CBGSCNB 1: Untitled Goose Game

This is not the first game my wife has played and enjoyed, but I want to start here because I believe it is probably the platonic ideal of a CBGSCNB.

Untitled Goose Game was a proper hit when it came around, but I never actually bought the game at the time - I recall playing a demo of it somewhere, and hearing a lot of buzz around it, but one way or another, the game itself passed me by.
It came across my desk as one of the many games that were suggested to me over in the VGBees Discord server when I started asking around about games that would fit the CBGSCNB requirements:

An inspired pick! It ticks off all the boxes: It stars a goose, you don't have to control the camera, and the game is all about causing mischief.
Spoiler warning ahead!

The game's controls are great - on a controller, you need the left stick, the triggers, and a couple of face buttons, and the camera handles itself.
Triggers feel very natural to use for our rookie, and this meant that the slightly advanced tech of bending down to pick up some objects wasn't too hard to coordinate with the pick-up button itself, and zooming out for reconnaissance was well-used.
The movement control itself presented the game's core mechanical challenge: when sprinting, your turning circle becomes really wide, which makes it easy to get stuck on stuff in a panic. This ended up striking a good balance, so she learned to plan routes and slow down to turn corners. And of course, the fun of the panic itself.
There were only a couple of points that were too difficult, and I was handed the controller: scoring the goal in the uphill back garden being one.

The game could have presented itself as totally open-ended, and certainly there's a sandbox here that allows for a lot of creativity and making your own fun if that had been the way they went with it. However, it does have a list of objectives in each section, which turns it into a sort of free-form puzzle, and I think they represent an excellent design choice.
These objectives did well to signal how the world works, and inspire ideas about what is possible - which is vital to making an experience accessible to someone who hasn't internalised the tropes and routines of video games.
An eye-opening moment: "How can I take the radio if it's so noisy? Can I break it?"

Failure is never an excessive setback - you can always get right back to your plan since most of the time, the villagers will just put stuff back where it was. The final run through town was a great example of this: any time you lost the bell, whoever took it would just keep it in their own area, and you could use all the tricks you learned before in how to retrieve your prize back from them.

Untitled Goose Game was a lot of fun, and we looked forward to sitting down together with it every day and playing out a few objectives at a time. I know there's a co-op mode, but I think the single-player-with-backup setup was the right way for us. If I'd been player 2, the heists and mad chases would have been less interesting, and honestly, it's fun just watching how my wife solved the problems this game presented.

I'm delighted to say that Untitled Goose Game can officially wear the title of Cute Bird Game with Simple Controls that is Not Boring.