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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

It may not meet your criteria for non-violent, or I suspect your kids requirement for interest but... you never know.

"Return of the Obra Dinn" has some of the finest game story telling I have ever experienced, the story it told was ok, a good serviceable story, but nothing exceptional. However the way it was told was amazing, I found it a highly satisfying experience.

Made by Lucus Pope who also made "Papers Please"

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I was really enjoying Obra Dinn until I took a break from it. A few weeks away, I simply couldn’t find my place in the story/puzzle/mystery and was too stuck to move on.

I had to binge it for that reason. I kept telling myself to slow down, take the time to enjoy it, while actually going, hurry up or you will forget important details.

I also find I have to read books in one or two settings, I just loose the plot if it takes longer than that.

Games really, really need something to solve this. I can't tell you the number of games I've had to start over.

A lot of games I feel like just need a way to place custom notes and pictures on the map. Kind of like pins/stamps in Breath of the Wild, except better.

More and more games nowadays have a little recap during the loading screens when you load a save file.

I've even seen games that explicitly say "you haven't loaded this save in a while. Do you want a refresher?"

It's a cool idea and seems to me to solve the problem of "where was I" after a break, but it hasn't caught on fully yet.

The FFXIII series did this really well. I took a year to finish FFXIII, and even with its complicated plot I was able to follow it because of the recaps that would be presented to me every time I'd start the game up. I think it's the best Final Fantasy ever made.

Dragon Quest 11 did a great job with these recaps. Someone else already gushed about how great they are: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/dragon-quest-xi-recap-featu...

It's pretty graphic (nothing for the kids), but also came to my mind immediately.

Obra Dinn is fantastic! I've not encounter anything similar to its mechanic elsewhere and I totally agree on the storytelling. It is definitely a bit gruesome at parts (although in a lofi way), but in service of unraveling a mystery in retrospect rather than enacting any sort of violence.

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