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.
I second outer wilds. It’s so sad that the game is only best experienced once. The second I heard about the dlc I jumped right into that too. Only for me to have the same feeling after I beat it. There has been no game like outer wilds that left me with such a feeling.
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.
Mass Effect trilogy. Bioshock. Deus Ex (the first game). Disco Elysium: this game made me laugh so hard I ended up crying, made me feel the entire rainbow of emotions. Wish I could experience that again). The Witcher 3.
But yeah, most of all Mass Effect. Still look forward to N7 day each year, but I would give up my entire Steam library to experience the trilogy for the first time again.
Alley Cat.
Noita, hands down! Forgetting all the secret and dark knowledge I have now and most often not gathered through my own hard work over weeks and months cannot ever be forgotten enough to allow me the joy of rediscovering it all over again…
Also FF X!