Serious design point: most people don’t finish most games. Most adventure game players don’t finish most adventure games. HV is often described by game people as having weird pacing or frustrating design - but almost all those choices are made for this goal: finishing https://twitter.com/amalwaqar/status/1357004131987300357

Finishing is a really hard goal! You can make your game short, of course, but then it risks being shallow. You can make it easy - but then players get bored! Our idea was to make sure whatever you push forwards moves forward: tricky or simple, detailed or rushed.

The weird trade off of that is people who play games “normally” - who, say, investigate every corner and dead end before moving on - slow their own game down. We never worked out how to convince people they can just move on when they feel like it (Six literally tells you.)

Anyway. The second thing is, no one plays adventure games twice (except Unavowed). It’s really hard to, in fact, because discovery *is* the game. Outer Wilds replay? You have to wait ten years maybe. HVs “get you through” design also helps a lot with replay...

... you can do things in different orders, but each individual scene can be like by line different too! But that was more of an accident. New Game Plus was “a quick bonus idea” not something we designed for. It’s less important tho ultimately...

(For Pendragon we tried a design where the game is super short and New Game Plus is the “real” game, but a single longer playthrough might have been more compelling)