Persona 4 Golden

Atlus's 2008 role-playing game, expanded in 2012 and finally brought to PC in June 2020, splits its time between a rural Japanese town and a television people can climb into. The murder mystery is the frame; the calendar is the actual system. Each in-game day gives you a limited number of hours, and you spend them on classes, part-time jobs, fishing, or the social links that deepen your relationships with a cast of teenagers each refusing to look at something. Those relationships then feed directly into combat power, which is the trick the series is built on - time spent on friendship is mechanically identical to grinding. Dungeon crawling is turn-based, keyed to exploiting elemental weaknesses for extra turns, and fused Personas carry inherited skills so party building rewards planning several floors ahead. Golden adds Marie, a new social link, extra scenes and a substantially better late game. It is long, roughly eighty hours, and unusually warm for a story that opens with a body hanging from an antenna.