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?
Please Don’t Touch Anything. What genre does it even belong in? It would have been a flash game if made 10 years earlier. You’re left at a console with a single large red button, and told to wait for a minute and don’t touch anything. Depending on how you interact with this console, there are many different things it can do/behaviors it can have, and your goal is to find all the different endings. It was entertaining, I don’t need to own it anymore.
Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. Both Zachtronics assembly-em-up games, which…I don’t think there’s absolutely zero replayability, because you might redo the level you just did or go back to an earlier one with a solution you just learned from a later level, but I don’t know finishing these games feels less like beating Bowser at the end of Super Mario and more like graduating from high school. I’m done with that phase of my life and I can now move on.
Antichamber. The video game equivalent of a Piet Mondrian painting. It’s an abstract and brain knitting non-euclidean first person puzzle game that uses its surreal mechanics as a metaphor for the journey of life itself, and halfway though you get a gun that shoots cubes and it turns back into a video game. A lot of the actual impact of the game comes from how it comments on the epiphany you just had, and that effect is spoiled somewhat by “Oh I remember this part.” I will note there is a speedrunning community for this game.
Firewatch. There are some games where you’ll watch a Let’s Play, decide you want to have a go, so you’ll buy and play the game. Not Firewatch; a Let’s Play gives you 96.4% of the experience. It’s a walking simulator that probably should have just been a short film. I’m not even convinced it is a “video game” because…how do you play it well or poorly? Like do we need a new term like “narrative software” or something?
Firewatch is more in the visual novel category. I did in fact give it a replay with completely different choices to see how it changed things, and was disappointed to find that all choices are merely for aesthetics and make zero difference in the plot. However it’s a well-made enough game (especially dialogue and voice acting) that it was still kinda fun to play again.
I liked firewatch, even though I usually dislike walking simulators. It really was a good mesh of dialogue and voice actors, unlike others where the dialogue just drags.
Interactivity really helps relate to the character you’re playing even if you’re not making any actual choices. And like you said, the dialogues are done pretty well to be enjoyable and not annoying. I liked Firewatch a lot.
So did I, which is why I listed it among good games that have no replay value. I enjoyed the thing that it is, I appreciated the visual style, it’s well performed…it’s one of the better walking simulators. The ending is controversial, which I take to mean it’s a work of art.
I was going to write anti chamber, because I never want to play it again, but %'s 30-90 of the way through the game I was itching to start over. It had me so hooked, but then the ending just took the wind out of the sails so hard. Heck maybe 10-98% of the game had me itching to replay it.
When I think back on my time with AntiChamber, I don’t really think about the ending. I really think of the beginning up through getting the green gun. It starts leaning farther into the direction of Talos Principle or Portal at that point.
To me the game was about the experience of coming to terms with this strange new world you’ve found yourself in, and the THIS IS AN ALLEGORY wall tiles. It’s impressive how long the developer managed to keep that schtick up.