'To gender games' can be broken down into several components:
a) It's bad when people say only one gender can or only one gender cannot play a game, a type or genre of games or games in general.
b) It's bad when people assume only one gender plays or one gender doesn't play a game, a type or genre of games or games in general.
c) It's bad when people question a gender identity because a person plays or does not play according to the norms of a) and b) (unless specifically wanted (see GNC people))
Play the fuq you want.
Zombies don't need to be male-coded, cottagecore doesn't need to be fem-coded.
Personally I'm not huge of fan of supposedly overt satire due to Poe's Law, but yes, anyone should be able to play Broforce and Broforce could've made it's point with less gendering of the subject.
My wife actually played The Sims (all of them) for years though. I just let them drink espresso till they pissed themselves, set them on fire or let them drown in the pool before I got bored. May be a mental, not a gender issue though.
Also, yes, the Grass Crest shield is cheating. And so are summons. Also you have to beat it blindfolded with the volume muted and DK Bongo drums for a controller.
Unless you're playing with the antidote mod, which honestly is kinda surprising something like that isn't in the vanilla game. Lore-wise, I don't see where the problem with that could be, especially when they knew what the outcome was before they caused the zombification outbreak.
If you take it all the way back to the arcade era, the basic premises of games were even more wild...and yet also, like, weirdly pedestrian.
I mean, literally. Literally pedestrian. As in, trying to cross a road. You're still a pedestrian, even if you're a frog.
So, like, is "Frogger" casual, because crossing a river and a road isn't hardcore enough? Is "Tapper" casual, because it's a beer pouring simulator? What about "BurgerTime," then? You're flopping burger ingredients onto each other, to make 30-foot-diameter hamburgers, while being pursued by other food ingredients, that have come to life. Is that a casual game, or is it some kind of weird premonition of much more "hardcore" action games?
I mean, I don't even fuck with Souls-like games, but I would play a "BurgerTime" reboot that was done as a full send, completely serious Souls style game. Fucking fighting massive rotisserie chicken bosses, while assembling burgers so large that the sesame seeds on the bun are the size of American footballs.
I want that game, yo. I don't even give a shit about finishing my original thought, about what "casual games" even are, anymore. I just want epic "BurgerTime" to be a thing.
It was a literal RPG in the Xbox 360 version of Sims 3, with direct control of your Sims and everything. You could swap back to the classic overhead view and let them do their own thing at any time, or walk around and live their daily life yourself. Even had split-screen co-op, which rocked.
It kind of ruined the series for me because it was so much better with direct control yet they never revisited the feature outside of that single console port, and that game was one of the few with major backwards compatibility issues that AFAIK never got fixed so you can't even play it anymore.