Outer Wilds
Yes, this is exclusive to Epic on PC for the next year or so, because life isn't fair, but the game itself is good. You play as an astronaut trapped in a time loop - every 22 minutes the sun explodes in a supernova and wipes out the solar system, with the player character waking up where the game begins with their memories intact, but nothing else. There's no quest log, no set objectives, only the ship's log where all your observations and discoveries are automatically recorded. With every 22-minute cycle, you have a chance to find out something new on your explorations, whether about the solar system at large, your present circumstances, or the obligatory mysterious precursor race that lived in the system centuries ago. Despite how bleak it all sounds, there's something very optimistic and wholesome about the game and its attitude towards exploration and scientific discovery. I will say that the game does lose some of its charm in its later stages, when you need to start hunting down specific pieces of data and struggling against the time constraints and rapidly-shifting terrains of certain planets, rather than just taking off in any random direction and seeing what you can find, but there isn't much they could have done to avoid that. I still wholeheartedly recommend this charming game.
The Sinking City
Another Epic exclusive, and a major letdown. Based on the works (but not all of them, due to legal tomfoolery) of H.P. Lovecraft, you play as a generic dark-haired white guy who's also a generic private detective investigating a strange city that's heavily flooded, overrun with monsters, and seems to be hiding more than one dark secret. I haven't played a ton of this game yet, but it doesn't take long to discover that its general format is fatally flawed. In between cases, you run from one point on the big, empty map to another, and interact with precisely nothing along the way. You can't go into most buildings. You can't talk to anyone. You can't do anything but travel from one point to another. There is some combat, and it sucks. There's no real combat system, just you producing a gun and firing from the hip at monsters that can either nimbly dodge your bullets or absorb a huge number of them before dying, and for some inexplicable reason you can carry barely any ammo, or even materials for crafting ammo. Both of which are pretty rare, or would be if not for a glitch that lets supply closets constantly replenish themselves. You get into one fight, and that's it, you're cleaned out. Time to waste a few minutes scrounging up more ammo. There isn't even any currency with which to buy more, because this setting uses a bullshit barter system in which people hand out bullets to each other. What the hell were they thinking?
The cases you have to investigate are pretty neat. It's kind of like L.A. Noire with a supernatural twist, and very refreshingly, the game does not hold your hand with quest markers or even spelling out what your next step needs to be most of the time. You're given the information you need, and you have the tools - usually just looking up a few keywords in one of the city's databases - to find what you're looking for. It's genuinely cool, and turns out to be the game's saving grace. It'll be enough to pull me through the game, but I'd caution anyone to be sure they really want this before spending money on a game that, frankly, is this shitty. Oh, and I didn't even mention the fucked-up animations, wonky physics, and hideous screen tearing. On a technical level, this game is almost (but not quite) as shoddily put together as a Bethesda title. Huge disappointment.