So first off, you can’t have a game without a gameloop, I don’t think the author is using the term correctly. What the author means I think is that they don’t like repetitive gameloops, particularly in narrative focused games.
I think there are lots of games that a lot of different game loops, “It Takes Two” and it’s sister game “Split fiction” would be exactly what the author is asking for I think.
Most open world games fit to some extent too (do you spend your time fishing, or playing the board game in the game, or hunting, or fighting bad guys, or climbing things or racing etc etc etc) but usually fighting is tied to the main stories of the games. These days many games have a “story mode” difficulty to skip past this combat however. I don’t think this is really want the author is looking for.
But there is a cost to this, it’s either your budget blows up or your mechanics have to be very simple. It Takes Two has very basic mechanics because they have to support so many. Big open world games are only really possible for largest and most expensive of projects. I don’t think this is really what the author wants.
I think there is a spectrum to gaming between games as Art and games as sport. Chess and esports are all the way on the sport section, it is about growing your brain or your reflexes, it isn’t trying to tell a story or impart meaning. That’s not to say there is not beauty in sport to be clear or that one is superior to the other. What the author calls repetition is rarely just that (in good games at least!), first they make you use a mechanic to beat an enemu, then they make you use a mechanic while doing another mechanic and now they make you do the mechanic to beat 10 enemies at once. This is a test of consistently and of whether you have mastered the mechanic.
Then there are games as Art, games who main goal is to tell an interactive story. And I do think that for a time games were afraid to go too narrative while other games keep the mechanics and mechanics too separate. I definitely think there are games that should just be a movie or where the story harms the experience more than helps. But I also think it’s pretty silly to say we don’t have games that are primarily narrative today or games that merge the mechanics and story well. Most games are somewhere in the middle.
The author using Celeste is interesting to me. The game has a story that deeply resonates with a lot of people but it is also considered one of the best designed platformers of all time as well. Each level is very intentionally designed to teach and then test a particular mechanic within the game. The end of the story is in a lot of ways just the end of the tutorial mechanically. To remove any level would be to completely destroy that. I think there is a conversation to be had about whether this could have been two games, one a purely mechanical test and the other a narrative game with minimal interaction but I think that that misses exposing the joy of the other to a new audience. I know of many people who resonated with the lore and story of Celeste but didn’t really like platformers (or sometimes games at all!) who learnt how to play platformers and really got into the genre as a result of the game. On the flip side I have heard many stories about people going into this game for the platforming and coming out of the game realizing new things about themselves (in particular their gender) because of the story. I think that has a lot of value, and personally I think they are stronger packaged together than separate.
Another example not from the article is the fire emblem, the most recent 3 houses in particular, but I think most of the series has similar moments. I engaged with the this game primarily for it’s mechanics, I personally didn’t really care about the story of this particular game. I had a lot of fun going through all the optional battles and challenges. As I progressed through the story a character betrays you and becomes unavailable. This happened to also be my favorite unit for fighting, I was devastated, and the story I was only half paying attention to suddenly became incredibly interesting and personal to me. My choice to focus on that character made a really big impact on the story and it’s only because I grinded so many missions. Had I only played the mandatory missions or focused on different characters I would have had a completely different experience of the story.
It seems like the author just doesn’t like and cannot engage with games that aren’t all the way on the art side of things and are extremely dismissive of the other side of things as a result. They also seem to just believe that this is a universal experience, in particular I was quite irked at the author’s liberal use of “we” as someone who generally only DNFs games that I strongly dislike and enjoys games at both a mechanical and artistic level.
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By default windows does block unverified binaries. It’s pretty annoying. You have to click more info and then run anyway: