Over the past couple months I’ve been playing StarVaders (2025), a roguelike deckbuilding game that’s sort of a turn-based Space Invaders fused with Slay the Spire. The first (and currently only) title from Montreal developers Pengonauts, StarVaders is fun in a way where I’ve got nothing much to say about it. I like the different characters with their different playstyles. I like figuring out the deck combos. It’s short enough that I can play a round without investing that much time, and if I fail, I don’t feel like it’s a slog starting over. StarVaders fits into a very specific niche in my life. Like Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, or Slay the Spire itself, StarVaders is one of those casual games that I’ll boot up when I’m watching TV. It’s something to do while I’m listening to something else. At time of writing, I’ve played about a hundred and twenty hours. You could say it has a lot of replay value.

Replay value is sort of a strange idea – it’s tied into the notion that the value of a game is dependent on how long you spend playing it. You’ll often see player reviews on Steam or elsewhere assess price in terms of length. Hozy gets criticised for being short: “3 hours of gameplay for $15 seems a bit much“. The underlying idea is that a game’s value is attached to how long you spend in it – which seems a little weird. I can’t immediately think of any other art form where you assess value based on length. Long books aren’t inherently more valuable than short books, and a movie ticket costs the same whether you’re seeing Fantastic Mr Fox (at 87 minutes) or the latest Christopher Nolan. It’s maybe a rough indicator of production costs – that is, if a game costs $80, you would expect a production value that reflects that price point – but it’s still a metric that prioritises quantity over quality.

The interplay between length and value is a long-standing problem for video games. For corporate interests, the longer a player sticks with a game, the more opportunities to upsell them, whether with season passes, merch, or microtransactions. It’s the attention economy: longer playtime can be leveraged for additional financial return. Elsewhere, shorter games run the risk of losing their sales. In 2015, Steam started offering refunds for games if you’d played for less than two hours. That policy might be appropriate for games that are broken or glitchy – sometimes you need a bit of time to realise you can’t fix the issues – but it also means that any indie game less than two hours in length could be bought, played through, and refunded. Short narrative games like Behind the Frame and Florence were at risk of losing their sales. Within a year of that policy, Polygon was reporting on people maliciously refunding Firewatch, a critical success and indie darling that unfortunately fell within the two-hour band. In both ways, there’s a pattern of incentives associating length with value. Keep player attention and you can milk them for extra cash; build a thoughtful 90 minute narrative experience and you might get ripped off by the audience. 

This association between length and value obviously isn’t applied equally across all games. And sometimes it’s not totally groundless – it probably shouldn’t ever be the sole factor, but it can serve as a rough indicator of certain qualities. In an RPG, run-time can speak to the depth of the world-building. It can suggest the scope of a puzzle game, the breadth of an MMO, or the complexity of the underlying systems in a roguelike, the number of runs it might take to master the game and beat the final boss. There are places where length can be a useful indicator. But it’s particularly weak in relation to narrative games. If you’ve got a metaphorical journey into grief and loneliness, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s two hours or four. It’s not just about the raw consumption of content – it’s about the structure of a narrative arc. Some games aren’t improved by cramming more stuff into them. Some games are meant to be short. Some are meant to end decisively, and in some, the game mechanics aren’t just there for you to doodle away an evening; they’re part of an intentional, structured narrative.

Cairn is a 2026 mountain-climbing game from the Game Bakers, the French studio behind Haven and Furi. I talked about it a few weeks back as a game about human connection and the push to the summit. The narrative of Cairn focuses on the main character Aava and her attempt to summit Mount Kami, the highest mountain in the world. It’s claimed a couple hundred lives, nobody’s ever made it before, but Aava thinks she’s the one to do it. The game is built around her self-destructive pursuit of a goal. Aava isolates herself. She’s hostile to community and connection. As the game moves into its final phase, Aava has to navigate the icy mountaintop, representative of her self-isolation. There’s no access to food or water. Aava’s pursuit of the summit drives her into territory that is hostile to life. You reach the summit, trudging through hip-deep snow, Aava wincing and moaning from all the damage she’s done to her body throughout the climb, and for a moment, at the very top, you touch infinity.

There’s a clear parallel here between the gameplay and the overarching narrative. Aava’s quest to get to the top of the mountain is paralleled by your quest to beat the game. Your travails are her travails, and the difficulty you have getting up the mountain is reflective of the enormity of her quest. It’s difficulty as narrative device, as with Dark Souls. And the two aspects can be read back into each other. After summiting Kami, Aava will move on to her next challenge and you the player will move on to some other game. The finitude of the narrative structure gives a natural end to your gameplay. This isn’t an open-ended game, or something based on multiple runs. There’s a clear start and end. Early on, Aava finds a plaque showing nearby mountains and milestones on the way to Kami. She talks about them like they’re challenges previously confronted and overcome. “All these peaks… like familiar faces.” You finish it, you move on. You don’t stay there: you go looking for the next challenge. In that sense, the structure of Cairn seems to encourage playing it once and moving on. The game ends when the narrative ends – along with Aava’s constant searching for the next challenge, both theme and structure work together to set a fixed end to your playtime. But what we see with Cairn – at least in my experience – is a dissonance between gameplay and narrative. I got to the end and I immediately wanted to start over. The gameplay became a goal as much as the summit. In itself that’s not that weird – it’s fun to play and I wanted to play it again – but it jars with the forward, restless nature of Aava, and it seems to cut against the nature of the narrative. Cairn has, so to speak, replay value: its gameplay seems to outlive its narrative. That’s an oddity for a game whose narrative arc is specifically about moving on.

So what does a second playthrough look like? What changes? Obviously you’re more experienced, so you know where you can push yourself safely. You know where the major rest points are and where you can stock up on food. I also started to plan out different routes. Cairn has a bunch of different paths up the mountain. Different routes have different levels of difficulty, sometimes marked out explicitly if you can find a map. You start to move through the space differently too. Played well, Cairn is not a fast game. There’s not usually benefit to rushing up the mountain. It’s smarter to move slowly, to listen to Aava’s breathing. If she moves into a weak position, she’ll start to burn more stamina holding herself up, and her breath will quicken. Moving slowly lets you be sure that each new hold is sensible, that it’s sustainable. There are some occasional instances where you need to scramble across a weak hold to get to a stronger position, but for the most part, Cairn should be played slow. The mountain isn’t going anywhere, and neither should you. That meditative, deliberate pace is part of what makes Cairn‘s gameplay so attractive.

On a second playthrough, the critique in the narrative also exists out of sync with the gameplay. We’ve always known that gameplay and narrative can get out of sync – that’s a very familiar notion. Games like StarVaders have a gameplay loop that outlives any narrative interest by dozens of hours. Many open-world games dump you back into the environment after you complete the main campaign, highlighting the disconnect between narrative and play – you can finish the story and still have quote-unquote things to do. The asynchrony in Cairn is curious because of how the narrative critiques the gameplay. It’s critical of the push to the summit. It reveals Aava as myopic: she alienates her friends and family and endangers fellow climbers by encouraging them beyond their safe limits. It doesn’t think she’s a monster – it sees some value in her quest for the summit – but as with Furi there’s a level of ambivalence around your character’s actions. There’s a sense that what she’s doing is destructive. When you replay Cairn, you understand that critique from the start. You know where Aava’s actions will take her. There’s something clear-headed about it. In a sense, you’re playing post-critique, after the narrative. The narrative repeats itself, but you’ve already heard what it has to say. You have metabolised the limitations of Aava’s quest, the foibles of her personal neuroses. You climb, and you climb, and you hear the words, but you’ve moved past them, and you meditate, and you bandage your hands – less than last time, because you know what you’re doing now – and the game addresses somebody who isn’t really you. It addresses who you used to be, who you were the first time round. Cairn ends with a thank you and a question: “Thank you for making it to the top. And you – what is your summit?” The summit, you realise on the second time round, is not the summit. It’s not the end, but the act. Boot it up, start it again.