Fallouts - challenging - with depth, and this is somehow wrong because you'd have to think on a build for a more than a few seconds? We are on very different pages here.
As to Underrail you can try to do what makes sense and not play on harder difficulties. That's what difficulties are for. Also, yes - what a terrible thing to do - read the mechanics, descriptions of stats and skills, etc... Reading is the hard for a casual player but the game wasn't meant for them anyway. Builds aren't that complicated, use your brain and what you have just read and you can make a build that will work on easy with... ease, probably on normal too. Most sensible builds work, little risk of making it unplayable. Power variance is irrelevant as long as the "low powered" builds are still viable. All that assuming you don't just go with random picks but it applies to any games with build choices the same
The "other games" use a formula that allows for relatively simpler mechanics to work. Complex systems cannot be always easily sliced up into parts with progressive complexity. And no matter how slow you make new mechanics available to the player you still need to make major build choices at the start in most rpg games because you need to choose stats, often race, etc... Which means you need to read or go blind just the same. You need those preliminary choices and you need them to matter if you want to have a crpg. The difference is the amount of reading you need to do which is incidentally the difference between a niche game and a game for casual player. There is no "fundamentally" better formula here. Just ones for different types of games.
One thing that I can think that could be done better, the author should have created a few pre-made character builds. That would alleviate some of the problems you mentioned.
Underrail builds aren't necessarily that complicated but they are extremely arbitrary, for example you don't want to max out certain skills, you want to take them up to a certain point and then stop investing in them, since you can get the rest of the way from items or equipment. Maxing out certain skills is strictly sub optimal, even if you are playing a character who is focused on that skill.
There are a number of counter intuitive aspects to character building like this. Properly building a character isn't about picking your archetype and investing in reasonable choices that fit with that archetype, it's about understanding what was programmed in an overpowered way and about understanding weird non-obvious interactions between game systems that you'd only learn about halfway through the game (when it's too late to fix your build)... or more likely from reading a forum.
This becomes more problematic because it's a long boring game with dialog and fetch quests and stuff where you are stuck with the same single character and build. I'd never, ever consider replaying it... but I also can't fix my character build on the fly. So I'm stuck with a shitty build for my one and only playthrough, unless I do tons and tons of research ahead of time. (Contrast with other games where you aren't stuck with the same build for tens of hours, but you are instead given the opportunity to try out a bunch of different builds as you play through the game, either on one character or on multiple characters.)
Games don't have to work this way. They can give you the opportunity to learn about how the mechanics work by playing the game and then use that knowledge to build your character as you progress through the game.
game in fact, which in today's gaming world is actually a fucking miracle.
