I’m surprised no one has said Terraria yet. It’s like a lil bit of everything on your list. You can go hardcore and try and beat all the bosses while powering up and mining, or you can take it easy and have fun with the building mechanics. There’s an rpg aspect with it too by trying to find the NPCs. Great for lanning. I had many hours wasted with my roommates and my girlfriend/now wife back in the day. They’ve since added a lot more stuff so I might have to fire it up when my kids are old enough to play.

This also happened to me. Spent a week getting through Path of Pain only to die on the last hit from the two dudes at the end. I just turned it off and by that point I had advanced far enough to beat the game but just never did. I got the gist of it and my time is now too valuable to go back and relive the trauma of fighting those bosses…

Probably after all major studios pulled out. Turns out dumping tons of money on huge marketing shows that usually turn out a ton of drama probably isn’t the best spend of money. It’s much cheaper to run your own announcements under your own control. The better game show for fans would be PAX.