I've been gaming for a good 30 years, and find it harder and harder to get that 'Itch' with newer games.
I mostly play with a friend, for most of those years. We play Co-op, against the AI or competitively online.
By way of experiment, we designed a new game by analyzing what gave us an itch in all the games we played in the past 30 years.
Defining the common pillars of what was fun for us, and what not.
Then we built Gloomdrill, the aim was 4-6 hours of full gameplay (several levels, complete story etc).
And boy did that work! When it was done and we could play we spent and entire evening shooting / building / exploring and had a blast.
Now I'm curious if others feel the same, so.....who wants to try it and give me some feedback?
One huge disclaimer: we used a shiiiiiitload of tokens on Opus 5.5, e.g. the entire game is AI built (but not necessarily designed). This is not noticeable everywhere, but especially the voiceovers are obvious sometimes. No budget for actors :)
Its free, so, have a go at it! It's small, fast and runs on anything except phones.