honestly I hate “can you pet the dog?!?” not for any of the common reasons but because it was initially interesting as a proposition of “can you interact with the world in a way that is not within the primary mechanical loop” and that very quickly fell away to being “well now any indie developer making a game has to have a pet the dog button or they’re going to get letters”

One of my dream projects has an NPC with a dog, and if you try to pet it, the owner tells you not to do that. If you try again, it bites you and you take damage. I want to do this entirely because I genuinely believe that this would make me feel way more grounded in the world than any “click button to see cute animation” would ever do, and also it would be really funny to have a game where people lose their runs because they tried to pet a dog they were told not to pet

Reading the dev notes for Mina the Hollower has been a pretty stark reminder to consider the practical reasons for creative decisions. I was all "okay, but what are we really saying by making the protagonist a mouse", and then the devs are like "yeah, the main reason she's a mouse is because GBC-style sprites are tiny and her bigass ears make it easy for the player to tell which direction she's facing".