The Outer Wilds might be the kind of games you’re looking for.
And if you are open to a more linear structure there is FPS like bioshock which have amazing world building and have very light RPG elements.
There is also the “walking simulator” genre, with games like firewatch, gone home or SOMA. But it’s also quite linear.
No there was HPC sku of Windows 2003 and 2008 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Windows_Compute_Cluster_Server
Microsoft earnestly tried to enter the space with a deployment system, a job scheduler and an MPI implementation. Licenses were quite cheap and they were pushing hard with free consulting and support, but it did not stick.