I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Rogue Legagy. after a while it suddenly occurred to me that if my characters were slowly getting more powerful as a result of how long i played the game, the game wasn’t challenging me to beat it, it was challenging me to invest my time until i’d customized the experience to be easy enough for me. so i switched back to playing more traditional roguelikes and roguelikelikes (which is what we called roguelites at the time) where you reset to 0 each play
Interestingly, the roguelite community has come full circle on this lately. Meta progression is increasingly seen as poor game design, at least in the communities I look at.
Granted, roguelike enthusiasts held fast to this principle the entire time.