Personally I enjoy harem games with gameplay and something outside the norm.
-A game in which a witch cursed your harem and made them become dominant towards you? cool in my book, the MC should be trying to recover control of his harem and there is a fun element in that.
-A game in which you are a lord/king with a political harem that is a pure mess? rectify the harem! make the girls fall in love with the MC!, and if there is any male guard or noble trying to enter it, execution is their final destination!.
Basically as you can see we have a conflict and the MC doing his best to solve it, you can fail, have negative consequences and all that but the point of the game is to succeed.
Personally when I played the first few harem games of my life I was like "oh cool", but it got repetitive really fast, mainly because the story tends to be meh to the point that I would skip it and in the end it becomes a pure nukige, a game in which you only want to see the sex scenes and be done with it.
This is why I entered this zone of issue to overcome -> reward, it gives me a sense of fulfilment and a deserved harem is always more fun.
Related to the games that I like then to say a few:
-A struggle with sin: Overall it is a harem game but failing/messing stuff can lead to NTR scenes, not ideal how the game works but I'm a sucker to farming stat points, earning money and stat uses.
-Harem collector: More typical harem game but you need to earn money, invest it and become a strong adventurer to get the girls into your harem. In general as a game is okay, albeit perhaps too many girls.
-Harem hotel: It's a harem game that at least try to give some variety, I will be fair, I skip the hell out of it but having some scenes of light femdom and girl exhibitionism pushes a bit the typical boundaries of what a harem game can do.
-Sengoku Rance and any game of the Rance series: RPG/strategy games, our MC is a fuck them all type of guy, bad stuff can happen in the game, from death of characters in a non gore way, to mind control or even the worst of all! the shimazu brothers.
