This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
TBH, BoTW is probably the first Zelda game I didn't finish just because I got bored of it, more than because of getting stuck on something & not wanting to look up a guide.
I appreciate the desire to want to replicate the experience of exploring your local town/countryside as a kid in a videogame, but maybe that's something kids should just be allowed to do IRL, and you should instead make interesting videogames as videogames.
Yeah but what are we supposed to do if cars still exist?
Dig tunnels under the pavement.