Stumbled upon this randomly today and thought it was surprisingly good, especially for the subscriber count. Particularly the bit about the inherent problem of save scumming in stealth games is something I’ve thought about writing about myself, but I guess someone else got there first, as this is pretty much an exact mirror of my thoughts.
One issue I’ve found with stealth games is that the concept of a lone commando outsmarting and sneaking past 30+ guards is pretty unbelievable to begin with, unless the player controlling the commando is actually a tactical genius. So, games tend to have to play pretty unrealistically in order to make the result playable by average players (idiot guards, x-ray vision, generous interpretations of darkness, super movement abilities, etc)
Something I think could be further explored is a game that explores a mechanic of “Plausibility”. Stealth long accepted that guards would react to footsteps. Breath of the Wild including a noise meter helped me think “Hey, why is that? This is a big compound with a lot of people that’s been quiet for the past week - wouldn’t they assume the footsteps are their friends?”
Another concept that I think was explored in a very janky way but could use a second look is the game Shadwen. It’s not a great experience, but it has the interesting idea of combining stealth with Superhot and Braid - you get full control over time, including time only moving when you do, and can rewind instantly from a failure. The game even shortcuts “spotted” phases by giving guards instakill crossbows, so the remedy to being spotted is just to rewind. The fun, then, is in creatively engineering the one-shot stealth circumvention you had in mind, even if a mispositioning messed it up the first 6 times (because it only took 15 seconds to get a successful effort).