captured the feeling of being Fairytale Royalty. You have direct control over the king character (who is a 12 year old because. Final Fantasy) – You walk around town. You want to see an overview of incomes and expenses? Go talk to your assistant and she’ll give you a report. Want something built? Point to the plot and ring the chime to call a servant and say ‘Magic college here’. Sending adventurers on their quests involves directly talking to them, and you can read their mood on how they react to the assignment, with motivated adventurers doing better. And when they return wounded you can visit them in the hospital for a boost to their morale and your popularity.

Also the higher the happiness level in the kingdom, the more citizens choose to stop and salute you, and the later you can wander around your town without your servants going “you’re underaged and royal and it’s dangerous at night, back to the castle now”, because your subjects like you.

Idk, these small touches made the game feel very special for me back then, I’ve been chasing that high since. Shout out to Fable 3 for the variety of nice royalish clothes your character could try on, but no shout outs to it for anything else.