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What's a game that you wish you could play again for the first time? Why?
Going off of my recent Outer Wilds thread (spoiler warning on that topic), what are some games that you wish you could play again for the first time? What about the game makes you feel that way?
Feel free to talk about spoilers, but please flag them! The easiest way is to drop them in a details block. Markup below in case anyone needs to copy/paste:
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Games that rely on great storytelling. In no order:
The stories of these games are so good, experiencing them again for the first time would be incredible.
It's that feeling of ending a great book, where you look at the back cover, almost wistfully thinking "I'll never be able to read that for the first time again, and it's finished." There are books I wish I'd stopped reading two chapters from the end never to know how it ends, so my imagination can still spin around it unresolved.
Feel free to ask about reasons for specific games. I figured long explanations for all (especially when many are very famous) isn't that useful to most.
Partly for the same reason, Psychonauts...
Glad to see I'm not the only one who enjoyed Life is Strange 2. It gets a lot of grief for some reason.
I'll go in a slightly different direction, there's some game concept I wish I could encounter again for the first time. MMOs for example, are kind of old hat now. I encountered the concept of a massive-multiplayer game for the first time playing 10Six, and the idea of thousands of people all playing in the same world at the same time and having to watch each other's back was positively world-altering to teenage me. That game in particular had a loooong list of flaws in it's base mechanics, but it was my first run in with MMOs. City of Heroes was soon after, and also holds a special place in my heart.
Incidentally, you can still play both of them because of fans! http://www.projectvisitor.com/ https://forums.homecomingservers.com/
The old point-and-click Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures from the early 90s were hugely formative for me when I was young. Monkey Island (1 and 2), Loom, Fate of Atlantis, and Space Quest 3 are the ones I have the most fond memories of. Can't say they really hold up for me anymore, aside from a bit of nostalgia, but I would give anything to experience the raw joy that playing through those games gave me at that point in time again.
OpenTTD.
I played the hell out of that in the early 2000s. Played it on private servers for an internet forum, all day long during summer break. I played multiplayer games with the custom patchpacks. I played in OpenTTDCoop (I might still be listed as a full member on there). I've played that game for something like 15 years of my life.
Every once in a while these days I get the craving to start up a new game of it. Every time I play for maybe an hour or two, after spending another hour or two thinking and researching what new scenario I should come up with to play this time. After that I get bored again and forget about it for another few months, maybe a year. I've already played enough games, played enough different trains NewGRFs, played enough big maps and super small maps, played enough games where I've connected all industry types, or made big passenger networks, I've played before pathfinding signals (the pre-signal era), and I've played before cargodist (I remember cargodest!).
I wish I could go back to being that 15/16 year old binging it all day long, making a huge train network and having to optimize it, trying to make it work against the operational constraints. It never hits for me the same way now, and I have more than enough things vying for my attention and time. I can't go back to it in the same way, even though the game has only gotten better since then.
I've never played another game like it (aside from Factorio, maybe that was a lie on my part), and I'm not sure I ever will -- but I can never play it in the same way again. For me it's done.
Slime Rancher. It's so cheerful and fun, I wish it was more replayable. The dopamine high that game gave me left me with an itch that couldn't be scratched once I finished my ranch and got all the achievements. It was almost low-key scary the sense of loss I had for a few days after I had done everything and knew I couldn't ever play the game the same way again.
I'm sure you are probably aware, but just in case you were not Slime Rancher 2 is coming Fall 2022.
I played myself by getting it in early access, so I saw the game in pieces and never quite enjoyed the full experience. It's a great game.
I have two:
Doom: I remember playing this on a friend's computer with headphones on. The fear I felt when I could hear that snorting sound coming from "over there," is the only time I've felt that in any game since. It made the game feel like I was really there and that I could really die :)
WoW: I played it at launch on an RP server. My first 1-60 character experience was amazing. The guild I was part of did a lot of darker RP I wasn't really interested in, so I left the guild and adventured across Azeroth guildless, making friends, instigating stealth dungeon crawls, playing a naive, happy go lucky character who made up dumb poetry. I explored every nook and cranny, had favorite "sleeping" spots, set up contests like "what's a lemon?" told outrageous lies, and am still friends with some of the people I met then. I wish I could experience that again.
I mentioned in another thread that I really liked narrative and story in games, and that means that most of the games I like playing are inherently unreplayable. So I guess my answer to this question is most of them.
Probably on top of the list is Iconoclasts. It's got some really great twists and turns and goes into dark places. As it is I feel like it's a fever dream because there's so few people who have actually played it, let alone enjoyed it the same way I did.
Ditto, but unfortunately that doesn't just apply to DF, but pretty much every colony sim, city-builder, tycoon, grand strategy, and 4X game I have ever played too. Once I figure out all the mechanics, and how to effectively optimize my gameplay, they tend to lose a lot of their charm and replayability for me. And the only way to really recapture the magic of that initial discovery period is to find a new one to play, or wait for a DLC that adds enough new stuff to rekindle my interest. But on the plus side, the market is thankfully flooded with decent games in that vein, and almost always has been (even going all the way back to the BBS days). :)
Return of the Obra Dinn,
This game caught me off guard. I was expecting a simple puzzle game and ended up with one of the most unique and memorable gaming experiences I've had. I would now rate this as one of my top games.
The premise is simple enough: determine the cause of death for each individual aboard the mysteriously returned ghost ship, the Obra Dinn. You are given a logbook to fill, which includes some background information of the ship and crew, and a special pocketwatch which can be used on a corpse to replay audio of the moments just before their death, and then take the player to the moment of death frozen in time.
You slowly work backwards through key moments leading to the demise of various crew members, as you unravel the mystery behind the Obra Dinn. I would love to be able to experience this mystery again for the first time, and absolutely recommend that you give this game a try.
I'll let this sit unused for a few more years I think. It's sad that it's so memorable. I still remember a bunch of the critical clues and plot points. My hope is in a few years I can enjoy it again as if it was almost a new game.
I wish I could play Portal 2 for the first time.
There's a free mod for it that adds basically a entirely new singleplayer arc. see here