I can think of a handful of games that, despite being games that I’ve enjoyed, never really became part of a “genre”. Do you have any like this, and if so, which?
Are they games that you’d like to see another entrant to the genre to? Would you recommend the original game as one to keep playing?
Hardspace shipbreaker. You are a wage slave in orbit, disassembling and salvaging ships and binning the components. It’s very dystopian. Essentially it’s a puzzle game, to maximize profit and completion rate, but with physics and lasers.