Two initially jump to mind for me.
Outer Wilds took me three attempts to get into, but when it did…wow. Its a game that I is definitely more than the sum of it’s parts, and one that I’d argue is genuinely beautiful in it’s story and how it tells that story.
That said, once you’ve worked out the games mystery; it’s story, it’s tricks, timing and logistics, I wonder how more pull the game would have.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a game that I spend a lot of my time thinking about. The music, the atmosphere and of course, the games moment to moment gameplay.
Those puzzles will likely (hopefully) melt from my mind at some point, but even then I fear that initial sense of excitement and intrigue will be lost.
As much as I plan on going back to it at some point, I’m not sure a game of it’s nature is all that well suited to additional playthroughs unfortunately.
Everyone is here mentioning really good games. Im going to be dead honest: Minecraft. I remember dropping into this huge unknown world when the game had just dropped, and you didn’t know anything about anything. There weren’t youtube tutorials on how to craft all kinds of stuff yet, you didn’t know what the scary things trying to kill you at night were. All you knew was that you could dig and cut trees and build stuff, and that there was some scary shit out there in the dark trying to get you.
It was just the perfect open-world exploration game.