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?
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Antichamber - clever first person puzzle game. I played it exactly once and I loved it.
I replayed it after many years. It was fantastic, now I need to wait another many years to forget the solution.
The older you get the more often you’ll be able to play!
I’d place Superliminal in this category as well.
Superliminal was cool, but I just didn’t enjoy it. It was fun for a bit, but I feel like the mechanic overstayed it’s welcome for how simple it is. There’s not very many unique ways to use it. That’s probably why Valve abandoned the idea too.
Still, it’s interesting and worth a shot. Plenty of people love it.
You can replay it to find all the extra secrets though
This goes for most of these first person puzzle games. Once you solve the puzzle its not very fun to do it again.
Portal 1 and 2, the Witness, Talos Principle 1 and 2, Manifold Garden - all worth a play through. Next on my list to try is Viewfinder.
I play through both Portal games every few years; maybe every 5 or 6. I think I’m due again soon.
I kind of got bored of manifold garden. I guess it was the lack of any story. I just had no motivation to continue.
I feel portal could be replayed if you focused too hard on the puzzles the first time through, there were quite a few secrets worth exploring in that world, though none too deep unfortunately
I feel like portal 2 can get by on a playthrough every so many years based on the writing/VA making it enjoyable even if you half remember the puzzles.
Good suggestion, I played it many years ago as well :)
Copying my comment from elsewhere in this thread
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.
Awesome game. I was high on cannabis when I played it, and managed to beat it in one sitting about 10 years ago. I want to play it while high on shrooms, that would be even crazier.
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
What Remains of Edith Finch. A psychological horror game that REALLY sucks you in. As you play, there is a lot of stuff that doesn’t make any sense, but there’s a secret (disturbing) meaning behind it all.
I spent a good chunk of a Saturday going through it and there’s no need to do it again, but it was a great ride!
And if you do want more try out Unfinished Swan.
The Unfinished Swan is such a hidden gem, honestly. I never hear anyone talk about it. Very unique style and mechanics and an endearing story. Some beautiful environments too. And pretty short, so not a big commitment.
It’s a great, great game.
Thanks for pointing that out, I had never heard of that one. I looked it up and I’ll definitely check it out.
I am thinking of replaying Edith Finch because I must have missed a lot of details by the time I realised what the story was about.
Also take a look at: The Suicide of Rachel Foster
It’s currently 90% off on steam at 1.79USD
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a little older but it kind of reminds me of Edith Finch in vibes. It’s also really beautiful.
Oh man - I loved WRoEF, but the bathtub segment has ensured I can never play it again.
Oh yeah. They aren’t subtle in that one, you know what’s coming and I think I just muttered “oh no. Oh no. Oh no.” through the whole thing.
Puzzlers usually fall into that category. If that’s up your alley you should try the Talos Principle.
My favourite game of all time, hands down.
Why do i keep bouncing off this game? I keep hearing it’s great and then i play a bit and get bored. I don’t get far. Is there a point i need to get to where the story opens up?
Much like the gameplay itself, the story is another puzzle. You assemble the story from bits of emails and voice recordings that you find around the place.
There’s some reading required to appreciate it, as you find the emails and the various philosophical texts around the place. If you get bored, maybe that just isn’t for you. But I’d encourage you to give it a shot and see the story as another puzzle.
Thanks, i didn’t know to look for the story as a puzzle as well. It might not be for me, but Ill know what to expect next time and i can give it an honest go
If you don’t already know… the “corrupt” text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I’ll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.
That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn’t fun for you - it’s not gonna get any better.
I’ve played it once, waited a few years until I forgot the solution to all puzzles, and then played it again.
I’ll probably replay it again a few more years from now. I love that game.
Subnautica.
I found it to be one of the best games I have ever played with a fantastic story that really pulled me in. If you do decide to play it, look up nothing. As in don’t even google it because it’s a slightly older game and people spoil the entire thing.
Great game, too little story line and too much grind to replay.
It’s actually very granular on the grind difficulty. There’s a story only mode that removes the survival elements and leaves only the material gathering for crafting. There’s also a creative mode where you don’t even have to gather materials and can just build whatever and go wherever and see all the story bits with almost no challenge at all. You choose how you want to go at it.
For me, it wasn’t just the story, but also just randomly going out and exploring, checking things out, and finding cool (and sometimes scary) things.
It’s one of those games that I’m hoping in like 10 years or something I’ll have forgotten enough of it that if I go play it again it’ll be mostly all new again.
Firewatch
I replied it after several years cause of nostalgia, but yeah first time is where it is at!
First impressions, I thought it was going to be a boring on-rails walk simulator.
Then I teared up at the end with Delilah. I can’t believe how good the acting is for me to fall in love with a voice.
Great example
Firewatch. Road 96.
Road 96
Huh? The point of that game is being a narrative roguelite, everytime you start out different and have different choices to make.
I felt like the gimmick in Road 96 wasn’t worth it.
It feels more like window dressing. Turning night into day. Or instead of looking for a walkie talkie, it’s batteries.
The beats are too specific and if you had one motorcycle minigame, you had them all.
Same with firewatch.
Firewatch has 1 ending and only pretty small changes depending on dialog.
How “bad” is the walking simulator aspect in these games? Is it mostly just walking or is there actual gameplay?
Bad if you hate it, good if you like it.
I like walking simulator and Firewatch is great. Lacking gameplay doesn’t mean it is bad.
What Remains of Edith Finch is even better.
I haven’t really tried a walking sim before but I suspect I’ll find it boring - considering the reviews on What Remains of Edith Finch, I’m statistically unlikely to dislike it though, so I guess I’ll give it a shot and see what I think :)
If you like exploration and discovery, good “walking simulators” are actually really compelling.
If you don’t like games without action, they’re going to feel rather boring.
I definitely recommend trying one, at least.
Personally I thought What Remains Of Edith Finch was boring as hell as none of the emotional points hit and the super-low-fi sequences made the game feel almost buggy and as a result ruined a lot of the atmosphere.
OTOH, I loved Firewatch, a great short interactive story about someone working in isolation and trying to get away from their life.
Try changing your mindset when you approach the game, treat it like an interactive exploration or a digital toy. You might get into it more easily doing that.
I would not recommend Road 96 although some people seem to like it.
Instead, I would suggest “As Dusk Falls”.
I hate the term “walking simulator”. It’s totally missing the point. They’re never about walking, but about discovery. Outer Wilds is a “walking simulator” in that there’s no combat and traversal is the only “action” you take. That’s definitely not what Outer Wilds is about though, right? That term should probably die.
Road 96 has quite a bit of replay ability as you’re unlikely to get 100% of all stories on the first playthrough.
Tunic is a solid 10-15 hour adventure game, and I highly recommend playing without spoilers as several experiences are information-locked like Outer Wilds. It’s an isometric adventure game heavily inspired by Zelda with some Souls influence bleeding into the lore, mechanics, and boss fights. Replayability is limited to speedrunning and challenge runs.
Bastion is a wonderful adventure game with a heavy focus on combat. It’s a precursor to Hades from the same developer, and shares the same mechanical DNA minus the rogue-lite elements that Hades introduced. The followup game, Transistor, is also worth checking out, though it didn’t quite hit the same highs for me as Bastion. Both are 10-20 hour adventures with limited replayability if you want to achievement hunt.
More games to check out:
Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2
Journey, Abzu, and The Pathless
Subnautica
Saying Tunic has zero replayability is absolutely insane to me. IT EVEN HAS A NEW GAME PLUS!!
I kind of agree with OC’s sentiment. The game is a masterpiece, but the puzzle solving and metagame is half of the game, if not more. Once you’ve solved that, replaying it is just going through the motions of a pretty OK action adventure game. I dunno.
It’s like playing Braid after beating it. Another masterpiece of a game! You could speed run it—which I was very much into—but the thought of playing it again after that just doesn’t interest me. It’s just going through the motions.
That being said, its been years and years since I’ve played it and there’s a new anniversary edition coming out with new content. I’m almost certainly going to buy it.
I loved the built-in speed run of that game. You only had 45 minutes to beat the whole thing. The first time I accomplished that, my time was 44:58 and some change! I lost my shit that I managed to juuuust squeak in a win! 😂
I ended up getting it down to 37 minutes. There are so many tricks in that game to speed it up. I wonder what the official best time is. Back in the Xbox 360 days there were a lot of cheaters using the back-end to submit bullshit scores. Or people doing save trading and all having the exact same time down to 1/100 of a second.
I’ve got my Tunic time down quite a bit too, and since your upgrades carry over I’m super OP with my health, magic, and stamina spanning basically the entire screen lol. To me it’s fun to go in and just do a run here and there. Personal preference obviously but there’s certainly replayability there.
NG+ is optional since it’s not required to finish the game or appreciate the story. It’s there for the challenge.
“Finishing the game” comes before the “replayability” aspect though. You finish the game first, THEN you see if it’s replayable. So… Yes, I completely agree? Replaying is usually always optional lol
I would highly recommend Tunic as well, played through with a GF and it’s an amazing game! (Single player though)
I would somewhat disagree with Subnautica. There are lots of different settings you can tweak to make the game harder or more survival-oriented that might warrant a replay (although probably only one) if your first play-through was on a simpler/easier mode. Plus there are the creation modes where you can create your own base without restrictions, which sort of counts as replay? Mostly though the setting in Subnautica is quite unique, and short of playing Below Zero you won’t be able to find that vibe anywhere without playing the game again. However as a story-oriented game I’d agree it has lower-than-average replay value.
I find Subnautica has less replayability than other survival games since the map and questline is static. Once you know where everything is and you’ve seen all the plot beats there’s not much reason to play the game again unless you want to challenge yourself with a speedrun or, as you said, one of the harder difficulties.
I wouldn’t consider creative mode or sandbox mode to be a core part of the game. They’re great for fucking around or as an extended tutorial, but I see them more as external tools than as part of the game experience proper.
For me the story really drew me in. It was like watching Terminator 1 and 2 for the first time - you had no idea where it was going but it was going to be awesome.
I have watched both movies again, and while they are great they don’t hit the same as the first time.
I would absolutely consider replaying subnautica if managing inventories wasn’t so bad. Playing it to build up a base would be fun if it wasn’t such a frustrating process to deal with. I think all crafting should pull from all inventories in your base, and also preferably adding inventories just increases the size of one large abstract storage system of your base that you don’t need to worry about organizing.
As it is, once the story was done I was done. I had become so annoyed with building out my bases that I just couldn’t be bothered to do it again.
I definitely played through Bastion at least thrice. There is enough build variety that you can make another playthrough feel totally different, not to mention the difficulty modifiers. First game that I took the time to 100% for achievements.
Bastion’s story doesn’t necessitate multiple plays. Sure, it’s fun to play through again and try different builds. I’ve also 100%'ed the game.
The important thing, I think, for OP’s question is that it can be finished in one play. It has a satisfying ending from which the player can set down the game and move on.
+1 for Tunic especially if you go for all of the late game puzzles and other stuff that I shall not spoil. I have the Tunic plushy up on my shelf!
For Tunic - you will 100% be expected to play like an old school game. So keep physical paper notes of what you see or you’ll be going back and forth.
+1 for Tunic. Fantastic game. Not too long. Get it on sale.
I played it on my Steam Deck when I had Covid and was banished from my bedroom so I didn’t get my wife sick. 😅
Superliminal - once you know the puzzles you know the puzzles, till then it has its fair share of mind bending moments. Speedrunning it is fun though
Absolutely this! I hate that I now know how to think in the Superliminal world.
The Witness has a lot of generative puzzles that I guess technically are replayable, but you can’t go back to before the moments of joy of discovery and that’s the core of what made that game incredible to me
If you want a good laugh, check out The Looker. It’s a short satire of the Witness, free on Steam
I did play the Witness, though the ending was quite disappointing to me. I got kind of tired of the (imo) very similar puzzles throughout the game.
Agreed. By the end, i was just looking up the solutions so i can just figure out what the heck happened on the island, only to be met with the biggest let-down in my personal gaming history. Game went from an 9/10 to a 3/10 just on the ending alone.
A problem with The Witness is that the game’s single biggest excitement comes from a twist that revealing completely spoils
spoiler
The environment puzzles
So it’s stuck in the position of letting 80% of its player base walk right past the best part, or preserving the moment of discovery.
I’m personally grateful it has the integrity to let me find it on my own, but it’s also a bummer since at least two of my friends beat it without ever realizing
Brothers, a tale of two sons. It’s a 2h ish long story, really good.
Ugh - this game!
I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I’ve seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I’m considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can’t.
The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I’d put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.
I’ve played this game all the way through 3 times. The only thing that affects its replayability is the long-term emotional damage.
Thomas was alone.(I recommend this one up there with obra dinn)
Spec ops the line
Dlc quest
Limbo
For something quite a bit different, amnesia the dark decent.
This one might be controversial, but the original BioShock, I played it how I wanted, and >! Got the good ending!< And never felt the desire to pick it up. If you’re a completionist on the first run, and it isn’t very difficult to do (very rewarding I’d say), then there’s 0 reason to pick it up again. I felt the same about replaying BioShock infinite, but more because I just didn’t want to play it again (I felt like it had much more story to offer, and sidequests to do, but I didn’t get any of the same satisfactions from the game, first one was done and wrapped up nicely, third one was barely unraveled and I chose to read other people’s ideas of how it had ended)
Spec Ops The Line has sadly been delisted and is no longer available for purchase. If you already got it, you’re fine, but the only way to get a copy now is 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I played amnesia exactly once and still haven’t brought myself to replay it. I tried a year ago (originally played in 2012) and, while I admit I didn’t give it much effort to relearn the mazes, I didn’t feel too motivated still remembering most of the plot and of course the finale.
I played through Limbo twice, but it didn’t hit quite the same way the second time around.
Play “Inside” by the same team
And cocoon
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.
Untitled Goose Game
once you played it, or even just watched it, it loses the initial trill.
I still have fun watching other people discover it.
When people are over at my house and we are just hanging around doing nothing I like to put on a game and toss a controller to someone with no explanation and just let them play while everyone watches. Goose Game, Donut County, ABZU and Journey are always a hit even for people that aren’t normally into video games.
Am I missing something? I tried it for 5 minutes and felt like I didn’t understand?
I put it in the Goat Simulator territory of twitch players love it because it’s great for streaming and doing weird shit.
It’s a puzzle game of working out how to complete your to-do list, so that the next area unlocks. Beyond its meme status, I do think it’s a very smartly designed puzzler, with lots of experimentation and observation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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