Nier Automata is an interesting example! It touched on a lot of interesting topics and did so in a very creative way. At the same time I also feel that the game wasn't mindful of my time at all. The stretches between the interesting story elements were frequently separated by long, often-repeating stretches of fairly simple hack'n slack gameplay. I'd hold up something like Outer Wilds or Disco Elysium though. But Disco Elysium is pretty close to an amazing book and doesn't do as creative work with the game medium as Nier does.
Also, you sound extremely prejudiced and close minded: > Novels, while being ficitonal, allow you to explore inner worlds of other people and complex interactions between them (and there's nothing more complex in the universe and at the same important to us than humans and interactions between them) How do you even argue with that? Can you somehow support this claim? Though from reasoning like this i can deduce that you must hate House of Leaves, and kinda understand why you dislike Nier Automata.