One of my main heuristics for if a videogame is worth playing is if it only works as a game. As in if you transported it out of the medium, it loses a lot. The adaption can still be good, hell, the game can still be good but I don’t think they’re interesting in the art form that is videogames.
My main example here’d be TLOU. The netflix adaption was pretty much a hit because of course it is. The story is entirely linear, it’s very clearly subdivided into combat -> exploration -> story, allthough sometimes the order changes. It’s all polished to a mirror sheen, the gameplay is fun, hell, the brutality ties in thematically instead of being a back-of-the-box selling point to edgelords (allthough it is also that) but functionally it could be a movie or a series and it is and it works.
So whats your videogame that only works as a videogame, and most importantly, why? I think Disco Elysium is the free bingo square for this community on this one and the reasons are endless, but I’ll start with something that surprised me recently: the new Hitman games.
They have movies but they’re shit, all the comics and tie in novels I assume are for people into hitman lore because the story isn’t really anything to write home about - mostly existing to get you to next location - but the the experience of playing hitman can’t be recreated in another format because the interactivity is such a big part of it. I mean sure, “shoot someone in the head” basically always works. It’s one of my main criticisms about a lot of games I have that give you a whole host of options to tackle a mission which all pale in effectiveness to “have a bit of aim and do headshot with the starter pistol” but somehow it’s way more fun to hoist rich dipshits by their own petard.
Beat me to it. It’s one of those games that really shows what the medium is capable of, and I feel like I’m always going to be chasing that high. Not to mention, it shows that you can make a game that values player freedom and gives you a genuine sense of exploration without needing to spend $500 million making a game world the size of Texas that ultimately just has a bunch of procedurally-generated foliage to fill up the empty space. And in fact, the intimacy of the world is what makes it feel immersive—as you play the game, you naturally begin to learn the contours of the solar system and how to navigate over and between planets, and it’s small enough that you can hold all of that in your head.
Quite a different sort of game, but I played Ocarina of Time for the first time recently, and that same quality is one of the things I really loved about it. By the time I fought Ganon, I knew every nook and cranny of Hyrule and every last NPC, and it was a bit melancholy to leave it behind. I think that intimacy is also what makes the time skip so effective. It was genuinely shocking walking into Hyrule Castle Town as Adult Link for the first time, since it’s a place you get to know well as Young Link.