I do enjoy game mechanics that interact in emergent ways that weren’t fully planned out by the developer in games like Dwarf Fortress.

Roguelikes and roguelites tend to be my favorite. Ones where each run is new and you can toy with different builds and usually get pretty OP toward the end (or get cut down early because luck wasn’t in your favor or you made a mistake).

Peaceful exploration

Among plenty of the other things mentioned, I enjoy “diagetic interfaces”. Ways of interacting with a game’s systems that stay grounded in the reality of the setting of the world. Dead Space is a prime example, but I’ve been enjoying a lot of the crafting in Vintage Story for this reason. The smithing in particular has had me hooked for a while. Hammering out my armor and weapons voxel by voxel made finally suiting up and feeling ready to take on a boss that much more satisfying.

Puzzles, traditional or unique, as well as physics and spatial-heavy thinking.

More floaty, less realistic platforming. Thugs like double jump, or somehow your character has less gravity when they jump, stuff like that. Stuff like that. As a general platformer lover, I really enjoy more fictional cannot be done IRL physics in games.

Parry and riposte mechanics make me happy. Idk why exactly, but something about timing a parry and making the enemy entirely helpless for the followup is just great.

Save anywhere

I like most game mechanics to some extent. Creativity in combining game mechanics is key to making an outstanding game imo.

However, I don’t like things that force a time limit. I play games as an escape. I don’t like feeling stressed by a clock while I’m off the clock. These can be literal timed missions or things like a food/water meter. Escort missions also suck for similar reasons.

I think difficulty in a game should come from overcoming a foe, traversing harsh terrain, or solving a puzzle. If the game is hard because I have to stop what I’m doing to feed myself, or I have to rush to complete an objective on a timer, it just becomes work.

Not a game mechanics maybe but more of an engine thing i guess. I just love simulations. Good VR combat physics, elemental stuff like water, fire, smoke, crumbling stuff. I love a world that feels dynamic but not necessarily realistic that makes sense of itself.

I like systems that allow for outrageous combos, whether unintentionally or by design. Roguelikes and roguelites usually have them, but it’s almost entirely luck based. Dynasty Warriors 8 allows for plenty of OP combos if you manage the right weapon attributes. Skyrim and its broken as fuck perfectly balanced enchanting + alchemy (or Morrowind’s even more perfectly balanced permanent fortify attribute magic)

I like strategy games that allow you to design your own units such as Warzone 2100 where you select different components to get different functionality or Endless Space 2 where you pick a ship hull type and then assign different modules to adjust the combat stats or add special abilities. The production cost of the unit changes with your selections in whatever the base game currency is and/or requirements for specific resources.

This gives the player the freedom to adjust their forces to fit their play style, their economic situation or to accomplish specific objectives or strategies. It also breaks the rock/paper/scissors aspects of unit combat in more simplistic games and creates far more complex unit interactions, and the potential to win with clever design rather than just numbers of units.

I’m an absolute sucker for a hidden traitor mechanic. Boardgames like Battlestar Galactica, Werewolf, and Secret Hitler (the latter of which might be my absolute favourite board game). More recently I’ve just started playing Among Us (I never got into it during its ~2020 peak) which is the first time I’ve seen the hidden traitor translated well into video games (unless you count that one minigame from Jackbox Games).

Detailed completionist checklists.

If I have cleared an area, I want to have it reflected in an overview screen.

If I’m missing an item, I want to know which enemy drops it, where I can find it, or how I can craft it.

If I need to pull out my phone to check a wiki, then the game has failed me.

There’s something to be said for exploration games, and in those cases, the details should be obscured until the player has cleared 90% of the area, or gotten past the boss (or something like this).

I really like Zelda and Ys style ARPGs. Specifically, rare and impactful loot, and little reliance on skill levels, but rather skill aquisition. Both approach it very differently, and later Ys games fall into more traditional RPG mechanics (e.g. farm money/exp, buy gear, etc), so I’m more talking about Ys 1, 2, and Origin, as well as pre-BOTW Zelda games.

Basically, I love this gameplay loop:

1. Enter dungeon/level and fight baddies
2. Find important item/ability
3. Use important item/ability to defeat monsters
4. Fight boss, using a mix of important item and learning movesets
5. Repeat 1-4 several times, with plot mixed in
6. Fight final boss using a mix of everything acquired

Ys and Zelda do this in very different ways, and I absolutely love the level cap in Ys 1 to enforce playing smarter instead of grinding. You can never really get OP, even if you try (except Ys 2, which I don’t like much).

Unfortunately, “ARPG” has been twisted to mean Diablo-like, which is heavy on loot and ability trees instead of puzzles and exploration, and future Ys games go that direction as well.

This isn’t really specific to mechanics or systems, but I’ll like pretty much any mechanic or system that lends itself well to that gameplay loop.