Don't Starve

I got RoG; still boring. Plus so much stuff is just custom-built to be annoying (smoldering, tons of short-durability crap, bad interface with no dedicated axe/shovel/whatever hotkeys or chain crafting that would automatically do stuff like queue up a subjob like turning grass into rope so you can make a spear without juggling more clicks and inventory) that I can't even really enjoy it like a zen Finnish vacation simulator like mid-lategame Unreal World.

It's a pretty well-made attempt at a cute Unreal Worldish survival game for console gamepad controls.

 

E-larping and creating wacky shit for its own sake usually trumps gameplay reasons in Don't Starve. You can make a variety of items but don't even need that many to sustain yourself. Game should be much tighter and have a better relationship/need for crafting/using certain things. It's almost like a TES game without the content. You can explore but it isn't as if you're going to find neat stuff or unique enemies.

Contrast that with their work in Invisible, Inc, where you have a much tighter experience and functionality of skills, items, etc.

 

That's a classic problem of the games developed gradually, patch by patch. All the updates are nice and add a lot of cool stuff but rarely integrate into the core game tightly enough and feel like an optional challenges. Prison Architect and DS are worst examples of this even though both are fantastic games otherwise.

 

DS needs zombies, killer robots, and genetic monstrosities

 

Eh, I think it's really that there's a critical mass of petty annoyances, often because of the gamepad interface but sometimes not, rather than that they haven't found anything interesting to do with a sandbox. Unreal World doesn't have any exciting endgame but I never come away from it feeling annoyed after I've reached a good stopping point where everything becomes sustainable. Like why does every single biome need to be on a separate peninsula on a basically asterisk-shaped island (and again the same thing on every cave beneath that island)? It makes is so everything is effectively extremely far apart when I have to detour around long inlets to get to neighboring biomes.

Another thing Unreal World does in the interface that would help a ton: automatically pull items from the ground nearby for crafting.

 

Shipwrecked was released, seems after 2 years of patching and 2 dlc this seems to be complete now.

Time to be a pirate.