After rolling around what you described liking about Earthbound in my head, two games immediately came to mind:
The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls
This also does that thing of using preexisting tropes and genre conventions as the basis upon which to just riff like crazy and have a lot of fun with the form. Lots of surprising turns you don’t see coming and a real willingness to drop its commitment to a certain system or mechanic the moment it’s no longer relevant to the story it’s telling/fun it’s having. Also just really nice to play something so technically rudimentary and yet it somehow manages to blow most modern games out of the water!
Cookie’s Bustle
Bit of a hassle to get the English translation for this up and running, but if you can manage it it’s well worth the effort. Uses the basic structure of a point n click adventure to string together a bunch of bizarre set pieces that are mostly impossible to predict. The tonal whiplash with this one is something else. Notable to me personally for being the first game I had played in long time that actually elicited real surprise and childlike wonder.
Also second @iguferon’s recommendation of Planet Laika, a game so alien it made me feel like I was dissociating at certain points… It really gets in your head!
Just minimized my post in progress only to see @daphaknee honing in on the exact sorta thing I feel like these games represent! Piggybacking off of what they said, Consume Me is a really good recent example of something with writing that feels predominantly informed by things outside of videogames while also messing with familiar sorts of systems as the building blocks to map out a more complicated and dynamic story than something that’s just focused on the following the expected beats provided by the shape of those systems/mechanics themselves…
(also saw you mention you were planning on getting Stray Children so no need for me to recommend it further, but all I’ll say is I think it probably fits a lot of what you described enjoying as well 
)
Edit: ALSO ALSO SEAMAN!! How could I forget?! A virtual pet that regularly makes YOU feel like the pet instead. You only have to read @thecatamites recent posts on it to get a sense of how effective it is at disarming the player at almost every turn!