Originally posted by Ulthar:

these are great responses. I feel like it's 80% there - but it's the lack of story that will probably not appeal to my wife.

Are there any games that you would suggest that fit the bill?

Not sure any of them fit 100%, but there are a few worth checking out potentially. Going off you don't want PVP, you'd prefer to be able to play at your pace even if that's months in between sessions, you still want it to be cooperative with your wife, you want a bit more lore and perhaps a bit less focus on combat:

-For lore, Ark came to mind. That game is packed full of lore and finding the notes with it (on the story maps) even gives you an experience boost. However, it is a massive game for starters (over 360GB for the full install last i checked, though you can reduce that a bit by not installing the maps/DLCs you are not currently using), it can be quite expensive, many of the dedicated servers are toxic (especially official, but the PVE servers are not as bad as any PVP server), the public servers do have decay timers (but private ones can disable this), and it can be an overall pain in the neck to set up. Then, in game, the start is absolutely brutal, you die a LOT. That's just how it goes. It's not until much later game that you find out why it's so addictive, if you even get that far. Overall, probably not a recommend but worth a peek to decide for yourself.

-Raft could be another good one, but also one where the best/easiest setup is that whoever plays most ends up hosting the world as the host will have to be online to play at all. At the start you really have no idea what's going on or what the story is, you might have to play a bit to even discover there actually is a story...but you will indeed find it and it's actually the main focus overall. There is some combat, but that also isn't the main focus. At the start your biggest threat is falling off the raft and getting bitten by the shark. Your "base" is the raft the game is named for, and you continue building onto that as it moves around the world, but you can also anchor (when you have an anchor) to explore interesting locations you float across as well. Most of the game is focused around that building, collecting the materials to do so, and of course not dying in the process all fundamentally oriented towards working your way up into being able to follow the story.

-Grounded is another that comes to mind. It's co-op for up to 4 players, but again, whoever plays most often should host the game. Host can play alone but whoever joins needs the host be online to play. This one also requires an xbox (or really anything microsoft owns, i used a mojang login after they bought minecraft and other users apparently used their ancient hotmail accounts) login in order to play co-op though, or get achievements. It is also very story focused and in some ways the building can actually be a bit limited (though the kind that enough creativity makes up for it). It also lacks decay timers, worst that happens is one of you loses a few base pieces to a raid while the other is offline (but raids also only happen where the player is, so you wont go back to an old base to find it wrecked). The downside on this one tends to be the combat related learning curve. There's tons of fights you can cheese with a bow or other projectile mind you, but the melee combat is HEAVILY reliant on the block/parry system which requires some practiced timing. It can end up rather difficult if you aren't great with timing, especially for bosses.