As soon as you start going more to the niche side, it gets super specific. My day jobs is RTL design, doing digital circuits, and my top 1 niche recommendation is MHRD, "a game in which you design various hardware circuits in a hardware description language."
You might find it a little simplistic given your day job, but for anyone else reading, I found it really fun.
Side note: If you like MHRD and want something a little less real world and a little more video gamey, try TIS-100, which might be the single best game on Steam.
It seems pointless to try complete proper sentences anymore. Even specific queries about X often shows me "TOP 10 X!!!" or similar adcrap.
Oh maybe the decline of findability of specific things is caused by the increase of total things on the web.
Why is it so hard to find story co-op games... always MMORPGs, RTSs, or sandbox games. Battleblock theater and pit people were fantastic co-op games.. and stuff like Halo's co-op campaign was great :-/
One of my favorite games is “Nuclear Throne Together”, although it is quite hard, and more players make it much harder.
A current good and accessible one is “Vectronom”, a very stylized rhythm game where you play as cubes moving through levels morphing to electronic beats.
Mainstream games Rayman and Overcooked are also very good and fun and instantly accessible even to “non-gamers”.
Another one I discovered which is quite fun is “Hidden In Plain Sight”, where all players look like NPCs and most modes revolve around figuring out who is a player and who is CPU. It can be really intense because of the psychological terror.
“Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime” is fun but gets tedious because of the huge levels.
Most of those those don’t have mich of a story though, except maybe Rayman. But that doesn’t detract from the games being fun.
Overcooked 2 is our current fave. Also Diablo 3 is a classic.
This is especially useful in something like steam, where you get the front page full of suggestions... that you've likely already seen many times, or heard about because everybody played them. I can't find anything interesting on the normal recommendations, but after going 100% niche I've added 3 games (from 2014-2016) to my wishlist.