I think my absolute favorite type of game is:

• a Really Good core gameplay loop
• the main menu basically just asks you what level you want to play and what mutators you want to play with
• there is no story and no concept of a linear campaign. there is only Game
• no skill trees, no XP, no unlocking new weapons, no unlocking new gamemodes or mutators. there is only Game

I’m specifically thinking of GZDoom mods and Severed Steel as I write this. Severed Steel technically had a campaign and technically had a story but they were really just excuses to have levels sorted by ascending order of difficulty for first-time players which I actually think is a great idea

I’m also thinking of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 but I did just remember that that game technically had a story-based campaign too - it’s just that it was one of many different options for how to play the game

extremely dishonorable mention to any game that requires you to go through its linear and heavily story-driven campaign in order to unlock the free play modes

some other games that are like this:

• most rhythm games (I fucking love the demo for Dead as Disco as well as Clone Hero)
• the White Knuckle demo, kinda
• Creeper World 4 almost. I don’t know why it tried to have a story I’m ngl. I feel like the dev added it out of a sense of obligation because most players expect games to have stories
• PowerWash Simulator does have a story and it’s batshit insane and I actually love it, but also the story is completely optional. it has some progression elements though which is :/

most video games: alright asshole shut the fuck up and listen to this in media res dialog that you’re not supposed to understand. the cutscene is unskippable and 20 minutes long btw. after this you’ll be forced through a bunch of linear scripted scenarios where you barely have control over anything that happens, and then maybe things will open up into a Ubisoft sandbox but we’re still going to take control away again the second a Story Thing is scripted to happen

peak video games: how do you want to play today? you can pick anything you want! there are even console commands and mods if you want to play through a really weird scenario that the dev could never have imagined!

@kasdeya The Left 4 Dead series was the only game series that I thought did this.

Thanks for informing me of other games to try

I love when a game is just game, give me more game.

@kasdeya Although I guess you could consider each L4D campaign as a story-driven linear event but you could start from any level you wanted to, and the individual campaigns feel more like single levels to me than anything, and only take about 20 minutes to an hour to beat.

@OllieBranch omg yeah I didn’t even consider Left 4 Dead! I guess a lot of older multiplayer games are like this tbh. like TF2 is like this too (edit: oop I forgot that you have to unlock weapons :/)

and I’m happy to’ve given you some more games to check out! I hope you like some of them