For me: with AI War, yeah. I've logged hundreds of hours on that one outside of testing-time. With Tidalis, I've played it some off and on for fun, but mostly I got most of my playtime during testing and that was enough for me (still 100+ hours). With Shattered Haven, that also I've played just for the fun of it with my wife over the years since 2008 many times. With Valley 1, I mostly did testing time -- I logged hundreds of hours, but had no desire to do more than that.
With Valley 2, it's more like AI War and Shattered Haven, and it actually pulls me along and I've played it "just for fun" a number of times. My son loves watching me play it (he's two and a half), so I'll play with him a lot of evenings now because he demands it, heh.
I think the big thing lacking in Tidalis and Valley 1 in terms of why I didn't play those more outside of testing was that both were heavily mechanics-oriented without any real progression to them that was specific to a session. In other words, if you've played the adventure of Tidalis once, in bits in pieces or all the way through, there's not a reason to really do it again. Same with most puzzle games. With Valley 1, if you've played all the biomes and with all the spells and against all the enemies, and you've explored everything in bits and pieces, there's not a strong pull to do that again.
With AI War and Valley 2, the strategic bits make each game a lot more fresh for me, and have an overall meta-narrative that the player drives. Shattered Haven doesn't have that meta-narrative per se -- at least not in the sense of a strategy game -- but it does have a strong set of pick-up-and-play mechanics that are really enticing to me, as is the case with Valley 2. So Valley 2 kind of has me both ways, heh.
