In the previous article, we rounded up five lengthy games with engaging stories — from Baldur's Gate 3 to Horizon Forbidden West. But not every game you can spend a hundred hours on relies solely on its story. Sometimes the main appeal is gradually mastering complex mechanics, building your own system, growing a dynasty, or simply exploring a vast world.

So this time, we’ve picked four games that can absorb you for dozens and even hundreds of hours. There are strategies, RPGs, and survival games here, but they all share one thing: even after completing the main content, you’ll still have plenty to do.

Factorio

· Release date: February 25, 2016

· Genre: indie, strategy, action

· Time to 100% complete: about 200 hours

This is one of those cases where a screenshot doesn’t convey at all what makes the game so addictive. Visually, Factorio looks fairly simple, but the depth of its gameplay more than makes up for the lack of impressive graphics. At first glance, it seems like just another building and production simulator. In reality, the hours disappear here at an alarming rate.

It all starts innocently enough: you need to mine some ore, smelt it into plates, and assemble a few parts. But a few hours later, you’re already laying a railway line across half the map and trying to optimize production that has grown into a small industrial empire.

Factorio’s main strength is that the game constantly throws new challenges at you. You’ve set up copper mining — now there’s not enough electricity. You’ve built power stations — now you’re running out of coal too quickly. You’ve solved the energy problem — now you have to defend yourself from local creatures. That means you need walls and turrets, and then automated ammunition delivery.

As a result, a small factory gradually turns into a huge system where resource extraction, production, transportation, and defense are all interconnected. You solve one problem, and two more appear in its place. And that’s exactly why, after a few hours of play, it’s easy to realize that dawn has long since broken outside.

And when you finally manage to get production running perfectly, another problem appears — you want to start a new world and build everything from scratch again, only much more efficiently this time.

Crusader Kings III

· Release date: September 1, 2020

· Genre: RPG, strategy

· Time to 100% complete: more than 500 hours

What happens if you turn medieval politics into one giant family drama? That’s more or less what Crusader Kings III is. Here, your closest relatives can sometimes pose a greater threat than the armies of neighboring states, and the death of a ruler can turn a successful reign into a real nightmare.

The stated hundreds of hours are not so much the length of one specific campaign as they are the enormous room for learning all the mechanics and exploring different possible developments. In Crusader Kings III, you need to understand inheritance, diplomacy, religion, wars, marriages, relationships between characters, and many other systems. But the process of learning them gradually becomes part of the game itself.

The key thing here is people and the relationships between them. Your brother may demand a title, a vassal may start a plot, and your own heir may suddenly turn out to be completely unprepared to govern the state. You have to take your relatives’ personalities into account, arrange beneficial marriages, seek allies, and think about who will inherit the lands after the ruler’s death.

What’s more, the most interesting stories sometimes arise completely by accident. You may have planned a peaceful reign and the strengthening of the state, only for the intrigues within your own family to become so tangled that war with the neighbors starts to seem like the easiest part of the game.

That is the main charm of Crusader Kings III: the game doesn’t so much tell a ready-made story as create the conditions in which a story emerges on its own.

Persona 5 Royal

· Release date: October 31, 2019

· Genre: Japanese RPG, adventure

· Time to 100% complete: about 170 hours

Persona 5 Royal is one of those games that’s easy to put off because of its length and distinctive visual style. School students, anime aesthetics, turn-based battles — at first glance, that combination won’t appeal to everyone. But once you give the game a chance, it becomes clear why it can hold your attention for well over a hundred hours.

The protagonist moves to Tokyo after an unpleasant incident in his hometown. Soon, he discovers a strange app that allows him to enter people’s minds and change their desires. Thus begins the story of the Phantom Thieves — a group of teenagers who try to correct other people’s actions by exploring palaces created by the human mind.

At the same time, Persona 5 Royal constantly switches between two very different sides of the hero’s life. By day, he goes to school, meets people, makes friends, visits shops and cafés, works part-time, and gradually settles into life in Tokyo. In his free time, you can build relationships with other characters and improve various stats.

And then it’s time to head into the palaces and fight enemies.

These two parts of the game are closely connected. Relationships with characters can unlock new opportunities in battle, and your free time has to be divided among many activities. As a result, the game gradually turns into more than just a series of battles and story scenes — it becomes a full-fledged story of one year in the protagonist’s life.

That’s why Persona 5 Royal’s length doesn’t feel merely like an attempt to stretch the game out. New content, characters, and mechanics keep appearing, and the desire to find out what happens next pushes you to keep going for just one more in-game day — and then another.

Valheim

· Release date: February 2, 2021

· Genre: survival, indie, RPG, adventure

· Time to 100% complete: about 120 hours

Valheim begins quite modestly: the hero finds himself in a mysterious world where he has to gather resources, build shelter, and gradually make sense of his surroundings. At first, it seems like an ordinary survival game. But after just a few hours, it becomes clear how incredibly addictive it can be.

Your first home is usually a small wooden hut meant only to help you survive the night and do some crafting. Then come the workbench, storage areas, walls, and defensive structures. At some point, the player realizes that instead of a temporary shelter, they’ve built a full-fledged fortress with towers, workshops, and defensive lines.

Building in Valheim is not just an extra mechanic. It is closely tied to world exploration and character progression. New resources let you craft more advanced gear and unlock access to new building materials, while exploring different biomes gradually expands the player’s possibilities.

At the same time, the world constantly reminds you that this is no place to relax. Beyond the safety of your base, you may encounter creatures that will quickly make it clear that even a well-equipped Viking is not the master of this world.

A special kind of fun is playing together with friends. You can set off to explore a new biome, build a huge base, set up production, or simply spend several hours creating a house that won’t bring you any closer to the ending at all. And it’s precisely these optional activities that often turn out to be the reason people spend far more time in Valheim than they originally planned.