Mopping up

The true measure of a good game is how hard you find it to call it finished. Most of the time, when the credits roll, you move on to the next game in your pile of shame. But every so often, you find a game you can’t quite let go of. Maybe it’s an open-world game that lets you back in after the final mission to chip away at your quest log; perhaps it’s an action game that reloads your save just before the point of no return. There might be a New Game+ mode, or a character-class system that offers a completely different second (or third, or fourth) playthrough. Most games offer something like this these days; only rarely do we take them up on it.

Even rarer is the sort of game whose runtime you deliberately extend from the start: hoovering up sidequests and stripping an area clean of treasures before moving on. This month yields two of them. Given the 18-year wait, it seems inappropriate to sprint through Shenmue III (p98), and it is a game that eagerly rewards the leaden-footed explorer. And with our initial failed sprint to the finish line in Death Stranding (p102) now over, we appreciate the benefits of taking our time in Hideo Kojima’s confounding game, which for all its pervasive threats is an oddly serene work.

We’ve been doing some mopping up of our own this month: Edge has a pile of shame too. In our monthly sprints to the mag-production finish line, our gaze invariably passes over a few games that we ought to have covered. These things nag at you, so with the Q4 rush of releases easing up, now’s a good time to put things right. We’re starting a new tradition: in our annual awards issue we’ll devote space in Play to a few highlights we missed out on during the preceding 12 months, clearing out the past year’s questlog before moving onto the next chapter. We’ll see you there.