I've been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio's Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I've played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it's definitely worth a play.
Are there any titles that might not have been commercially successful that you feel everyone should give a shot?
TBF, it kinda sucked on release. I still remember the monoliths of Hydrogen…
still, I use it as one of gamings biggest comeback stories because it is.
I like the part about how it reminds me of Minecraft, but in space and with tools/weapons that never break and the ability to add more inventory slots. (There are less material options for building player housing though, but at least this limitation has led to some very creative community bases.) That, and I always find it rewarding to discover as many of a planet’s plant and animal species as possible to earn those chip things you can learn crafting recipes with, and many of the planets’ terrain looks pretty awesome since while it is all procedural copypasta, there are countless possible combinations of available ores, rock models/colors/usefulness, terrain color, animal appearances/traits, plant products, hazards, etc. You can use all of this to determine which planets near your spawnpoint are useful and which ones are useless, out of millions of possible planets. I also like how after coming back to that game after more than a year, I found that unearthing the buried tech things gives you 4 of that data thing you need to complete all the tech-trees in the early game instead of just 1. And unlike many games, they update all platforms at the same time, which is great since I find the console controls on the Switch edition easier to remember than the PC controls.
But I do wish the planets had more than just one climate and biome so they’d be more realistic and those 2 undiscovered rare polar animals keeping you from earning lots of nanites would be less painful to track down. My current home planet is a swamp world that has Florida-like temperatures even at the poles and on mountains.
If you want a true "Minecraft in space" experience, I recommend Space Engineers. Not as broad as NMS, but much deeper (especially with mods like WeaponCore, MES, and Aerodynamics).