Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
I think it's really hard to balance single player shooters to feel "fair" while still being difficult. Especially since if you make it hard, no amount of difficulty sliders will make it accessible to your average gamer.
For hard SP shooters I'd recommend Ultrakill & Neon White
If you are not humbled by either you are God's chosen gamer and should go pro
I think it's really hard to balance single player shooters to feel "fair" while still being difficult. Especially since if you make it hard, no amount of difficulty sliders will make it accessible to your average gamer.
I think Control did a bang up job of this honestly. All the tools are useful, allthough you have to pick, but then if something annoys you there is a variety of accessibility sliders to just nullify that. I think the main thing is that while you do click on head, you're gonna eat shit every time if you just click on head unless you enable 1-Hit-Kills or so. You have to use your skillset. Contrasted to something like the survivor Tomb Raiders with a quite similar amount of skills, none of which you ever really need because just shoot the guy in the head.
Clicking on heads is pretty fun but it gets old if there's nothing else to it
I rarely play sp. After awhile you get more adept at seeing behind the curtain and only truly novel mechanics can make a game interesting. Or maybe it's just the adhd 
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What games are you playing that feel like this? It’s hard to say much without examples to dig into
Roughly most things post 2010 that are shooter with RPG-Elements. Metro, Tomb Raider, Death Stranding (albeit the combat at least isn't the point in that) and such.
I like all of those games but they do have the common flaw.
I haven’t played metro, but tomb raider and death stranding are more stealth with shooter elements than the other way around. I’d definitely play something like doom if you’re looking for a more intense shooting experience (or turn up the difficulty as you mentioned, it’s not just that they have more health so you can’t one shot them but they’re also more threatening so you have less time to aim).
but tomb raider and death stranding are more stealth with shooter elements than the other way around.
No they're not, though. If I can just rock up to the encounter and shoot everyone in the head with a gun from a fixed position they're not stealth games. You can't do that in Splinter Cell or MGS V (for long), you can do it the entire playthrough in those games and it carries 0 penalities.
Dishonored you can also do this, but at least you get the superbad ending out of it.
This is besides Chronographs point that these aren't primarily Shooters, they are primarily Action-Adventure games with Shooter mechanics.
Try your hand at a game like Counter Strike where reaction time and game sense is almost more important than aim and you'll feel old as hell real fast.
Try your hand at a game like Counter Strike where reaction time and game sense is almost more important than aim and you'll feel old as hell real fast.
I suck so bad at aiming that in a combined 1000 hours of Counter Strike across 3 titles I've played the vanilla game maybe 50 hours and 30 hours of those were at LAN parties. I don't want to git more gooder at shooting, I want singleplayer games that challenge me on something that isn't very easy click on head
Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries on elite difficulty. Or hell, go play Mechwarrior Online, 95% of skill in that game is game sense and positioning. And on the aim side you just need to shoot well enough for regular queue, which just isn't hard compared to CS, halo, or any major mp fps game.
I really think you just need to turn up the difficulty if you feel there’s no penalty. The penalty is that it will be much harder to survive if they’re all alerted to you, your stuff will break and you’ll run out of resources.
Yeah, I think you just found the Oblivion/Skyrim "stealth archer" equivalent for those games.
The modern Tomb Raider reboots are... I dunno, spectacle adventure games? They sure aren't stealth or shooting focused. Maybe platforming puzzles? That's not really the focus either. Anyway, the challenge of any "combat" section in that goes out the window if you're halfway decent at "click on the head". I played the first two on Xbox Gamepass and headshots made combat pretty laughable even with the handicap of playing with a controller.
Death Stranding, as you said, isn't about the combat. And I totally beat the first "BT monster" fight that you're supposed to run from on my first try, not knowing it was coming. Though that was with grenades technically. Halfway decent shooting skills don't melt the difficulty quite as much as with Tomb Raider, but they still make it far easier than I think is intended.
And like you suspected, both of those were absolutely designed as "console first" games.
Can't speak to Metro.
As others have said, you've got to get into more boomer shooters if that's your thing
I think I yearn much more for something like Raven Shield or Far Cry 2 rather than Quake
play cultic chapter 2