Deus Ex. It’s beloved and influential. It’s also ugly as hell and kinda jank. Stitch together all the levels that had loading screens. Leave combat awkward, make conversations fancier. Keep the deadpan protagonist as a flat player-insert avatar. Keep tracked music, but give the composer a pile of money and enough tools to allow conditional variations. Human Revolution proved the formula still worked, and Mankind Divided proved it’s still impossible to do a good sequel to that formula.
Midwinter is one of the first true-3D open-world games, and it shows. You’re trying to escape an island and maybe start a revolution on the way out. The title reflects the mildly post-apocalyptic setting, where nuclear winter has upended civilization, and this little snow-covered dictatorship is actually doing okay by some standards. The gameplay would have to borrow from Death Stranding’s focus on traversing terrain. Albeit largely on skis. It’s not a fuck-around simulator like Just Cause, or a shoot-em-up like Far Cry, and it’s not really a survival game in the sense of keeping gauges filled. (You do get to hang-glide - but it’s a great way to die suddenly.) It’s more of a wargame played from ground level. And between that, and being from 1990, the interface is completely terrible.