Short Thought: Playing Through A Game In One Sitting

Shortly after the release of Batman: Arkham Knight, I had a feeling that I should play through that series completely once more. I’ve loved each one… yes, even Origins… and thought it would be cool to see the whole story over a long weekend or something. I downloaded all four onto my PC.

One afternoon, I started Arkham Asylum, and fired through the story stuff exclusively. Doing this in a game I know so well, it only took around four or five hours to get to the end credits. I went and immediately jumped into Arkham City, and scrubbed that off in a similar amount of time. By now, it was the early hours of the morning, and not even as a fan could I stomach Origins when that tired.

What I took from this was the knowledge that it is quite possible to finish games in one sitting, and it doesn’t take as much time as you might think. I’m now looking at my console drawer and my Steam library to see what other games I could do it with. There’s easy stuff like The Banner Saga and The Order: 1886, but the games I’ve got my eyes on next are larger, with each entry of the Mass Effect series to potentially be my next targets.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that I get a kick out of doing this, as I have paid to attend film marathons in London, and have had an interest in speedrunning games like Dark Souls for a few years. What I can’t decide is whether I’m spoiling a game by playing it all at once.

I didn’t use any kind of glitches or skips to get through the Batman games, and I wouldn’t for any others. But am I missing the point of grand RPG’s like Mass Effect by completely ignoring the side stuff? I’ve played through the first a dozen times, and the sequels just a handful, and have seen the majority of what is in each one.

If I’m going to answer my question, I’ll just have to try it and see.

Should I stream it too? I might stream it...