I want to try and play some more games. That feels more fulfilling if you play games that you can finish and be done with.
So what are some good games that have zero (or close to zero perhaps) replayability? I’ll start with my own suggestions:
- Return of the Obra Dinn: Amazing mystery/detective game. However once you’ve played it, you basically can’t play it again as you remember the solution already and the challenge of the game is trivialized.
- Chants of Sennaar: Really great game about deciphering languages. However, once again, by playing the game once, you’ll remember the languages and the game has no challenge any more.
- Outer Wilds: Mystery adventure game. There is some replayability as there are perhaps areas that you can still explore, but largely once you figure out the mystery and complete the game, there’s not much more to experience. Some people speedrun the game though.
All of the above games I value extremely highly even though I only played them ~8-10 hours.
Do you have any others?
Might be an unpopular take but the Red Dead Redemption 2 campaign. I’ve tried twice to start a second campaign but it’s so slow. The first time around the narrative carries it, so it doesn’t feel so slow. But knowing what happens next takes that away. The worst part is how ridged it is with mission failure/success conditions. It removes room for creative solutions.
This is not to say it wasn’t wonderful to play once. But it plays like they wanted to make a movie not a game.
My biggest complaint with R* games is that they refuse to let players leverage the open world to even a minor extent in their missions. I understand that restrictions are important to telling the story and can even nurture creativity but for as detailed the world and fairly deep their systems are their missions are quite dictatorial.
I couldn’t even finish it once and it took so long to get to where I stopped that I had important bits spoiled by random comments mentioning who dies and whatnot… It was really good for what I experienced but oh my God is it longggggggg.