Most games stake us to places we’d never be able to go in real life. A post-apocalyptic wasteland, for example, or another planet. Others still allow us to experience places we may be able to visit in real life but in an entirely new light. Ghost of Tsushima transports us back in time, while Marvel’s Spider-Man puts a superhero spin on a well-known and iconic city. While each of these games is engaging because we can never truly replicate their setting, there are others that put us in a place some of us might find familiar.

Tomorrow, a game about flying across a vast open galaxy could release at the same time as a game about China post tracking. The one you choose to play would likely be based on two factors. The first is price, and the second is which one you think you’ll get the most time out of. If you’ve played No Man’s Sky, you’ve seen space and explored it before. But I don’t know any games about being a postal officer in China, so that game would be the one I’m most likely to choose. You can even judge the gameplay before playing. It’s obvious that the space exploration game will have a lot of open spaces and repetition. Still, the postal officer game will require you to think much more and pay attention to things like letter weights, addresses, and scanning the inside of anything that passes your way.

Papers, Please and Not Tonight are great examples of this. They put you in the shoes of characters with extremely mundane jobs. While the story might venture into places, you never could. The actual gameplay doesn’t. Instead, you find yourself stamping passports based on various regulations or working to keep a club as exciting as possible with just the right kind of clientele. Being a bouncer or a border control officer are jobs anyone could get in real life if they follow the correct path, so why are these games so engrossing?

I think that the key to these games is that they’re so grounded. As crazy as it sounds to say, traversing New York as Spider-Man gets old after a while. When you’ve seen every animation a few dozen times and know all the jokes he’s going to say as he travels, you sort of switch off. In Papers, Please, though, you can’t switch off. If you do, you might slip up and make a mistake, bringing you one step closer to being fired for negligence. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a petty punishment and nowhere serious as the deaths that Spider-Man suffers if you get the timing wrong in a fight. But still, these mundane games never lose that sense of urgency they all have to them.

While this may not be true for everyone, I certainly know that my tastes in games are dictated by what I think will be fresh and new. So even if that sounds boring on paper, I’m more likely to go for it because I know games like Papers, Please, and Not Tonight have kept me engaged for tens of hours.