The idea is that you’re meant to be destabilizing the Nazi regime in America by returning to all these locations and killing Nazi officers. There is technically a really loose narrative framework thrown around the replay function, but it almost makes the situation worse. So you take a level, strip it of all of its emotional significance and position within the narrative, and let the player just wander around looking for fucking collectibles. In New Colossus, it’s different, because you’re having to play through levels that you’ve already been through, only without all the interesting dialogue and narrative events that make the game so compelling in the first place. It was cute in New Order where you could go and have a nap up in the tech room and play through a level of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein II is, like New Order, a powerful narrative experience, and pulling the player out of that narrative momentum to spend three and a half hours exploring all the levels that you’ve already been through is just… ugh. For one, it can rip any sense of pacing right out of the heart of the game. That said, there’s also a bunch of weird knock-on effects stemming from that decision that are bad and awkward. That’s a pretty good reason to have a replay function. That’s fair enough – there’s 200 collectibles across Wolfenstein as a whole, and you’re probably not going to get all of them first time through.
The basic idea is that you can replay through an area and pick up some of the stuff you missed – so you don’t have to go through the rest of the game missing it. The replay function is an example of one of those good ideas in theory that turns out to be awful in practice.
Anyway let’s talk about replaying missions. I assume BJ had all of Max’s toys in his pocket and was just losing them along the way – it’s the only vaguely plausible explanation. It’s also an opportunity to collect Max’s toys, which are inexplicably scattered around all the different levels but only after you’ve already been to those areas. Ostensibly you’re supposed to be killing Nazi commanders who are hanging around in those areas. After the halfway point of Mesquite, Wolfenstein II has this thing where you can go back and replay through the areas that you’ve already explored.
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