Giving games a second (or seventh) chance
Sometimes a game comes along that you feel like you will fall in love with but things just don’t seem to click. That was exactly how I felt with Death Stranding the first time I played it. I remember leading up to release I followed every news article, I listened to the perfectly crafted album from some of my favourite artists on repeat, I attended the Death Stranding experience, saw previews at games events and yet there I was, finally playing it and something felt off. Maybe I just didn’t have the patience to deal with the overly lengthy tutorial. Maybe I was confused by endlessly ridiculous jargon coming from the characters mouths. Or hey maybe I was just left baffled with the needless monster energy placement but it ended up being a short lived experience that I’d given up with in just a few hours. I was naturally disappointed yet never fully defeated. Every year or so I’d return to try and see if I was missing something but only to find myself hitting the same stumbling blocks again and again.
It wasn’t until the release of the sequel that something inside me changed, a true second wind. I felt a strong motivation and things finally clicked into place. I was beginning to understand and enjoy this game like never before. At the time of writing I’ve just passed Chapter 3 so still a long way to go but its given me motivation to write this article because this isn’t just a one time thing. Some of my favourite games of the past few years have been ones that I’ve picked back up after years of neglect or ones that I’ve restarted entirely. You see sometimes its not the game that’s the problem, its me (Usually me). So lets talk about how not clicking with something at first doesn’t have to spell the end.
In fact this year has been the year of second chances. With my ever dwindling excitement to be involved with the discourse of new games I’ve taken the time to go back to old games I never got around to finishing the first time. The first one of the year involved my complicated relationship with the last of us series. You see I’ve always respected that they are masterpieces of storytelling in the genre but never personally put them on the pedistool that I see other people do. However with the release of the second series of the HBO show I thought now would be the perfect time to see it through till the end.
The first time I played it was on release during the pandemic and I was blown away by the technical achievement and the massive improvement to the combat. However in terms of mindframe, a game as hopeless in tone understandably just didn’t hit quite right with me. I managed to make it through Ellie’s story but once it switched over to Abby I just didn’t have it in me to go all over again. So I put it down hoping to come back and finish one day soon. I’m sure I didn’t intend to wait 5 years but here I was finally playing through it again and I don’t know if its because it was the part of the game that was new to me but I was shocked to find out that it was actually Abby’s story that resonated with me the most by the time the credits rolled. The last of us Pt 2 is not a game that’s meant to be ‘enjoyed’ in the traditional sense, Abby’s story is meant to be tough to get through, you aren’t meant to want to play as her. These are all things I either didn’t understand or didn’t have the patience for the first time around but coming in with a fresh perspective really helped me to find new respect for this game and I finally got the hype, cementing it as an all time great for me.
However if you thought a 5 year gap was long then allow me to talk about my decade long journey with the Witcher 3. I remember loving the look of the Witcher 2 at the time, it just looked a bit hard to get into. So when I saw the Witcher 3 announced I was immediately on board as it was serving as both an entry point and a culmination to the series. I snapped it up on day 1 and quickly made it through the tutorial area but once the game opened up to me I felt too intimidated by the influx of exclamation markers popping up around the map. Over the next few years id try to go back and multiple times, never making it more than a few hours. This was until something crazy happened, I decided to pick up the heavily downgraded switch port in 2019. However it was due to this portability factor that the game finally clicked with me and I began progressing through at a rapid rate. Over the course of a few months id sunk over 40 hours in and I was absolutely enraptured with it. The care and attention to detail in even the simplest quests, giving my choices true consequences was unrivalled to anything else I’d played. But before I could make it to the end the unthinkable happened. My save data was lost and along with that every choice I’d made and every interaction I’d ever had. So dejectedly I left it to time, never knowing how the story ends.
Fast forward to 2025 and I see the celebrations for the 10 year anniversary, so I decide to boot back up my switch version and low and behold I notice the cloud save tab. There it was, my old playthrough just sitting there like I’d never left. I couldn’t believe it. At first I was hesitant, would I still even remember what was going on? But the more I played the more it all came back to me and before I knew it I was in this world again like nothing ever happened. The next two weeks were a blur, I couldn’t remember the last time I was so infatuated with a game, it consumed me. I managed to put in another 25 hours to complete the main story (good ending and all) and it left me exhausted in the best way possible. The passage of time only added to epic scale of the story and if anything, when the credits rolled, I felt like I had grown up with this game. I had been on this grand journey but it too had been on the journey with me and my life.
Anyway I'm getting off topic here, there’s plenty of reasons to give games a second chance. Whether that’s being burnt out on a genre, needing a game that’s smaller in scale or just wanting something a little less mechanically complex. I often find it hard to play multiple games in a series one after another. A great example of that was God of War 2018. It had already taken me multiple attempts to finally finish it but when I did I immediately bought a PS5 to play Ragnarök due to my excitement. However, once I played a few hours I felt all too familiar in the world and struggled to find the motivation to continue.
So if you’ve taken anything away from this post its that I urge you to go and retry something you’ve failed at. Because you never know, it might be your (old) new favourite game.
