Comment by wongarsu

That's a bit like saying all CGI is bad: the bad instances are the ones you remember most vividly, the best instances are the ones you never noticed.

In my opinion, the best tutorial in any game I've ever played was Portal (yes, also 19 years old, not a good case for "tutorials were terrible back then"). Portal has 19 levels of tutorial (the test chambers) which gradually introduce mechanics with Glados as your sarcastic guide, and five levels outside the tutorial (escape and destroying Glados) where you use what you learned

Meanwhile the colony sim genre has mostly arrived at the checklist style: you get a checklist of things that would be useful to do, and when you complete them you get a new checklist. But you are free to just ignore it and do something else. Captain of Industry or Timberborn come to mind

In the FPS genre Titanfall 2 had a pretty nice tutorial in the campaign that ended in a timed obstacle course