i am addicted to Kingdom: Two Crowns these days and what i like about it, even though it's kinda shitty and stuff, is how it visualises the notion of being able to manage only a small part of a system that you set commands on... it's literally like a metaphor of computer programming

stories are really important mostly, with games, a lot of games get away with just putting the same old mechanics with an engaging storyline, so, there is really a lot of games that are the same but have interesting enough stories to carry them, but when they are sandbox games, this is a recipe for boredom, and only can work when humans are the opponents

if you don't have stories, or other people to make the game interesting, you need to construct a genuinely different game mechanic scheme

so, yeah, good games are usually new mechanics, mostly people just want new stories, new skins, more fancy graphics and "smarter" control interfaces, and really new games are pretty rare and hard to find, and often are done badly