In anticipation of upcoming travel and with nothing to play on my Steam Deck, I booted up Persona 4: Golden. It checked the boxes for what I thought would be an ideal diversion from cramped economy seating and long days spent in the car. The game is known for taking over 100 hours to complete, its turn-based combat has been described to me as Pokémon+, and it is generally talked about as the game that launched the Persona series into modern prominence that has seen Persona 5: Royal gain a massive fanbase. It seemed like a natural entry point and a welcome time to take my leap.

So, I played some. Just over 11 hours, actually. In the car and on the plane. I enjoyed combining Personas, leveling up my social links, even becoming attached to some dark horse characters and investing in storylines that helped my path feel unique. But I never really craved more Persona time, and now that my travel is over, I find myself almost dreading the investment it would take to pick the game back up. Keeping track of the weather, when to tend my in-game garden, and juggling the pressures of school and dungeon-crawling all together paint a monotonous picture. While I know I could go on autopilot and probably enjoy diving back in, nothing is calling me to do so.

This realization got me thinking about why we continue playing games. What separates an experience we pick up for a few hours before shelving from one that absorbs our attention through completion? What keeps us coming back to some games and not others? Let’s start with the 4 types of ways games capture our attention: as candy, builders, mysteries, and runners.

Candy: Tight gameplay loops that keep us coming back by presenting rewards that provide dopamine rushes at the exact right times. The games we get addicted to. They’re generally able to facilitate the turning off of conscious thought. Example: Vampire Survivors.

Builders: Games that entice us with the idea of constructing a character from scratch, building their power and loadout until they conquer and/or save the world. Generally very crunchy and mechanic-heavy. Think CRPGs for this one. Example: Baldur’s Gate 3.

Mysteries: One of the most classic ways to entertain: provide a mystery worth solving. Mysteries entice us to find out what happened and why, and – in this case – playing is the vehicle by which we can do so. Example: Curse of the Golden Idol.

Runners: Games that feel so good we could spend time just running around and still enjoy every second. I call this category “runners,” because these are the games we could return to purely for how tactile/tight their controls feel, and I often view this distinction by how good it feels to move around a game’s world. Mario and OlliOlli World are runners, Disco Elysium is not. Example: Lonely Mountains: Downhill.

Before moving on to analysis, I’d like to caveat this taxonomy with the idea that I am writing about games designed to be returned to. By that I mean games that include stories/level-arcs intended to occupy longer stretches of time and/or rogue-likes that beg repeated playthroughs. But there will always be outliers. While the puzzle game genre might not appear to be represented in my above categories, stellar entries like Baba is You could be creatively slotted in to accommodate their gravitational pull. The point is, what I attempt to provide here is a basis for reflection rather than anything comprehensive.

So, what is Persona? I wouldn’t describe it as candy, and it’s certainly not a runner. For, while you can (and will) run around, there is no depth to the action. No rumble, no meaningful variation in speed, no nothing. The movement controls are not notable beyond their ability to bring you from set piece to set piece, battle to battle. Persona is, however, both a mystery and a builder. A series of murders happens in 4: Golden, and it’s your job to figure out why. Meanwhile, the RPG mechanics of leveling up both your Personas and the social links that fuel their development land the game solidly within the builder genre. Then, why did I devour my 110 hour playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3 while feeling unmotivated to pick Persona back up around the same time? Let’s answer this question by thinking through what each above category needs to keep us coming back time after time after time.

Candy games need either to present many different strategies to win or borrow meaningful progression mechanics from builders. A personal favorite game I would categorize as candy is Slay the Spire. It checks both these boxes, but its strength is in the first. The reason why I keep coming back to Spire is that each run feels completely unique. Since encounters and the path to each one is randomized to a degree, as are the card rewards and loot drops you are offered along the way, the player is constantly challenged to think on their feet and adapt their strategy to stimuli that change as they play. The fact that each of the four characters’ card bases have seemingly limitless options to craft a winning strategy makes me feel like a creative tactician when I play. Meanwhile, the more you win, the more cards and characters you unlock, and you can keep making the path to victory harder and harder each time you prevail. These mechanics are certainly fun, but maybe not quite as meaningful as the second part of my lead sentence references. 

Builder games need to make you feel like they’re worth it, through the promise of progression, a tantalizing story, or both. Baldur’s Gate 3 triumphs as a builder because its branching story is massive, engaging, and gives the player control over its outcome. When you play BG3, you always want to see what happens next, to see how a decision in a big moment could potentially impact the path of the entire epic tale. Its progression mechanics are also solid, allowing you to gain better class abilities and loot and become more powerful over the course of a playthrough. That said, the story is the reason I kept coming back, evidenced clearly by the fact that I had achieved the max level of twelve at the beginning of Act 3 and still wanted to play through all available side quests to see what would happen. On the other hand, a game series like Diablo’s strength is purely in its loot progression system, getting more and more powerful gear and abilities until your character can defeat the big bad and rule the realm. The endless clicker nature of a builder like Diablo also places it squarely in the candy genre, showing how the majority of games that keep us coming back usually combine two or more of our categories for effect. 

Mystery games need to make you feel like a detective, rather than an audience member. This, in my view, is where Persona 4: Golden misses the mark. While its murder mystery concept has the potential to occupy one’s curiosity, the way in which the game handles the unraveling of its mystery dismantles this potential entirely. The only way you’re able to uncover more about the murders in the game’s small-town setting is to advance its linear story until it makes narrative sense for the writers to dole out the next clue. This makes me feel like I’m an outsider watching the beats of a predetermined story, effectively destroying my sense of immersion as a player. On the other hand, experiences like Curse of the Golden Idol, Return of the Obra Dinn, and – to a lesser extent – Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp, enhance immersion by facilitating the experience of thinking like a detective in order to solve the mysteries at the heart of their stories for yourself. Thus, these games are very hard to put down. Even when you take a break from your screen, you’re pondering various clues and how they might fit together. Especially when I played Idol and Obra Dinn, I could not wait to get back to my computer to try out a new combination of clues and/or puzzle over the motivations of a newly introduced character. 

Runner games need to feel amazing. Go play Lonely Mountains: Downhill. You’ll race time and maybe strive to get new bike parts or outfits, but in your heart you’ll just keep wanting to rip down mountains and try new shortcuts to see if you can pull them off. It’s because mountain biking in the game – pedaling and braking, drifting into a hairpin turn, landing from a gnarly crag jump – just feels great. Mario, modern Zelda games (Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom), and Elden Ring are also all runners in their own ways. Mario because it feels amazing to platform and jump. The modern Zeldas because of just how good it feels to traverse their open worlds, and Elden Ring because of its tight and impactful combat mechanics born from a lineage of FromSoftware staples. There are more to these games than their controls, but it is their controls that facilitate immersion and give us the warm and fuzzies. 

Now, let’s look back on Persona 4: Golden, a game that attempts to be both a mystery and a builder. Its mystery is unraveled through a controlled linear story, robbing the player of the immersive detective experience that mystery games should provide. Meanwhile, as a builder, 4: Golden feels disorienting and monotonous. The promise of leveling up Personas is undermined by how much stronger the fusion process can create them in a much shorter period of time, and the idea of advancing social links between characters competes with what story beats you as a player would rather see. While it might be more strategic for me to go to basketball practice because I have many Personas of the Strength Arcana in my current party, I would rather go to drama club to see how my relationship with my romantic interest Yumi might advance. Where does this leave me? Stressed and unsatisfied regardless of which decision I make, feeling like I’ve left something on the table.

We all have different definitions of what makes us excited to invest time in a game, and that’s what is so fascinating about games as both conductors and conveyors of expression. Next time you excitedly load up a save file or fret about why a certain entry into a franchise isn’t grabbing you the way its predecessors did, I encourage you to think about the categories I presented here, what you might add to their descriptions, and what – in your mind – was left out of this particular taxonomy. 

Bottom line: the more we think about the games we love – and, for that matter, the ones we dislike – the more chances we have to get to know ourselves. And that’s special.