While the registrar should have made more to understand the situation before acting, it’s important to keep in mind that according to itch.io, the request was not a DMCA takedown but an accusation of “fraud and fishing”. There’s probably a very large legal exposure for a registrar to let criminal website use their service if they are made aware of it, so reducing their liability is probably their highest priority.

BrandShield is inexcusable for using such a claim as a first step.

The Outer Wilds might be the kind of games you’re looking for.

And if you are open to a more linear structure there is FPS like bioshock which have amazing world building and have very light RPG elements.

There is also the “walking simulator” genre, with games like firewatch, gone home or SOMA. But it’s also quite linear.

It’s really stretching the adventure game definition but if you are open to first person games without combat with great stories I would recommend :

• “the outer wilds” : really nice puzzles, good story, wonderful setting, definitely not linear.
• “SOMA” : a little dark, engaging story, this was an amazing experience.

Relaunched it to replay the demo : “uplink”, it really lived up to my memory. A self contained half hour of half life fun, with an original map that show off diverse game mechanics. This was really a great demo back in the day.

Well you have to take the price of the system you run the game on into account. If you spent hundreds of dollars to buy a game and a console (pc gaming is even worse), you need a lot of content to reach parity with something like a cinema ticket or a Netflix subscription.

This hobby is expensive, particularly because it’s main demographics is children or cash strapped young adults. Maybe it’s good value if you spend hundreds of hours on a few games, maybe take-two is feeling that it doesn’t get its fair share from these hundreds of dollars, but they should not be deluded into thinking it’s cheap for the customer.