how can you tell one is blocked by an instance?

I see 4

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s requiem. It’s an older game, GameCube era. I don’t like horror games and this one isn’t true horror. There are some good jump scares and body horror though. I had to stop after a certain scene because of the jump scares. The sanity system is really great.

And it dismisses the time component of self hosting. It’s not going to be zero.

Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.

Nowadays? I’ve never enjoyed mobile gaming. Every time I try, there’s been an absurd paywall or monetization. Once that strikes, I’m out.

It’s not Zelda like, but if you like factory games, Satisfactory is as close to open world as a factory game gets. You land on a planet and have to build a factory to launch things into space for corporate overlords. It’s first person, lots of climbing and building. There’s a tiny bit of combat, not the focus tho.

Counterpoint. Rimworld is complicated. EU4 is super complicated.