I kind of agree with OC's sentiment. The game is a masterpiece, but the puzzle solving and metagame is half of the game, if not more. Once you've solved that, replaying it is just going through the motions of a pretty OK action adventure game. I dunno.

It's like playing Braid after beating it. Another masterpiece of a game! You could speed run it—which I was very much into—but the thought of playing it again after that just doesn't interest me. It's just going through the motions.

That being said, its been years and years since I've played it and there's a new anniversary edition coming out with new content. I'm almost certainly going to buy it.

I loved the built-in speed run of that game. You only had 45 minutes to beat the whole thing. The first time I accomplished that, my time was 44:58 and some change! I lost my shit that I managed to juuuust squeak in a win! 😂

I ended up getting it down to 37 minutes. There are so many tricks in that game to speed it up. I wonder what the official best time is. Back in the Xbox 360 days there were a lot of cheaters using the back-end to submit bullshit scores. Or people doing save trading and all having the exact same time down to 1/100 of a second.

NG+ is optional since it's not required to finish the game or appreciate the story. It's there for the challenge.

I find Subnautica has less replayability than other survival games since the map and questline is static. Once you know where everything is and you've seen all the plot beats there's not much reason to play the game again unless you want to challenge yourself with a speedrun or, as you said, one of the harder difficulties.

I wouldn't consider creative mode or sandbox mode to be a core part of the game. They're great for fucking around or as an extended tutorial, but I see them more as external tools than as part of the game experience proper.

I would absolutely consider replaying subnautica if managing inventories wasn't so bad. Playing it to build up a base would be fun if it wasn't such a frustrating process to deal with. I think all crafting should pull from all inventories in your base, and also preferably adding inventories just increases the size of one large abstract storage system of your base that you don't need to worry about organizing.

As it is, once the story was done I was done. I had become so annoyed with building out my bases that I just couldn't be bothered to do it again.

Bastion's story doesn't necessitate multiple plays. Sure, it's fun to play through again and try different builds. I've also 100%'ed the game.

The important thing, I think, for OP's question is that it can be finished in one play. It has a satisfying ending from which the player can set down the game and move on.