The Witness.

Now to dive into this thread for my next play 👀

Kingdom Shell currently, holy crap what a bizarre and beautiful world.

I predict that Cyberpunk 2077 will become this game for me in like 3-5 years

Mass Effect. I didn’t get far in the original. Played the Legendary Edition trilogy all the way through. Went back to the original. It’s the tank (Mako). It dies in like 2-3 hits and you get less XP for kills in it. It’s just not fun and they never fixed it in the original. Legendary fixes it. At the very least, it’s balanced to the game’s difficulty setting. Where in the original it’s stuck on the hardest setting, but only for the Mako missions.

Original came out in like 2007, Legendary came out in like 2016. Might be off by a year or two with one or both.

Witcher 3. It had me for a bit then lost interest again. But, I'm planning on trying again.

Both Project Zomboid and Old School Runescape. Dropped both of them quick the first time around and now they are the only two games I play

Witcher 2, baldur's gate 3, cities skylines.

Baldur's Gate 3. I tried it when it was in early access and thought it was too clunky. Tried it again a few months ago, absolutely love it.

Baldurs Gate 3. When I first saw it on the Fitgirl website I thought it was boring DnD stuff. A month ago I decided to try it out and have been hooked on it like crack.

Oh it's a distant memory now, but I remember the first time I played RimWorld I bailed out again in less than an hour and didn't touch it again for at least a year

Fast forward to now and I think it's claimed 1500h of my time

FTL the space dogfight roguelike. Took me 10 years to revisit and I've gotten more than a hundred hours in it since then

Kenshi. I got it in 2013. It seemed interesing but ran so badly on my machine at the time that I gave up on it. Played it again when I got a better PC and some religious people came around to preach and hand out bibles, I put them in a skin peeler.

The Citadel. I didn't realize how fast the combat loop was at first. The first level was setup like a stop and pop shooter, but it's really a run and gun style.

witcher 3

first time playing, i got to the bloody baron and for whatever reason i can't explain, felt like it wasn't resonating with me. went back some time later and was hooked enough to finish the main game and all DLCs.

fucking fantastic game

Fallout 3. When I first played it, it bothered me that there was no weather. Stopped playing it for like 2 years. Started a new game finished it, all the side quests, and the DLCs because suddenly I was just into it.

Outer Wilds. Wandering around in the village in the beginning was a bit boring so I put it down. Took it up again some days or weeks later and continued to play until I found the thorny seed on my home planet. That was the point where I was hooked and at the end it became one of my favourite games of all time.

Schedule 1, tried it early alpha, meh has potential, tried it few months ago, amazing!

Not a game, but as a Fallout fan I hated the show at first. The acting is bad and everything looks too shiny and new to be 200 years old (plus I don't like how the show is inspired more by Fallout 4 than any other game in the series). But I gave it another chance a year later, and it's growing on me. Binged the first season in a a few days. Sure beats a lot of the other crap on TV these days.

Dragon Age Origins. My third try it finally clicked, but a year after I bought it!

Stardew valley was this game for me. I basically sped through getting married and then put the game down after maybe 20 or so hours. Then I got it on switch and have over 1.5k hours

HBS Battletech

This happened to me with three games:

• Hollow Knight
• Steamworld Heist
• Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

In each case the game just didn’t gel with me on the initial play, even if I could objectively tell it was a quality game.

Currently playing through Stranger of Paradise again now. I think I expected a more traditionally “Final Fantasy” game my first time through and dropped it at 10 hours. Started fresh recently and am tearing past where I was and playing it enthusiastically now, it’s a lot of fun.

I’ve played some souls-like games in the interim which helped with the general gameplay loop and control scheme. Also have upgraded hardware since my first run, which makes a big difference as the game was previously a shimmery mess full of slowdowns.

Factorio. I really didnt understand it when It was first released. Got to my first steam generator and quit.

Freaking love this game now, so many hours. Conveyor belts are the same as happiness.

Dark Souls

Eventually went back to it after beating Bloodborne.

Guild Wars 2. Didn't click with it at launch, tried it again a few months ago and oh my god so much has changed in over 13 years. I'm still playing plenty of other games but it's nice to have an MMO (without monthly fees or any kind of FOMO) to come back to every couple of weeks.

Grounded. It initially felt impossible cuz early game practically every enemy one-shots you. Abandoned it for a while, then a friend played it and told me the secret is to learn all the movesets and perfect parry every single hit, and I was like "that sounds unreasonably difficult", and then immediately played it for like nine hours straight.

Dark Souls. Bounced off it a bunch of times on PS3 and PC, then got the remaster on Switch and it got its hooks into me and never really let go.

Hollow Knight

Bought it not long after it came out because I was so in awe with the visual style. Played it for some hours and thought it was fun, but it was not clicking with me as much as I thought it would. It got even worse when I got stuck in the progression. I put the game down and did not play it for a while. Fast forward 3 months and I decide to pick it up again. For some reason this time I found out where to go next and from that moment I could not stop playing it. I could not believe how vast the exploration felt. To this day it is still my favourite game of all time.

Baldurs Gate 2. Never played the first and didn’t know D&D so it was a LOT to get used when Final Fantasy was the most complicated RPG I’d played before trying it.

Fumbled the intro dungeon and just couldn’t get into it so it sat in a drawer for awhile. Then Throne of Baal was announced and for some reason I gave it another try and got SUPER into it. No idea how many times I’ve played through it now. The engine really doesn’t hold up well but I love the characters so much.

The Witcher 3. First couple of times it didn’t click. Now it remains one of my favorites.

Disco Elysium.

First go was after finally playing Planescape : Torment and I just wasn't in the mood for another text heavy game, even though it came highly recommended and had some voiceacting from some podcasters I knew about.

Then the Final Cut came out with all the professional voice acting and it was absolutely excellent.

Skyrim.

I couldn't stand the ultra hype. I didn't see anything special about the game. To me it just looked like a dumbed down fantasy Fallout without guns.

Then like a decade later I picked it again.
Ended up first playing hundreds of hours on normal, then hundreds more on VR.