Greentext

Cool. Welcome to the world of options that exist outside of designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, mechanically stagnant gaming.

It's telling that your prime examples of AAA are games that choke on their own development but ultimately only offer bigness as their value. Big maps... big, mostly empty maps. Big crowds of NPCs... that do the same three idle animations, duck and cover like a choreographed team at a gun shot and then go back about their day 30 seconds later. Big, powerful engines... with big piles of bugs that take a year of dev time after release to fix. Big texture files... that you probably don't notice because you're playing on less than top of the line hardware or just ignore if you aren't. Big 'storylines'... that ultimately end up being 'choose path A or B and then shoot/stab a giant pile of mostly similar enemies,' and 95% of your game time is the distraction of sidequests you wander into with no effect on the main story. Big collections of voice acted lines... saying generic things and repeating them so often they hit you like an arrow to the knee. Big teams... that get so big they have to have meetings about their meetings with the meetings team before scheduling a meeting with someone from art, marketing, sound, code, and three other people to decide whether its reasonable to have a meeting about adding a hair to the dog in side quest 37.

So, yeah, welcome to the part if gaming where you experience the small, but meaningful. 'To the Moon' is never going to have an impressive trailer, but it might make you weep, if you have the heart for it. Disco Elysium doesn't have square lightyears of map to wander, but its creators paid attention to everything you can see. Pacific Drive was made by a team of less than a dozen people, but was put together with incredible skill and artistry. Bullets Per Minute took an idea many have had and made it real, and even did a great job of it. Quality over quantity, every time.