The Replay Notebook
Second visits, written down
Every piece here follows a full replay of a game finished at least four years earlier, with notes from both playthroughs side by side.
I finished this open-world game in a fortnight when it came out and remembered it as a place. Returning to it nine years later, the place is smaller, thinner and considerably less interesting than I recalled, and the thing I had ignored entirely turns out to be the whole game.
The village I remembered as the heart of this game takes eleven minutes to walk across and contains four buildings you can enter. What I dismissed in the first playthrough as a bookkeeping system turns out to be where every decision in the game actually happens.
Six years on, the visuals hold up better than I expected and the writing does not. A replay about a game whose central twist depended on a convention that has since become standard, and what happens to a story when its surprise becomes the default assumption.
Eight years, one genre transformation and a great deal of hardware later, this racing game plays identically to the way it played then. A replay about the small category of games that were finished rather than current, and about what that costs a developer.
One room, three plinths, and a solution I stumbled into without ever knowing why it worked. Returning to it with seven years of other games in between, the logic is obvious, which raises an awkward question about what solving a puzzle actually means.
A rooftop level I remembered as brutal took nineteen minutes on the second visit. The game did not change; a decade of patience did.
Two systems I had treated as separate turn out to be the same system. Eleven years of confident incompetence, corrected in an afternoon.