Live for the adventure, not the grind:

Journey (if you play one game on this list it should be this one)

Far: Lone Sails and the sequel Changing Tides

Jazzpunk

Master Reboot

Manifold Garden

Sable

Fract OSC

Chants of Sennar

The Red Strings Club

The Stanley Parable

Rime

Superliminal

Naissancee

Soul Axiom

Contrast

If you liked Life is Strange, I strongly recommend Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. Made by the same team.

Slightly old by now, but Portal and Portal 2 remain two of the best games I've ever played. Gameplay is intuitive and linear, and doesn't require grinding or building up resources. I thought the difficulty increased appropriately as well.

I enjoyed the Star Wars Jedi games.

Bugsnax. Substantially better game than I anticipated.

Citizen Sleeper

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 could be what you're looking for. The main story areas are significantly easier than all the side content.

You'll want to do the side quests because how can you not play that game with cool sunglasses and a baguette on your back?

But you can easily get through the game without doing any side quests. And if you are afraid of being overpowered when you do play the side stuff, they recently added some nice controls to bump up the difficulty.

oh also, a less popular one: Wandersong! non-violent adventure platformer about a bard who wants to make the world a better place. a beautiful, mostly linear story in a colorful world. very easy to get sucked into.

This is why I sometimes enjoy Ubisoft trash. Especially Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint. Just the same old shit on a massive map, an okay story, fun gameplay. Easy. Simple. Nice for mindless bullshit.

For an RPG, try Kingdoms of Amalur Re-reckoning.

I mean, if you've enjoyed Skyrim, honestly you can just google "best RPGs of all time" and play any that will show up. I'm gonna go against the grain here and say that Skyrim's world is beautiful and the combat is cool but there's nothing special about the story or the quests. Try enderall, fallout London, gothic 1+2 + archolos, mass effect 1-3, disco Elysium, Witcher 1-3, Baldur's Gate 1-3, Neverwinter nights 1+2, dragon age origins, fallout new Vegas, pillars of eternity1+2, Kotor 1+2, south park stick of truth + fractured butthole, cyberpunk, fable the lost chapters, divinity original sin 1+2, dark messiah of might and magic(fun and underrated, imo), etc.

If at any point you feel like the combat is too hard or whatever you can use cheats and just enjoy the story. All of these have pretty good ones. At least all of these have less grinding and better story than Pokemon games, in my experience.

Beyond that, just go for popular, widely acclaimed games such as rdr2, bioshock, whichever doom you want, portal 1+2, etc.

I don't understand fluff in this context, what does it mean? I searched in dictionary but I'm still not sure.

Anyway:

• Spiritfarer: I don't remember so much grinding in this game, and it's a beautiful game, not too long, not too hard
• The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
• Slay the Princess, but you don't really play, you make choices. It's a masterpiece of narration. If you dislike body horror, don't play it.

The Stanley Parable and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. I'm getting the no play for 5 and 10 years achievements with no cheating.

mass effect, cyberpunk, clair obscur, baldur's gate 3 all super fun and have difficulty options. Doom is pretty fun too. I've just been ripping through game pass single-player campaigns and RPGs.

Let me offer a spin on this: the point-&-click adventure Technobabylon, which is more a staggeringly creative and massive series of escape rooms, and not that much of an open world to explore and revisit.

Perceptibly, it has zero grinding and is to the point with what you've gotta do. It is one of the only point-&-click adventure games that I've beaten; I normally dislike the genre, which speaks volumes to how incredible it is.

Recently, I've been playing a lot of Brotato. However, there is no story.

If you haven't already tried Oblivion Remastered, that's a no brainier.

Avowed was pretty straight forward with a decent story. It's more linear than Skyrim, and sometimes I had to reload a save because I walked into a situation I wasn't ready for, but all in all, I made quick consistent progress.

I played both on Gamepass.

Also, there's no shame in turning that difficulty bar down when it's available. I'm in the same boat as you. I don't want to master the game, I just want to enjoy it.

Oh, and I just remembered the old Thief games. They had pretty consistent difficulty. At least for the first two. I cannot remember if that was retained with the third because it was a little more open in terms of what you acquired in the hub world and took on missions. And we don't talk about the fourth (which was a reboot nobody wanted, not even the dev team).

Classic corridor shooters fill this niche pretty well for me, if that kind of on-rails experience is what you're looking for. I recently played F.E.A.R. and it's first expansion Extraction Point (don't play any later expansions or games in the franchise though) and they're some of the best, tightest and most satisfying FPSes out there. Metro 2033 is also good for this.

If you want a no-nonsense RPG I want to put in a good word for Skald: Against the Black Priory which is very tight and linear with minimal fluff, focused on telling its story and doing a few things well rather than spreading too thin.

I usually have a good time with isometric fantasy rpgs in the vein of Baldur's Gate. They don't really have grind, the world is generally well-filled with a relatively dense story and interesting quests (denser than Skyrim at least), and if the game becomes too hard you can turn down the difficulty. Though you do need to actually be interested in the combat mechanics (which are much more complicated than e.g. in Elder Scrolls games) to really enjoy these games, IMO. One downside is that these types of games are usually really long; I've dropped a couple of them halfway because they overstayed their welcome.

Some examples:

• Baldur's Gate 3 (don't really need to have played 1+2 to enjoy this one, though they're still very good)

• Divinity: Original Sin 1+2

• Pillars of Eternity 1+2 (2 has much better combat, but the first one is pretty important to understand the world)

• Tyranny (this is a relatively short one)

• Pathfinder: Kingmaker 1+2

For more Skyrim-style games, I really enjoyed the Gothic series. I think their level of grind is about the same as Skyrim (probably a little less, but it's been a while), and if you can get past the outdated graphics of the early titles they're quite fun. Especially the dialogues, they aren't as serious as Skyrim's.

• Some Pokemon ROM hacks where the difficulty spikes were not too harsh

There are definitely some good pokemon fangames on PC that aren't super difficult from what I remember.

• Pokemon Hidden Place ( Spanish fan game with English translation IIRC )
• Pokemon Bizarre ( another Spanish/maybe Portuguese ( I don't fully remember ) one with English translation ). Has some memes here and there but it's manageable.

Most other fan games I could think of are either too long, have a good amount of difficulty, or have some sort of QOL thing preventing me from recommending it.

Maybe the Half-life games? You go through the game on rails, the most challenging part is the final bosses but you can skip those or use cheats.

Dragon Age, the first one.

Dark Souls (any) and Bloodborne.

The others don't pass muster because they do have some insane difficulty spikes. These don't, really. Smough & Ornstein is really the only spike I can think of in the entire DS series and BB actually felt pretty even through the whole game.

Grinding isn't necessary and there is essentially zero fluff in all of them, tho.

Death's door. Didn't think the difficulty spikes were that bad, and after doing the umbrella run, the bosses were almost easy the next playthrough

Edit: also just played Arranger and the cat quest trilogy.

Fe

I loved that game so much. Haven’t had quite an experience like it since