As games have become bigger and more complicated, they’ve also become increasingly difficult to pick up again after even a short break.

There are so many games I’ve ended up completely dropping because I come back, can’t remember where I am, what I’m doing or how to do anything. It puts a hard block on continuing as I need to spend ages working out everything again.

I find this is the worst for games I finish, and then come back to quite a bit later to play DLC. I think this is due to you generally being at a ‘late game’ state in terms of upgrades and mechanics. For instance I absolutely loved Control, one of my favourite games of the last 5/10 years. But I dropped the dlc after about 5 minutes because it was just so disorienting the game expecting you to know everything.

I really think playable tutorials (I say playable because massive long lists of instructions can also be quite overwhelming) and story re-caps, even if just a short general thing about the characters and plot (and an index of characters/weapons etc.) would go a long way to helping players continue through big and complicated games.