Having finished Northern Journey, I can recommend that it is worth puting up with it’s awful combat encounter design to see all the places and things you’ll do on the journey it takes you on. Seriously, there’s so many novel interactions built in between the basic FPS things you expect to be doing in a shooter. It’s constantly surprising you with cool one-off things and visual tricks. I’m extremely impressed with it as a debut despite the horrible combat, and expected roughness, but also just in general. I think a lot of the delightful novelty probably comes from this being the dev’s first game. There is a lot here I could imagine more seasoned devs cutting or working around before, say, implementing a fully controllable hang-glider just for one level as this dev has done.

Another game that has a similar for-the-sake-of-nothing-but-itself, I recommend checking out the 2020 game G-String.