Recently while not feeling well, I picked up a new free incremental game on Steam. (It's nice, it doesn't try to micro-transaction you to death, like all the others these days.) And that reminded me of an interesting exchange I had on Discord, and that got me thinking... There's several different "start the game over" type of mechanics, and you'd think they'd all be pretty similar, but in practice, they feel completely different. So I asked myself one of my favorite questions: why?