I hear you, it's not that I don't like combat games, it's just that they're overdone and the medium has so much potential. The story and atmosphere are usually what draw me into a game, and the gameplay mechanics are usually just a means to an end of progressing through the story.<p>I'm going to focus entirely on first person non-combat games because I prefer first person and it's more rare for them to be non-combat. First up are FP games with interesting game premises or mechanics:<p>The Occupation, absolutely zero other games like this. You are a journalist during a politically charged period in history, and you wander about beautifully crafted old institutional buildings in order to find documents and clues that you can use during your interviews with various people. The story you are putting together centres around a murder, but it's really a story about political manipulation, immigration and corruption in policymaking. Sounds a bit dry, but it is both relaxing and thrilling.<p>Hardspace: you're a ship-breaker in an orbital space ship breaking yard, and you float around using tools to slowly pull apart ships for scrapping. It's got a comical dystopian sense of humour and a decent story line.<p>INFRA: Absolute hidden gem. You are a structural engineer, sent out on an inspection job. As you follow the path of infrastructure degredation, a series of mishaps pull you deeper and deeper into the cities hidden infrastructure, through dams, power stations, water processing plants, steel mills or underground water infrastructure. The game has a good, dry sense of humor, and the story is good. Each location has some system or facility you can take the time to fix, or you can just keep moving through the story.<p>Jazzpunk: A spy game, but as if it were written by a 17 year old on mushrooms.<p>Outer Wilds, others have mentioned it, but you can't miss this one!<p>Portal 1, 2, though I suspect you would know of these already.<p>The Witness, a fantastic atmospheric exploration and world-puzzle game, I think watching a bit of it on YouTube probably shows it off well but it's just a great world to spend time in.<p>Event[0], your only friend is a well scripted space station AI, it uses a natural language typing interface and you have to talk to him while you wander around the station trying to figure out what happened and how to get back home.<p>The Stanley Parable, a very funny exploration of choice in videogames. I'm really underselling it.<p>Teardown, voxel based demolition game where you have puzzles and objectives to achieve with the tools and vehicles of construction and destruction at your fingertips.<p>Superliminal, a game where each object you grab changes in size to match the perspective of where you are looking. Great sense of humor as well.