I own Nier, but never beat it. I enjoyed the aesthetic and gameplay, but often end up going back to old favorites when I sit down to relax. I should take a weekend or two and get back into it.
Bright Memory Infinite is a new game from China that's coming out in November, the demo is incredible and I'm excited. Gujian3 is an open-world action rpg, similar to Nier but with a xianxia theme, it's pretty good. Amazing Cultivation Simulator is a Rimworld clone with a lot of fun features. Path of Wuxia is a very original and fun martial-arts-school/dating-sim/srpg with a lot of replayability (only fan-translated for now, but an official english translation is slated for when it comes out of early access).
That's really interesting, I remember trying to get my hands on Gujian 2 when it first came out, which was impossible at that time. Glad to see it's now on Steam!
I think at first I played Nier Automata mainly for the mechanics. The worldbuilding and backstory take a while to pick up steam. But once it gets going, it has some unique and interesting ideas. I still feel they could have gone a lot deeper with a lot of things though. For example, the idea that robots would start their own religion seemed intriguing, but in the end they didn't really do much with it. Still very enjoyable and surprisingly a lot of food for thought.
I actually found nier automatas story beats so cringey that I was turned off on the playing of it, honestly. Pretty early on a pile of robots start an orgy that creates a human-looking clearly-not-a-human villain. It felt totally directionless and random at the time. I didn’t really want to continue if I was just going to get weird shit happening with an overlay of philosophical hand waving.
You got 2 hours into the game and dropped it because you felt the themes were surface level?
You were unironically filtered. The game does name drop a lot philosophers, but it's meant to contextualize, not as part of the game's themes. Hell, the game doesn't even care about the "humans and robots aren't actually so different" question. I don't want to write a whole essay, so I'll just say that Automata is probably the best existentialist story written this decade, with a lot of subtle details, some _great_ acting, and melding of story and gameplay that has not even been attempted elsewhere. It is unique, and uniquely excellent, beyond the point where it can just be described as "a fantastic game". Doom 2016 is a fantastic game. Nier Automata is a game I've had as much fun thinking and writing about as I had playing it.
If a game wastes two hours of my time without being able to appear like it has any direction I truly question the quality of its storytelling. If I want existentialism I can get it in a 10 minute long flash fiction piece from Fireside Fiction.
Yeah I get that, for me there were enough interesting things to offset the cringy bits.
Just off the top of my head, I remember being intrigued by the robots-trying-to-be-human thing, and how consistent they were with the fact that you're an android. For example, removing your OS chip actually killed you, which is one of the 26 possible endings iirc. That and the dynamic combat and the smooth mix of different genres were enough to keep me going.
As a counterexample to the first part, check out Nier Automata. One of the most original and compelling games I've played in recent years.