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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[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Brothers, a tale of two sons. It's a 2h ish long story, really good.

[–] swordsmanluke@programming.dev 8 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] jballs@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago

I've played this game all the way through 3 times. The only thing that affects its replayability is the long-term emotional damage.