If a game has any way to track how much of one aspect of it I’ve completed, odds are I will try to complete them all. If the progress is trackable and not too time-consuming, at least. This depends on whether I think it’s doable for me, also. Things like the Steel Soul achievements for Hollow Knight feel unattainable, so I’m okay not doing them. What aspects of a game I do aspire to complete are often those that are easily tracked.
With my great love of exploration and open-world games, going through the world by ticking off collectibles on an interactive map is my ideal form of completionism. I did this for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I’m currently in the process of doing it for its sequel. The existence of a guide for both games means that this is easy and fun, if only a little time-consuming.
This is ideal for two reasons. One is my aforementioned love of exploration in videogames. The other is the fact that there is a clear ‘end’ of things to collect. Even if it is a number as high as 900, it’s still a finite number. As such, I will always gravitate towards collectibles in games, or filling out the game’s almanac or something equivalent. If there’s a finite number of a thing, odds are I’ve tried to get them all.
In these games, after you finish the story, a percentage will appear on the bottom right of your map. When you finish a side quest or find a new location, this will update. Just by exploring the world, that percentage will go up. Because of this, I chose to tackle collecting all the Korok Seeds first. My logic was that I’d run into things while collecting them, and this worked. I got to explore and see the progress increase at the same time.
Every collectible is different, so even if there are 900 of them—and even more in Tears of the Kingdom—I never found it to be a tedious process. It was like exploring the world for a second time, top to bottom, to find all of the collectibles. There was an obvious end to the task, so I was happy to do it until that 100% appeared.
This is why I’m happy not getting that Steel Soul achievement. There’s no set amount of attempts, so I don’t know how much time I’ll end up dedicating to it. Plus, it’s the same thing over and over, which would get boring fast. Trackable progress means that I can estimate how long it will take me to do. Different puzzles across an open world mean that it never gets stale.
In the case of Celeste, I tolerated the repetition of the strawberry rooms because they felt more attainable. A deathless run of Hollow Knight is extremely difficult and more of an investment of time. A strawberry room in Celeste is relatively short and will immediately give me the collectible. It’s also really good at making its difficulty satisfying, so the attempts never got stale.
Many exceptions to this rule appear in my list of perfected games on Steam. They’re not open world, and they don’t involve exploration of a map. Most often they’re puzzle games, or point and click games, but I went out of my way to get all the achievements nonetheless. You could say that the achievements, when attainable, are themselves a bar of progress I can keep track of.
In Slay the Princess, the way to get all 131 achievements is to play the game over and over again. I interpret replaying the game to get all the endings as exploration, and get achievements along the way. By interpreting the achievements themselves as collectibles, I explore this variety, click on options I haven’t chosen before, and use a guide to help make it easier. Despite these games seeming like exceptions, they actually adhere to my desire for trackable progress.
Despite my completionist instinct, I am happy leaving some aspects of some games incomplete. At this point, Genshin Impact has thousands of achievements and thousands of hours of quests that I am happy never getting to see. The collectibles, however? I am happy to find any excuse to explore that map over and over again. Odds are I’ve tried to get that 100% badge in any game that has progress that is easily trackable and won’t take too long, especially if it’s exploration-based.
