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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[–] nac82@lemm.ee 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] impudentmortal@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

There are some games that are entirely story based that fit the criteria better.

One that comes to mind is To the Moon. There's some puzzle elements to make it a game but its appeal is pretty much entirely based on its story.