The first game I think of from this description is Citizen Sleeper, but it is all decisions and no combat.

If you like survival horror though, you should probably play Dead Space.

Yeah I use wooden toothpicks.
It's also possible that a lot of USB cables in your house are broken

Cool! I also have the issue of re-making the art 5 times over.
It's difficult to put a wall between pre-production and production, I really respect people who pull it off.

This all flies out the window if you're working on a forever game like Warframe or Genshin Impact. These games iron out their stopping points. They prioritise a different type of player, so they don't do credits.
And I think a lot of people play them until they dislike the game!

It's not bad gameplay! Some players just enjoy hunting every last item and some don't. So you need a bus-stop for anyone feeling drained to get off at. Especially if you're running a franchise with a new game every couple years and you need players to remember it fondly.

The 2nd reason is that you play every game differently every few hours. There's a way that you interact with Super Mario Oddyssey at hour 40 that isn't the same as hour 10. A lot of players will walk into that gameplay, and find it difficult, slow and exhausting.

Even if they rate the game a 7/10, they'll remember having beaten it, seeing a climax of action, and feeling invested when the sequel gets announced later.

The first reason is that everybody stops playing a game at some point. It leaves a better impression on most players to put down Pikmin 4 at a boss fight and credits, instead of halfway through some difficult puzzle that's only for sickos.

I'd dig into the patent stuff, but since it feels like running up to a dog and throwing a shoe at it, I'll just drop the whole thing.

Who is "we" in this message?? The secret gnomes that live inside it or what??

Amazing that we call these super ancient progenitors "grass hoppers". This really outs us as cavemen!

I actually thought I was making a naturalistic looking game until I went through all my screenshots today and said "oh that's like Metal Gear... Oh that's Ico... that's Shenmue... oh woops"

Moomins:

Man this is such a big job.
Even coming up with their solution, which is not dynamic or automatic, but a library of AUTHORED hand poses, is a tough convo.

Then the shape language of telling players what is and isn't pickupable from far away... something you can easily fail.

Hats off to 'em!