They don’t exactly fit with your theme of short mystery and puzzle games, but based on your initial question most JRPGs and most story-focused games came to mind. Let’s go over a few of them I’d recommend to everyone interested in those games:
Persona 5 Royal: It’s about a 100h and very story-heavy. There are some twists and turns which keep you engaged and you build relationships with a wide cast of characters. Besides the story and actual combat, there’s a ton of side activities, all of which you only do a few times. It’s probably my favorite game I’ll never replay, because all these things are an absolute slog to play again. The same goes for Persona 4 and maybe 3, haven’t played that one.
every Etrian Odyssey: They are old-school dungeon crawlers originally released on the 3/DS and got remakes on steam and the Switch. You draw your own maps of every layer the dungeon has, which is a large puzzle in itself. However, once you know the dungeon, there is literally no point in exploring it again. You know every trap, every worthwhile detour and of course the path to take.
Like a dragon 7/8: They combine an open world with lots of mini-games, funny and/or touching side stories and an epic overarching main story to follow. There are tons of interactions with your companions, all of them interesting. It’s just, similarly to Persona 5, all these mini-games and interactions only carry themselves for the short burst you get them in and while they are fresh. Replaying them? It’s an absolute slog. You know every punchline, you have optimized most mini-games and probably remember most of the great backstories each character has - you’d be skipping most of the content and the non-optional combat system isn’t fun enough to carry itself on its own.
Can’t you have fun in dungeon crawlers by trying other party compositions? Or is EO badly balanced where you can only succeed with an specific composition?
You absolutely can! There are classes, subclasses and equipable skills depending on the game. All with different builds. You can win with all of them and swapping around can be fun. However, you can also do this within a single playthrough. At least in my opinion, the dungeon is the main draw here - but of course, as with all games here, there are certainly people who like to replay them.
There is a game from the MS-DOS age of 1996 called Realms of the Haunting where you traverse large open areas for hours searching for items and interactables needed to progress.
You might clear it a second time just to make the experience seem like a linear cohesive string of events but I can’t imagine you would want to clear it any more than that.
90s style adventure games like Sam and Max hit the road, day of the tentacle, monkey Island, Indiana Jones, etc. Lots of comedy you can’t hear again for the first time, and puzzles that can be memorable.
scummVM can be used to run those games and runs on basically everything, phones, tablets, desktop.
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.
"One Shot", it has a few achievements that might require going back to try to complete.
It is puzzle top down story adventure game( it does the whole look into your actual files for solutions thing), once I finished the main story I felt satisified. It allows for playing after the ending but doing so feels hollow and unsatisifying which is the point. It asks the question of why do you still want to play, but oh well I will allow it and makes it possible.
While I’m not sure the “walking sim” games are what you’re looking for, I’d add Lifeless Planet and maybe Dear Esther. Once you know what’s going on/what happened, there’s not much point in replaying.
I’m currently playing through the ace attorney series, couch party w my fiancee. We’re having a blast, but there’s absolutely no doing this a second time. The nature of the games is such that you can’t really progress in any of the cases without having asked every question of every witness, gathered every piece of evidence and explored every relevant branch in cross-examination, so by the time you finish a case there’s just nothing left to go over a second time.
Axiom Verge 1 is a great metroidvania. I also tried 2, but it didn’t click with me at all. Cave Story is great as well. Dead Cells, but that’s more of a rogue lite game. Binding of Isaac is also one of my favorites, but it’s a top down rogue like.
Outer Wilds. not only is it a fantastic game, but the entire premise and gameplay is centred around discovering the world. theres no progression, the story is all diagetic and not quest-bound or anything, and once you know the world you cant really discover it any more (unless you forget)
OneShot is very much based on its story and immersion. Contrary to the title’s implication, there’s not so much potential for risk during play, even if it’s themed that way, but it does feel like any efforts to repeat the game would ruin some of the immersive thoughts present.
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Aktywne