Titanfall 2 is a great shooter and story game. Don't bother with Titanfall 1 if you are only in for singleplayer as it is multiplayer only.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

I only finished it for the first time this year, after about 20 years of giving it a go, getting part way through, then forgetting about it. ADHD is evil. Still, it was fun, there were no long boring parts, nothing was grinding or luck based, and it felt really tight as an experience. Very well thought out, honestly I would consider it a masterpiece.

Any of the Naughty Dog games fulfill this criteria, especially the Uncharted games. They are mostly linear, all about exploration and combat, and very little fluff.

Indiana Jones & The Great Circle is pretty good too. You don't unlock skills or abilities through experience but rather through finding books throughout the maps. The maps themselves are not too large and worth exploring.

The Wolf Among Us, and I imagine other Telltale games (but that’s the only one I played so far). It felt a lot like Life is Strange in gameplay and storytelling, even though it’s also a lot different.

In a similar vein, point and click adventure games like The Whispered World, The Book of Unwritten Tales, or Syberia. The modern ones usually don’t have a failure state (as opposed to the infamous Sierra games), but unlike LiS you may get stuck on a puzzle.

Have you tried sandbox-like games, or just games that basically have no story line? Or is the more "adventuring" type of gameplay the one you enjoy the most? Personally I seem to find most games kinda boring outside puzzlegames and sandbox-things, since the typical stuff always has at least some form of grinding and I don't really like fighting either.

Just started playing the indiana jones game, for fans of the movies its a love letter to them and a great game

If you liked Skyrim, check out Enderal - it's a total conversion mod, but in Steam as it's own game. It's much more linear than Skyrim - the world still feels open, but it's much more dense, and it's scaled more like a traditional RPG, so if you wander off the intended path too far, you'll get your ass beat by mobs that are much higher level than you.

Side quests are meh, with a notable exception of the Rhalata line, which is kind of like a combo of thieves guild and dark brotherhood. Main quest line is fucking wild.

If you skip the vast majority of side quests, you might have an issue with scaling, since you'll be missing out on all that xp. If you run into that and don't want to do the quests, just use the command console to cheat some in.

Dredge is a pretty unique one that I had a lot of fun with. Firewatch is good but short

FF16 is not an incredible game. But it sure is easy to button mash your way to a win, especially considering how good some of the trinkets are (acquired at start of the game). The music is solid, the writing is interesting enough, and the visuals are great, provided you can run it well.

I really like the Ys games, and I think Y's Origin meets those requirements. The boss fights are difficult, but no crazy difficulty spikes, provided you've been killing things properly along the way. I only had to grind for a few min for one boss, and that's back because I actively avoided the mobs and ended up underleveled.

Zelda games tend to also be really well designed, pretty much any will do.

Portal I and II.

Psychonauts I and II, with the caveat that there used to be a HUGE skill spike in the penultimate chapter of #1. I gather they've softened it, but don't know how much.

Hearts

OUTER WILDS!

• zero fluff. every piece of text and every setpiece is in service to the main story.
• no gating. you can go everywhere from moment one.
• no grinding. no combat at all, in fact.
• no time pressure. it may seem like it, but don't worry.
• the big mystery requires understanding the world and the story, rather than fighting a difficult battle
• it will make you cry

Shattered Pixel Dungeon on fdroidorr Linux or Windows

look back to some of the games for the 8 and 16-bit consoles. They tended to be about fun rather than shock factors. So check out the larger games for the megadrive for example.

Also, I kinda thought borderlands was good in that it adapted to how you prefer to play and the difficulty seemed consistent.

Subnautica comes to mind. It's a survival game with a heavy focus on exploring and a very structured story. Fluff text and the obligatory random documents and audio logs are mostly optional, though the game does have a mystery to solve so some of those you want to pay attention to. No real spikes in difficulty, it's honestly an easy game.

It sounds like you've found some games you like but are turned off of by some difficulty bottlenecks. If that's the case, considerWeMod. It's a trainer for a ton of games that allow you to "cheat" in singleplayer games(god mode, speed hacks, etc.)

I still love playing games but as I get older, my tremors get worse, making it impossible for me to get through one on my own. WeMod allows me to explore all of the game world without being stopped by something as simple as clicking on something quickly.