Deathloop’s story basically means that you’re replaying the game because you failed your previous attempt at escaping. You can play it more than once, the game encourages you to, and I kinda want to, but I never did because I already won. In a lot of games replays are basically just “fresh starts” and here, they are part of the story, and ironically, that’s what’s stopping me.
Also… A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. … and sadly, there’s only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.
It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target’s vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored’s missions could have multiple solutions.
… but I get why they didn’t. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.
As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn’t have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.
I don’t mind that there’s only one winning order too much. Could be cool to have more options but I’m okay with that design choice. Like you said, it’s a lot of effort for not a lot of players. I could still vary the gameplay during the missions and that’s good enough. Besides, I enjoyed the world and the characters more than in any other Arkane game, maybe on par with Prey, can’t put one above the other.
Phoenix Wright comes to mind since I’m just watching someone else play the games I don’t have because there’s not much player agency so watching it is as good as playing it 🤷🏻♂️
Sometimes you can still replay them for the same reason you’d re-read a book (like to catch things you missed the first time around). It’s not as common and a different kind of replayability though
I would say something like ICO is the latter kind for me. It is focused on the gameplay, but the gameplay is the same exact thing from the first moment to the last and you can find all the secrets in the levels themselves pretty easy the first time through (since the rooms ain’t that big there’s not much room to hide things), the only reason to replay it multiple times is for the special weapons you can get; which are more like skins than actual weapons, except for the energy sword that OHKOs everything. But you only get that after like, 5 or 7 completions I think? It wasn’t worth it. By the time you get it, a normal person would be totally over playing the game lol
I think Dark Souls and Elden Ring and such would be the same for me, if not for the PvP multiplayer. Other games copying that style without any multiplayer at all, I have so far only played once and then never touched again. But I keep coming back to the ones with PvP to make new builds and fight other players. And because of how you obtain items, making an entirely new character means playing through the entire game, or at least a good deal of it. Currently building a dude to be ready for Shadow of the Erdtree and seeing just how low level I can beat Mogh at. So far it’s been 60. 😄
I would volunteer a lot of the single-player story games produced by Sony like Uncharted, The Last of US, with Spiderman being the exception to the rule.
Some of their games have a little more open game loop design, but personally, I don’t think I could play The Last of Us twice.
From what I played of God of War I would imagine it’s similar, but I never actually beat it.
I’m sure there are people out there who love single-player game narratives and would disagree. I just think a lot of these games are good for the story, but the gameplay feels like once you’ve done it, you’ve done it.
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.
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.
Since puzzle games seem to be the theme overall here I’ll mention Cocoon. It’s a recent puzzler that is absolutely gorgeous to look at and did some super clever stuff imo.
As a hardcore player of Metroid Prime Hunters (online) in the Nintendo DS I always was confused about what the issue with the controllers for Kid Icarus, or other shooter like games was lol.
Soma - This is such an amazing game, but it made me so mad that I would never play it again.
The Painscreek Killings - A really fun detective/mystery walking sim. You absolutely have to figure everything out yourself, as there is no hand-holding or hints given by the game. At all. But, like Return of the Obra Dinn, once you've figured out the mystery, there really is no sense in replaying it.
I was going to add some others before realizing I had a theme of mystery walking sims. I think that genre of games are pretty one and done kind of plays. They can be really great, but most don't give you a reason to go back and replay them, unless it's for achievements or something.
It's been a few years since I've played it, but I remember not being a fan of the female companion. To me it felt like she was just using the main character as a means to get to her goal and nothing more. I know that's an unpopular take (I've gotten into a couple light arguments over it), but I just could not stand her by the end of the game. The way she treated the MC just made the post-credits scene so angering.
Dredge comes to mind. It’s a nice game and all, but outside of the two endings (which are basically a choose left or right situation) you see pretty much everything there’s to see in a single playthrough.
Midnight Suns was like that for me. The tactical combat was interesting and could have had replay value, but all the chores and conversations you have to do to progress the story made this a “no way” for a second playthrough. Absolutely worth it to go through once though, if you are into turn based combat games and marvel characters.
I stalled out on playing this. I loved the combat aspect, but the chores and conversations feel too much like… well, chores. I just wanna fuck up some bad guys, not watch my character watch a movie with a Marvel character!
Yeah I almost gave up too, it did become a bit of a slog in the middle with all the back and forth collecting shit and chatting everyone up. Definitely has some pacing issues.
Loved my 3ds. It helped me get back into gaming regularly. I had weird guilt when I tried to sit down at a console or pc to play, thinking I should use my time more wisely, but was able to spend hours on Animal Crossing and then other games.
I got introduced to the Fire Emblem series through it and loved them. Although I never finished Shadows of Valencia. One day, I’ll get back to it.
I also learned that Resident Evil, while awesome, is not for me to play lol.
I only ever got them off friends or when traveling into London. Then one day I discovered that you could set up a Streetpass ‘relay’ just by setting your home WiFi’s SSID to some secret string and then you’d be able to meet other people using the same SSID wherever they were in the world. It stopped working eventually, but me and about 6 other people somewhere in the world made good use of it!
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