I’ve had a similar experience with my wife on Dark Souls. I tried making her play multiple games that are considered as accessible and beginner friendly, she didn’t really enjoy them. Then I suggested she tries Dark Souls to get some laughs… surprisingly she got hooked.

What is BOTW if not an amplified puzzle game? The core mechanic aside from the open world is literally to enter small isolated puzzles and to solve them. Zelda in general is heavily reliant on puzzles, are they not puzzle games? What about detective games and point and click games like Myst, Monkey Island, what are they?

There are many mobile games like Candy Crush or Angry bird.

To which I answer, can’t we kill stuff in puzzle games?

So essentially something like Thief or Dishonored where you need to find a path in a level?

I believe you’re being very reductive by saying we don’t have AAA puzzle games. Yes we don’t have AAA tetris-like because they don’t need ultra HD graphics or first person viewpoint and therefore they have some limits, but puzzles have definitely been incorporated in many games.

Speaking of mods, if you haven’t already played it I highly recommend My House.

Speaking of time mechanics, Touhou Luna Nights is a pretty short metroidvania where you play as a character that can stop time and they really nailed the time stop mechanic. You can use it to avoid the very difficult to dodge attacks from the bosses and they’re an essential strategy to counter some of the attacks, what’s more they allow you to launch a lot of daggers which will only hit when you restart time and that is very satisfying to do. The plateforming also benefited from it, with things such as moving platforms to freeze or climbing on top of the daggers you launch yourself after stopping time.