I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (albeit on Tactician) recently, and I wanted to share the experience with my non-gaming spouse, but there is way too much “gaming” stuff in it. This is things like gear management, stat management, half a million rules and conditions for any action. So while the story/branching dialog seems to capture her attention the other stuff takes up so much time that she doesn’t really care for it.

For context she’s not anti-gaming: she was obsessed with animal crossing, and enjoys overcooked, and we played Mario odyssey together, but she’s never played anything with a real story, even though she has enjoyed looking over my shoulder watching the story portion of narrative games I’ve played.

Can anyone suggest games that you can throw people into that don’t require video game intuiting, but also have good narratives?

Basically, narrative games with 0 skill floor.

I was thinking maybe things like Walking Dead or Detroit: Become Human, but those don’t really have “gameplay” they’re pure story. Maybe that’s the direction to go but I’m wondering there are alternatives.

Edit: Also played Portal together