I’ve been playing R.E.P.O. with friends like the rest of the internet and I had some thoughts. R.E.P.O. is for sure a good time, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’ve laughed as much when playing a game in recent memory. While I’m happy to keep it in rotation with my friend group, I think there’s some stuff missing that really could make it stand out for me.

The cycle for R.E.P.O. is you go to a very spooky place, find loot, put it in your cart to hit a value target and then leave. Once you leave, you use all the money you earned to buy upgrades and tools to make your next run easier. But that’s it, you kind of just keep doing that in a loop until you either end for the night or your party wipes and you start over. I remember playing with friends and one person asked what the end goal was and the answer is you just keep doing the cycle. There’s no end state, no kill screen, and no way to make the credits run. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that as I’ve gotten older, I need these simple games. No skill ceiling, no getting stomped over and over again in a multiplayer game, just dumb fun with friends.

I guess I feel greedy for wanting more. For wanting some permanent upgrades and to have something carry over between runs. It can be hard to start a new game with friends, complete your first run and get to the story and just see all these tools you just can’t see how you’ll ever afford. But, I don’t know how that would help the gameplay loop to start the first run with weapons and then you’re not scared of the simple monsters that pop-up. I get the game wanting you to start from scratch so you always feel the need to be careful, to run that risk vs reward math in your head when you find something heavy. Do you risk alerting any monsters nearby of your position by yelling for some help or do you try to find your friends, maybe taking longer to complete the map?

I guess I go back to the multiplayer shooter in realizing that I’m asking for the wrong thing. In Overwatch, yes, you might have some progression in terms of cosmetic unlocks. But you don’t pick up a new gun or weapon that has different stats. You start each round with the same loadout, with some different choices here and there you can make. But if you ask the same question, what’s the end state? What’s the goal? In that scenario it’s to just have fun, unwind, kill some time, to just entertain yourself. So I know I need to apply the same thinking to R.E.P.O. and just enjoy the ride.

That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t say no to some unlocks, funny hats always win in my book for character customization. Also, the game is in early access and the devs have promised character customization, meta progression and just more content. So again, I’m being greedy and now I’m being impatient.

I guess the main reason I wrote this is to say that my knee jerk was to say this game doesn’t give me progression, so I may not stick with it. But I think that does a disservice to the game and would cause me to miss out on a fun experience. But also, I think it’s the rhetoric you can see online sometimes, armchair devs (fans) who say a game needs to do XYZ and it needs to happen now, or the game is dead. I think there’s more to it than that and part of the conversation is remembering that the game wasn’t tailor made for you and that’s okay. But also, to maybe be patient as this game is also early access. If you’re not connecting with it, jump to something else, there’s so many other things you can enjoy. But for me, I’m going to remind myself to not be greedy, enjoy what the game does offer and continue to have dumb fun with my friends. That sounds like a pretty good time to me.