Game Features I Would Love to Encounter More Often

When I was younger, I poured a lot of time and energy into gaming. I had the time to spare. So I didn’t think much of dumping a hundred plus hours into something to make a small amount of progress. But now that I’m older and I have a mortgage, among other bills, to pay, I just don’t have the same amount of time to spend on games as I used to.

As a result, I tend to either play shorter games or games that allow me to progress in small chunks. I put over 100 hours into Hades, for example. But because you can complete a run in that game in between 20 – 60 minutes, I could play it in little fits and spurts without feeling like I was spinning in circles.

More recently, I’ve put about 80 hours into Hollow Knight. This is a game that requires a bit more patience, because you have to learn the patterns for various boss fights. But for the most part, I can spend an hour exploring the map and feel like I got somewhere.

Most of the games I play these days are narrative games. Because it’s easy to do a couple of chapters and then pause for awhile. As time goes on, a clear set of game features have proven particularly useful in accommodating my limited game time. And since I’ve hit an unlucky string of games lacking these helpful features, it feels like they bear mentioning.

A Chapter Select Feature

Lots of narrative-centric games want your choices to matter. So lots of games these days feature auto-save functions that trigger as soon as you make a decision. That way you can’t go back and try the other option unless you do something extreme like crash out of the game.

I understand why game devs sometimes don’t want to allow save scumming. But at the same time, I don’t always want to re-play a 20 hour game just so I can make one or two different choices or see a different outcome.

The Chapter Select function seems like the best middle-ground for this conundrum. Usually it unlocks after you play through the entire game once. That way you can go back to a previous chapter and choose a branching narrative path. Chapter Select functions are particularly good for achievement hunting when a game has a good and bad ending. I don’t like making the ‘bad’ choices, so being able to rush through it quickly encourages me to see that content.

I have actually reached a point in my gaming life where I feel like every game should feature either a Quick Save button OR a Chapter Select function. Having neither represents a lack of respect for my time.

The biggest offender for me recently was the Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. I really wanted to love that game. But it trapped me into what felt like a bad choice at the end. I didn’t realize until too late that I made the ‘wrong’ narrative choice. But in order to go back and get the ending I wanted, I would have to re-start the entire game and pour an entire 20 extra hours into one different choice. No thanks.

A Quick Save Function

Dating sims pretty much rely on the Quick Save button. I think it’s generally expected among dating sim devs that players will save before a choice and quickly re-load if it doesn’t take them down the path they want. I’m not sure how else people would ever figure out the perfect route to love.

But Quick Saves have a lot of uses outside of dating sims. In fact, the Quick Save function is the only reason I’ve been able to play Baulder’s Gate. That game is so dense with various options and content, it takes a long time to explore everything available. Sometimes I don’t want to re-play an entire dungeon just so I can re-do a conversation. And I probably won’t re-play the game 60 times (no matter how much I might want to).

Quick Save has saved me a lot of trouble outside of conversation options too, because I can hit the button just before a difficult challenge. If I fail, which happens often, I can reload my quick save and try again. The same is true if I save just before a difficult battle. It becomes easy to re-load and try a new strategy.

Some people might consider this ‘cheating’ or think that quick saves make a game too easy. But I actually had to abandon the game Outer Wilds because it lacks a quick save function. I spent hours re-playing the same part of the game trying to reach the final destination necessary to progress the game, and I just don’t have the skill. Being unable to cut through the time sink of getting back into position to make a big jump or piloting maneuver eventually made me give up on the game.

A Fast-Forward Button

Another regular function of dating sims. The fast-forward button lets you skip through dialogue quickly. Lots of narrative adventure games like Baulder’s Gate will let you skip through dialogue if you hit a specific button. But it’s not quite the same.

The best fast-forward buttons remember the dialogue you’ve already encountered during other playthroughs and automatically stop fast-forwarding when you encounter new dialogue. When you’re playing through a game with a dozen branches and some scenes vary only slightly, this is an invaluable tool for making sure you’ve found new content. Not to mention it prevents the need to read the same dialogue over and over.

I don’t think a fast-forward button is right for every style of game. This feature probably belongs mostly to the realm of visual novel and dating sim style games. But I would say that every narrative-style game should have either a chapter select or a fast-forward button (if not both). Re-playability is a valuable aspect of games, and I’m sure every dev wants players to keep engaging with their game several times. But if it’s not convenient, lots of players won’t bother.

A Clear Path to a Chosen Branch

This is less of a feature and more of a design choice. One of the reasons I’m drawn to narrative games is the branching pathways. I like to see how making a different choice or siding with a different character will affect the overall outcome of a game.

Sometimes this can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes playing through multiple branches of the same game reveals how little changes based on your choices. And sometimes a scene will change by only a couple of lines or more, although you hope the final outcome will still end up drastically different to some degree.

But the most frustrating aspect of a narrative game is being blocked from exploring a path or choice you haven’t tried yet. Recently I played Harmony: the Fall of Reverie. It was an interesting game because it basically exposed you to the graphical flow chart of the narrative. The idea was that you could plan ahead the path you wanted to take through the narrative choices to get a specific outcome.

Yet it seemed at every chapter, certain paths were blocked. The game warns you that making certain choices will make others impossible, and that’s fair. But what felt unfair was plotting a path through the flow chart only to discover that the crystals didn’t work as anticipated. Several times I found myself blocked into an outcome I didn’t want. And my only choice was to start over and re-play a large chunk of the narrative or accept a crummy outcome I didn’t want. I wasn’t a fan of either, needless to say.

While it’s safe to say that not every feature fits for every style of game, I appreciate most games that respect the time and energy I’m going to spend on them and make it easier for me to continue to engage with their content.