A 100-hour RPG.
I know that scares you. Hear me out.
When I was a kid I loved long car rides and I loved bedtime, because both of them let me check out of the world, climb into my own head and daydream.
God, I loved doing that.
One night I was a superhero who never managed to save anybody. The next I was a football star with one vicious rival, or a man in a spaceship fighting relativity to get home.
When you're little you're semi immortal. Death is somewhere far away and time doesn't run out.
That's how I saw everything, and that included how I played.
No game was too big, too long, too full of options. Nothing could beat me.
A 100-hour RPG was just a Tuesday.
Now a 100-hour RPG is my worst nightmare.
Actually, that's a lie. It was my worst nightmare.
Now a 100-hour RPG is just an RPG. No number in front of it.
I decide the hours, and there will be as many as the game can give me while I'm enjoying it.
Not one more, not one less.
Mind you, I've got Baldur's Gate 3 sitting here, still sealed. It's not that I don't want to play it. It's that it scares me. I know it's huge and I know I'm going to love it, which turns out to be the worst possible combination when you've spent years counting the free hours you have left.
It'll still be there. I just stopped seeing it as a mountain I'll never climb and started seeing it as something good I haven't given myself yet.
Helldivers 2 scared me too. An online game with no ending. There's no moment where the credits roll and you move on. I figured I'd aged out of games like that.
I'd been watching videos of it for weeks and one day I said screw it: if it's ten hours, ten hours, and if it's five hundred, five hundred, as long as I'm still having a good time.
It was five hundred. I had the time of my fucking life. That's the closest I've been to how playing felt when I was a kid. And I nearly missed it out of fear, or because a backlog spreadsheet was never going to allow it.
When I do play Baldur's Gate 3, maybe I'll put 150 hours into it and maybe 30. I don't care, because I know I won't be deciding that in advance.
I measure in good nights, not in hours of content. A thirty-hour game that gives you ten nights you remember beats a hundred-hour one that gives you twenty hours of filler and the feeling that you're clocking in.
I haven't got too old for long games. I got old the day I started deciding a game's hours before playing it.
For when…
…you're playing with one ear on the hallway: Valiant Hearts. The First World War told like a comic book, with four strangers and a dog that the same war drags halfway across Europe.
You can pause whenever you like and it saves itself every few minutes, so if someone calls you mid puzzle you come back to that same puzzle. The puzzles ask for your head, not your thumbs. And even if you leave it for three weeks, every chapter stands on its own and there's nothing to catch up on.
Not for you if what you want tonight is an escape: this one doesn't leave you where it found you. It's on PC, and on PlayStation, Xbox and Switch too.
Hit reply and tell me the first game you ever played without knowing how long it was. I read them all.