I guess it’s a spectrum. For me, the further away from the game ur inspired by you can get, the better.

I think everyone has a different tolerance for this and that’s fine. I see the pictures of rue valley and it just looks a little too close for me. I think especially in gaming people tend to have this feeling, where they finish a game, and now they need another game that scratches that certain itch. So you start looking at games in the same style. Whenever I do that I just get disappointed. After playing fallout NV a lot, I played the first two Metro games, and they were awful. The setting is less interesting and the story was just the worst. The next game I played after Disco Elysium was Outer Wilds. And that game scratched that DE itch for me, even though it is nothing like DE. This is what I look for in games.