Level builders/editors
They're a lot harder to make with modern / 3D games.
But they also seem to boost a game's long-term audience by a lot, so it's weird they're not more common.
...I should make something that needs a level editor instead of always doing procedural stuff.
You could still squeeze a Wario Ware microgame into one of them.
I think it would be hard to fit a minigame into a loading screen without making the loading screen longer due to loading the minigame, though. Like it'd be easy enough if you were coding your loading system from scratch, but modern games are mostly built using big pre-existing engines, which are full of their own assumptions about how loading works.
Have you seen Backpack Battles? It's an autobattler that's 90% inventory tetris.
I've played way too much of it.
One of my permanent backlog game ideas is a game titled Horse Horse Horse Horse Horse where you're a horse and you press asdf asdf asdf asdf to run right, and fdsa fdsa fdsa fdsa to run left.
This is the level you unlock by 100%ing the game (all seeds, 10-coins, and flagpole tops)
I don't know about the larger trends, but Mario games have always had a lot of them. You fall down a pit and you're dead.
Also it's pretty typical for modern Mario games to have a nice normal difficulty curve, and then if you 100% it you get a final challenge that's just completely outside the bounds of the rest of the game's difficulty. This one was just even nastier than the last several incarnations. I'm not sure what the thinking behind these is, unless it really is "yeah we know you're playing Kaizo hacks."
I forgot about the rotating fire bars because it wasn't in the final checkpoint, and I did each checkpoint on a different session.
Non-binary robots rebelling against the nature of their birth.
I don't really know how Nabbit works, but aren't most of the rooms instant death pits anyway?
I love their choice of fake studio name.
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found out that facebook messenger has ai generated stickers now and I don't think anyone involved has thought anything through
I assume from the third one that this poster was one of you.
it'll happen to you
If you like cheesy live-acted cutscenes, I recommend Roundabout. Or at least watching its trailer. Or if you don't have time to actually play games, there was an SGDQ run where they did a speedrun but left the cutscenes on, but I think they end up skipping some due to tricks.