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?
There was an old flash game called “You Only Live Once”
It’s basically a rudimentary mario-like platformer. But once you die, the game just cuts to your funeral. Each time you load up the game again, it just shows time passing as your grave slowly ages and is forgotten.
There’s a similar one called ‘One Chance’, in which you have three days to cure a disease that will otherwise kill everything. Same sorta concept.
This feels like it’d be great for a networked game where what you do gets passed onto other players so eventually someone can finish it. Souls-like or Death Stranding-like multiplayer style. The issue is it’d probably take a lot of effort to make in a way that be interesting and take long enough, and also if it can only be done once then that sucks for making money. I guess it could use procedural elements and make it replayable, but that’d probably remove some of the charm.
Could you could clear your cookies or open an incognito tab and start over?
Yeah, you could clear cookies to start over. I never actually got to see what happens if you survive the whole game though