I play AAA games for the narrative now.
On proper gaming, most AAA games are lacking against Slashem, IF, csokoban and casual and libre games like Trigger Rally where the playability it's just there, even if the graphics are two decades behind.
But sometimes at the end of the day when I am tired, I just want to play something mindless and not that challenging.
It is obviously a matter of personal taste and a matter of being lucky or unlucky choosing games, but my experience is very much the opposite. There are (nearly) no good games anymore.
On my end, there are so many options that I tend to look at qualities that I would not even consider twenty years ago, like tone and setting. (Why would I want to play a grim game? Do I really want to play another game set in space?) Quite often, nothing will get past my personal taste filters, even when they are good games.
Go to Steam, search for any genre whatsoever that you're interested in, look at player reviews, and find out why some people think there are no games and why others think we're currently in an unprecedented golden age of gaming. Alternatively, which genres do you like?
But I disagree with the sibling comments in that I'm quite sure it's a fact for a lot of players that there are hardly any good games left in the sense that they have grown and their tastes have reached levels where pretty rehashes of old mechanics and ideas will no longer cut it. AAA games don't innovate much these days, and the indie game with one cool new idea is rarely fun to play because the execution as a whole is so lacking.
To be honest, I think the average HN user does not play games that much. Or watch films, listen to music, read fiction, etc. Which is probably a good thing, but means they have less taste, both in the subjective and objective sense. But go to different internet forums, say 4chan, and you'll find people definitely have huge problems with quality creative content being so rare.
Good things: * Tons of high quality small indie games that experiment with mood, story, genre. Think Cultist Simulator or Factorio.
* Remasters and emulation bring the best of the past to the present.
* New experiments in gaming hardware: Nintendo Switch, Playdate.
* Console play is more ergonomic (controllers, voice chat) than ever.
* Gaming is pretty mainstream now, so there's more people to play with, and there's less stigma.
* Twitch, Discord, YouTube all make finding a community for your game easy and fun (if your game is blessed with a positive one at least).
Bad things:
* Certain genres haven't really seen top-quality entries. After Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Warcraft 3, the only top-quality entry in the RTS genre was StarCraft 2. We just don't see folks even trying, certainly not with AAA budgets.
* Game design choices make games too streamlined, and remove fun interactions. For RPG games: quest markers, level scaling, lax loot table probabilities, incentivizing solo play til end game, etc.
* Voice acting means there's just less text and less depth. Compare Morrowind to Skyrim. But I think we're over the hump here. A game like RDR2 is fully voice-acted but had 2000 pages of writing. That's the best of both worlds.
* Bad art design makes things look really bad in low-power hardware. Compare D2 and D4 on a lower-end computer.
Deus ex, I really tried hard to like mankind divided but I don't know why I don't.
Wave race 64, even the GameCube sequel didn't capture the magic and every other attempt has rubbish water physics.
1080 snowboarding, the sequel was terrible, I left it back to the shop. No other snowboarding game captures the rewarding control scheme (same with wave race).
Goldeneye, ok perfect dark is good but why has no other game even attempted to capture what makes goldeneye special? It plays like a roller coaster that you can control. (I think someone on a gaming forum said that, I think they are correct).
Quake 3 and unreal tournament 99, no online shooter I've played compares to instagib on these.
I look at my wishlist on Steam and think "If didn't had a job and could play games for next 20 years I would still not have to settle for average one ever again". Like, compared to 20 years ago I don't ever play anything that by 20 years ago standards would be considered "just okay" or below. We're definitely spoiled
And between indies and sales they are cheap too.
Frankly picking good ones becomes harder, you no longer can count on next <AAA developer> being great as usual and game journalists are incompetent more often than they are useful.