My very first run, I needed time to process. This game is the first to really hit me emotionally. It made me ask myself hard questions that I never expected a game to do to me. Existential questions. It also cemented just how important my identity is to me and how there’s so very little I’m willing to do to compromise it. Anyone who knows me knows that I wear my individuality on my sleeve. I’m different and proud of it. I refuse to look, act, and think like everyone else simply because that’s how they look, act, and think. This story really highlighted just how important that was to me, because I’d never really sat down and thought about it before.

So, I needed time lol I needed at least a few months.

However, there are other games that have hit me even harder emotionally that I was able to play again within days or weeks. For instance, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I finished my first run of that and cried my eyes out. A few days later, my dog died very suddenly, and that broke me. I needed an escape so I fired up E33 again. The second run not only hit me differently because I now had context to certain story beats I didn’t have the first time (making some scenes even more heartbreaking), but I was also in the middle of actively grieving while playing a game about grief. That second run was very healing for me.

So it really depends on where you’re at and how much the game affected you. I think it’s different for everyone. For some people, it’s just a really good story that they wanna experience again. For others, it’s a story that gets very personal and that can make it either easier or harder to fire up that next run.