My brain likes meta-analyzing everything and something like a shooter game basically looks often like Shooting Gallery A -> Guiding Light -> Safety Hall -> Shooting Gallery B -> Drop Gate and so on. Same with shows or movies, red flag drops and foreshadowing are so visible to me that I don’t really watch anything unless it’s something absurd, or very unique. All films feel the same, because you see the same structure, bare character archetypes, the same Disney-style writing, etc.

I like older games for that reason, because back then you didn’t have things like online gamedev conferences where they teach you how to use a ruler, and often level designers were just random junior programmers or ex-modders that thought “this would be so sick” and made really iconic designs that are often unpredictable