for me, it's oxygen not included, ark: survival evolved, the katamari damacy series, and occasionally the metal gear solid games
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In the conventional sense of returning to play properly, all the way through , the one game still having that draw for me is Tales of Maj'Eyal. I'll repeatedly take year long breaks or longer, without even thinking of it, then the urge will strike me to cook up another TOME character and I'll have another run or two, losing another couple of hundred hours to it. After 1600 hours and many runs there are still lots of classes and races I haven't even scratched, plus I've never tried the difficulty modes beyond Nightmare and probably never will. A true desert island game for me.
I also have a quirky tendency of returning to only a specific section or mode of a game to replay the same part over and over in a way that tickles my boredom. Back in the 2000s I would do this for certain shootouts in HL1 and HL2 to prod the AI and see what funny outcomes it would produce (although I also completed those games over and over as well), or in GTA4 to cause flaming chain reaction pile-ups of cars and see how hard I could make it for the cops to reach me through them in certain locations. Nowadays my preference is to periodically revisit a specific Batman Arkham City challenge map (Joker's Funhouse) to see if I can ever get an infinite timer reset chain going and post up a totally busted score in the hundreds of millions - I feel like I've proven I can do it in principle but it's been hundreds of attempts now and I keep making a mistake and dropping all my points at some stage.
The other game in that category now is Sekiro, funny enough, despite all the cliched claims about its lack of replay value. Since they patched in the boss gauntlets I was eager to clear them all, but a combination of ring rust and extra difficulty modifiers (demon bell, charmless, NG+2; I refuse to play it any easier) has seen me hit a brick wall at the Shura gauntlet. So every couple of months I keep returning to Sekiro to try and beat the Shura bosses, Demon and Inner Owl all in one go, but much like Batman, even though I can do them all easily enough in principle I can't string it all together. Once I do it there's more gauntlets to do and more NG runs... I unironically believe Sekiro's skill ceiling gives it a lot of replay value for non-shitters since it's simply fun.
the challenge maps are probably the best part of those games, and that's saying a lot, because those were some of the best Batman games ever made.
Agreed. I'd go as far as saying they're in the running for best Batman in any media.
One thing I especially liked about the stealth challenges was that they teach you a bunch of techniques that aren't necessarily obvious from normal gameplay, eg. using weapon boxes as lures for gel, boosted remote batarangs to knock enemies off ledges & over railings, etc. Taught me a lot that I hadn't realised in my first run. I guess the Freeze fight is another one that's good for that, especially on hard. Really forces you to set up every trick.
if you haven't played it, you might try the Deadpool game that came out around the same time as (i believe) asylum did.
similar controls, fewer, more simplistic puzzles, though a much more forgiving combo system. and a smaller, but by no means insignificant number of challenge maps.
the humor is all deadpool, though, so if you're not a fan of the merc with a mouth, you may or may not have trouble gritting your teeth through the game.
Unless you can pirate it or it's still available on Steam, good luck getting a copy. It was delisted from PSN and Xbox marketplaces and hard copies online have gone through the roof because of the last movie.