Play it again

For years now, publishers have obsessed over how to keep the disc in your tray and off your trade-in pile, expanding and tinkering with their games long after release in the hope that you’ll stick around forever. That, however, is a difficult thing to get right, and a very expensive business. A far more cost-effective solution, as this month’s Play crop proves, is to simply dump you back at the start of the game as often as humanly possible.

In the old days, this was simply how things worked. You got as far as your skills could take you, then when you ran out of lives or credits, you had to start over. We see this ethos in Dead Cells (p112), a game that makes clear its Roguelike structure within seconds – first by showing you a room full of empty glass jars to be filled with gear that will persist across playthroughs, and then by having one of its nails-hard enemies kill you really, really quickly.

The Persistence (p116) is a little more subtle about it, if only because it’s played in VR, where few games to date have been designed with replay value in mind. Yet once the development community spends some time with this frightful sci-fi Roguelike, we expect things may change. Then there’s

Hollow Knight (p114), a game we missed on PC but whose Switch re-release has proven so intoxicating that we had to find space for it here to justify all the late nights it’s caused. While not a Roguelike, it takes from Dark Souls a penchant for severely punishing your mistakes. We already know its dark, mysterious corners like the backs of our hands. Needless to say, it’s not always an effective solution.

Octopath Traveler’s (p104) hook is that it tells eight stories, yet if you want to see them all, you’ll have to play through pretty much the same game eight times. It’s to the game’s great credit that it just about gets away with it.