I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Deadcells. Loved the art style, combat looked fun. I was so excited to play a new metroidvania only to discover it's a rougelike and that killed all interest in playing it. I just really dislike that kind of game.
"Roguelike Metroidvainia" is the most perverse and stupid subgenre. That's not what a fucking MV is! That's just a type of roguelite with traversal, there's nothing about the structure of a MV that survives a format where the map is constantly thrown out and re-generated.
I suppose, though I think of all the whinging to that effect I've done in this thread, this comment might be the least contentious claim. The comment I replied to expressed at least an implied belief in the same issue.
Yeah i stuck with it for it while, had two end boss cells i think and felt like it got more tedious than fun the more i played. I have a lot a positive things to say about it, but it just didn't click for me the way something like Rouge Legacy did