This is a cliche, but a lot of women I know play the Sims. Your girlfriend might like it as well.
Wilmot’s Warehouse is a cool game about organizing a warehouse.
I played a lot of Terraria with my sister. It’s 2D, so she did not get motion sickness. There’s a lot of costumes we could collect. (This was probably our favourite part of the game.)
The story of HL is also one of its weaknesses. It’s a generic chosen one story with unmemorable characters.
I. I’d argue that Minetest provides an alternative to Minecraft as a modding platform as it’s build to be extendable. Hell, Mineclonia tries to recreate “the Minecraft experience” to a T. But why would I play (and mod) Minetest, when I can play Minecraft which has way bigger community, so there are more interesting mods? That said, I hope both Minetest and Vintage Story grow their modding scenes more.
II. I find it baffling that no one took the Tekkit / Feed the Beast formula and spun it off as a standalone game. (Maybe except FortressCraft.)
I dropped out of uni because of the first game. Don’t do this to me!