This game sort of has the opposite effect on me. I was never a big fan of the Metal Gear series, I'm too impatient. And a whole game set around doing deliveries seems boring to me, but it's admittedly beautiful and has a lot of hype around it. Is it really a fun game?

It's so hard to describe the game without making it sound boring. There are very tense parts, there are very quiet parts, there are lengths of time when you don't do much, but the weirdness pulls you back in. I will say, the first one got the weird going quick, the 2nd one takes a bit to get to the weird parts. Watch some streams and see if it does anything for you. I absolutely loved the first one, and it's one of the very few games I have played multiple times.

This logic comes from recent years where big publishers have become very risk averse and AAA releases tend to look alike within few exceptions.

I was actually kinda impressed by the walking part in Death Standing, at least initially, because it is actually kinda involved. Like you are forced with controlling your balance and choosing smoother terrain instead of just pushing the stick forward. But it does wear off quickly and the first half of the game is admittedly rather dull. But boy does it get fucking awesome the further in you get.

I’m just over here constructing roads and shelters for my fellow porters. Something so relaxing about the game that scratches an inch I didn’t know I had.

I agree that it’s rather unique blend of a walking simulator and does explore death and loss through an extremely lengthy story that has some touching moments, however the slog of the “meat” of the game is absolutely not worth it to get to the core of it all. If you’re interested, I recommend watching the “game movie” on YouTube, where they just show the dialogues and skip almost all of the walking, granted even then you’d probably want to skip/fast forward through a massive chunk of it all where it’s the same animations over and over again. (Such as the load/unload/qpid sequence, etc)

These are quirky in terms of plot but not so much in terms of gameplay (at least your modern examples). That's fine to a point but I'd like to see a bit more variety.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. However, they are also creative or adventurous with graphics and art direction.

It is fun but it requires a lot of patience. If you didn't like Metal Gear and don't really have much patience then this game most likely isn't for you. It's a very very slow burn, if the first is anything to go by. Like, there are high-action, combative moments but they are absolutely not the focus of the gameplay — majority is just planning routes, figuring the best ways to traverse the landscapes, and helping rebuild the local infrastructure for your Strand (the asynchronous multiplayer server shared with other players)

That was the last time AAA publishers allowed devs to take risks. Those games, while profitable, were considered financial failures by executives. That era taught the industry to be risk averse. Gaming was profitable long before by decades at that point, mostly due to the quick evolution of technology propelling a lot of the innovation and novelty of new titles. Yet, due to how the economics of capitalism work, the industry reached the peak of how much they could ride those coattails before they had to begin creating their own industry growth, which was around the time of those consoles. Publishers and Devs scrambled to find new ways to bring in more players. They eventually learned what worked and what didn't, and the economic necessity of growth forced those companies to rely on what they knew had mass appeal instead of taking those risks like before. The wiggle room just wasn't there anymore.

Executives are just going to make more boringly weird games now in imitation of DS.