What to play next

You don't drop games — you play them up to the point where they start repeating. In Cyberpunk 2077 the first entry is about the atmosphere and Jackie; the second, twenty hours later, is about warehouses with the same floor plan. In ELDEN RING the delight held right up to the second identical mine. The threshold is steady: hour twenty-seven and hour thirty-four.

It isn't about length, it's about who invents the next hour. You spent seventy hours in Baldur's Gate 3 and forty-two in Hollow Knight without complaining — both are long. But there the next hour was invented by the author, while in Valheim and Stardew Valley the inventing was left to you, and both were closed before hour twenty.

Crafting and a map full of icons are one irritation for you, not two. In the entries on Valheim, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 the complaint is worded identically: the game demands labour that adds nothing. The word “tax” is yours.

What matters to you is that the mistake was yours. Hollow Knight and Celeste are described in almost the same words — “only I am ever to blame”, “a death costs half a second” — and both were played to the end. You have never finished a single game where the outcome is settled by numbers rather than hands.

You only mention music where it is doing work. Hades, Celeste and NieR:Automata — three entries where the soundtrack gets a line of its own, and in all three it is holding up a specific moment: the last room of Asphodel, the screen you were stuck on, the empty city. About beautiful music in games that didn't land you have written nothing, not once.

Writing is the only thing you will sit through length for. Disco Elysium is finished even though the first two hours made you angry, and you noted separately that you didn't skip a single line. Baldur's Gate 3 holds you for seventy hours on its companions. The moment there was less text — in act three — up came “finishing it on autopilot”.