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Stop right there! We know what you’re thinking. You’re expecting a long list of games that we wish we had never played. The stinkers that took up 20 hours we’ll never get back. Well, you’re wrong!
We are not about to be a negative Nancy and dunk on some bad games just because we wish we could wipe them from our minds. This is about positively forgetting games.
What do we mean by that? Good question. Have you ever finished a game so beautiful, that you wish that you could recapture the experience of playing it for the first time? What about solving a puzzle so clever, you know that no future playthrough will be quite as magical? That is what we mean. The games that we wish we could forget so that we could play them all over again.
Of course, nothing is stopping us from replaying our favourites for the 200th time (and don’t our backlogs know it), but we’re after titles for which the first playthrough will never be matched because the sense of discovery is gone, or the shock is no longer a surprise. We already know too much.
So, join us as we cast a memory wipe spell, look into the Neutralyzer or have our temples pressed by a Time Lord. Let’s remember the games we wish we could forget… but in a good way.
Jim Norman, Staff Writer
The correct answer is Outer Wilds. While I do wish that it played a little better on Switch, I know that no amount of replaying is ever going to capture the magic again now that I know how to [REDACTED] past the [REDACTED]. Oh, and where to go to find the [REDACTED]. And how to input the [REDACTED] into [REDACTED]. No number of performance issues would have been enough to make those discoveries anything less than amazing.
To be honest, I could say the same thing about Tunic. I can’t imagine replaying that game now that I know about The Holy Cross or about that one thing in the manual. Wipe my mind and throw me back into that one any day (just don’t make me fight the final boss again. Please).
Or, of course, I could go for Shaq-Fu: A Legend Reborn. Not to play it again, to be clear. I just want to forget that one…
Ollie Reynolds, Staff Writer
I’ve always asked myself whether I would want to play something like Resident Evil 4 again for the first time. As I’m sure many of you are aware, it’s easily my favourite game of all time, but when I play it now, there’s absolutely zero challenge involved. It’s like I’m on auto-pilot for the entire campaign. I’d love to be able to play it again and not know what’s coming behind each corner, but I think there’s a genuine concern as to whether I’d even get on with the controls in 2024. I know many newcomers have bounced off RE4 in recent years, and I totally understand why. To be honest, maybe I’m better off just breezing through the whole thing.
One game I’d absolutely love to forget and experience with fresh eyes, however, is Inside. Holy moly, that game was an absolute marvel on the first playthrough. Everything was just so weird and disturbing, there’s really nothing else quite like it. Dragging a live pig to use as a platform, avoiding the terrifying underwater Siren, and… well, I still won’t go into what happens at the end. Needless to say, it’s a game that never quite hits the same way after that first playthrough, and as thankful as I am to have experienced it, I’d like to forget just so I can discover it all over again.
Alana Hagues, Deputy Editor
I played Undertale back when it was first released on PC, so I was completely unaware of how things unfolded, or even what you needed to do to get every ending. I just knew you didn’t have to fight everything. Oh, my goodness, what a ride. Terrifying, emotional, beautiful, and funny. I haven’t dared to replay Undertale because I’m worried revisiting it will dull the emotional impact, but I would love to experience the Pacifist ending fresh all over again.
On a completely different level, Batman: Arkham Asylum. Specifically, the Scarecrow sections. The whole game has an eerie vibe to it, but nothing matches the scares of your first Scarecrow encounter. I freaked out during that cutscene with the body bag — ou know the one — and I still get nervous thinking about it now. if I had no idea it was coming again, I think I’d run out of the room. Man, what a fantastic game. I’d probably play it on something other than Switch, though…
Gavin Lane, Editor
Putting aside the temptation to wipe the Mega Drive’s Terminator 2 (not the Menacer one) from my memory, there are a load of treasured favourites to which I’d love to return. My first time trotting through Grunty’s Lair into the woodland area would be near the top of the list, but also would The Orange Box. Having not played Half-Life 2 until then, that package was an unrivalled series of jaw-dropping moments — boom, boom, boom, boom — that just kept coming. Portal and the Half-Life 2s (I barely touched TF2 – a telling sign of the Box’s quality when a game like that is an also-ran) heralded an exciting new age in gaming for me, one where the possibility space was blown wide open. To experience that anew would be a treat.
Now, if time travel were included in this imagined memory-wipe scenario, I’d go back to experience an all-timer in its industry-shifting heyday. Arcade classics like Pong or Space Invaders that I missed, or early RPGs and text adventures — how incredible it would be to play those without contextual, historical caveats and, ‘You have to remember that, at the time…’!
However, I suppose this question really calls for a game with a big twist to re-experience, in which case I’d have my mind blown once more by the KOTOR reveal (and play it on something more powerful than my iBook G4, which had serious problems rendering Dantooine with a playable frame rate). Thinking back, I can’t believe that reveal was so effective; it seems inconceivable that I didn’t see it coming, though perhaps the intervening decades of media consumption have warped my brain beyond repair. These days, it feels like the first guess I’d come up with, but back in the mid-2000s, my mind was less cynical. To innocence!
What do you make of our picks? Are there any other games that you’d love to forget? Fill out the following poll and then take a trip down memory lane (to the comments) and let us know.