In Sonic R, there’s a track with an explicit “trap hole”, and a long winding path to climb back up. If you just don’t climb back up and explore the map, you’ll find yourself back at the track’s beginning, and it’ll count as a full lap. Cuts the laptime in half.

The high bar of accessibility settings in Insomniac and Naughty Dog games. I’m not even handicapped, but these things are such nice features to know they’re there.

Darkest Dungeon. You’d run out of adventurers in like, two days.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Chapter 3, maybe. The protagonist sucked too much to care about what was going to happen to them.

Borderlands.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.

Burnout Paradise.

LA Noire.

Brink. Do I really have to explain it?

Top-down platformer. It’s about general movement around two-dimensional space.

Kingdom Hearts.

Velvet Assassin. A stealth game told from a recovering patient’s memories, where the mechanics are realistic, but the patient receiving morphine can allow her to misremember parts of her work and have her do more action-ey things when the player got stuck. This was a cool in-canon move that made the game seem so awesome. Unfortunately, it was developed by Southpeak Games, best known for Roogoo, Ninja Town, and Two Worlds, a game so bad that the press kit for the sequel included an apology letter.

Every dedication to Beatrice in A Series of Unfortunate Events. The one I remember best is “When we met, you were pretty and I was lonely. Now, I’m pretty lonely.”

(One of) The biggest PC game(s) of all time was World of Warcraft, which almost explicitly beat its competitors because it focused on gameplay instead of graphics, and could run on dogshit for the longest time.

This also goes for the Sims, Diablo, Doom, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even browser games like Club penguin. Making your AAA game run well on low settings was a very successful move. Whether the same applies today is different, but you’re trying to point out precedent that doesn’t exist.

The museum in almost every Ratchet and Clank game.