Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun?

I’m gonna come out swinging: not even a game, but two entire fucking genres:

1. Battle royales. I am like 90% convinced that gamers have been tricked by some dark psychology that has somehow convinced them that these games are worth playing. I don’t know whether it’s because the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter or what. Battle royales are 75% downtime. You spend so long fucking around parachuting in to the map, walking around, collecting stuff, bla bla bla, interspersed by just a few moments of action, and when you get killed it usually doesn’t feel fair, it’s because a whole other team showed up right as you were already fighting someone else and put you in a nearly impossible situation.

2. MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.

papers please. i thought i was doing pretty well in the beginning, but i guess it's built in to the narrative of the game that no matter how hard you work, your family will still get sick and die, and the story progresses by you unknowingly screwing up and letting in a terrorist. not only are you responsible for paying for your own mistakes, it only gets harder and more unforgiving with each level. i realized pretty quickly that it's not fun at all to spend my precious free time playing an extremely punishing game about working.

I wouldn't necessarily say unfun, but "not for me". Stardew Valley. I went in ready to relax and farm, but oh God, time moves quickly! And I only have limited energy per day. That wombo combo when I was starting out just stressed me out and I didn't get into it immediately.

I know there are mods for it or that it's a good game even with the time, but out of all possible farming type games there were plenty more my speed than Stardew.

Myst. I know, I know. One of the hallmarks of video games. I hated it. I like games that give you a path and let you figure it out. I've hundreds of hours into Factorio and it's kin. Portal! A puzzle game, Portal gives you A and Z and lets you figure out how to get there. Myst doesn't do ANYTHING. Nothing was obvious to me. I didn't understand where the A to Z was. I couldn't find A, Z, or any of the other steps. None of it clicked. Years ago, I watched some parts of walk throughs and I did not understand how I was supposed to know the things they were doing. None of it made any sense to me.

Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.

You couldn't access the story missions from the map, and you couldn't replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely "because nobody was playing them". Big brain move there!

In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level "strike". So you'd pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.

In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren't present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.

They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.

For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to "upgrade" to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn't make better gear because they were afraid of "power creep" and legitimately "explained" that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn't have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.

Maybe it's better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they'll never get another dime from me.

"Competitive" multiplayer games in general. I miss it when multiplayer games were just fun and not streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.

I know it's popular to fart on Overwatch 2, but even when the original came out I thought it was so fucking dull. The No Man Sky quote "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" can very well explain the hero roster of that game.

I'd rather do a barefoot pilgrimage to Jerusalem than play CS:GO, League of Legends, Overwatch, Fartnite, Valorant, etc.

Team Fortress 2 is unbalanced and janky, and it's 1000x more fun than any of those games. It even proved that the competitive crowd could do their own thing that suit their needs, instead of ruining a game to the ground with "balance" and unfun gameplay.

I'll list a few.

• MLB: The Show. I used to really enjoy these games because they felt like a sports game that actually cared about making a very realistic simulation while still keeping it fun. Now everything is about Diamond Dynasty, the fantasy baseball mode. All the other modes only reward you by giving you packs and giving you a gentle shove into Diamond Dynasty. One of my favorite modes was "March to October" where you play select innings in select games over the course of a whole season. Each game's outcome determines your team's general ability over the season. The better you do, the better you win rate and the higher chance of making it into the post season. Your rewards? Card packs. SMH.

• Ghostrunner. The levels were fun and had big Hotline Miami vibes but the boss fights were far too difficult and just utterly boring. Yeah, I really liked wall running in circles for minutes on end because the floor was lava. That was great.

• Atomic Heart. Bought it on a whim while high. I liked the bioshock influence and the level design is really cool. It just suffers from being a "survival horror" without the survival or the horror, so most of the gameplay involves you scrounging around for bullets and then dealing ultra light blows to enemies because you ran out of your 3 bullets. Pretty much none of the combat was fun and the stealth was a relentless ultra punishing slog. As a lover of stealth games, please if you're considering making a stealth game do not take any notes from this game. It did it all wrong.

• Dying Light 2. I loved the first game but this game just sorta felt overwhelming in a way? I really don't know how else to put it. I like open world games but developers just need to calm the fuck down. I don't need 10 map markers.

• The Quarry. I get that it's supposed to be a rip on teen slasher movies but that still didn't make it very fun to me. I loved Until Dawn and played it probably 5 times so I was super hyped for this but just really let down. I hated the way the game ended and I hated pretty much every second that I played it.

• The Hunter: Call of the Wild. It was just boring. I guess that's what hunting is like in real life, but so is truck driving and I like truck simulator games...

Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I'm not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.

For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.

The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.

Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.

Superman 64 is the only game I tried to return to Blockbuster before the rental window was done. They wouldn't let me so I had to keep it for the rest of the week.

For me it was Cyberpunk 2077. Yes there were all those bugs at launch but I did not have too many issues. My main complaint was the story and the characters. The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole. I couldn't empathize at all. I felt like I wasn't able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome. Additionally the gameplay was mediocre at best. A lot of places in the world felt completely rushed and unfinished. Combined with the lies from marketing, I wasn't hooked at all and felt betrayed.

Elite Dangerous is the most un-fun game I've spent 1500+ hours on. I want to love it but the developers' actions, or lack thereof, makes it difficult. The game has so much potential the devs won't or can't take advantage of for some reason.

No Man's Sky. (boring Sandbox exploration without a soul and very unfun crafting)

Minecraft. I'll play it if my friends ask me to but I found it incredibly frustrating and boring. The combat feels super weird and hard to execute, most of the discoveries are repetitive, and I didn't really like the building mechanic. I know, I'm in the minority for not enjoying it, but I guess voxel-style games just aren't my jam.

12 Minutes. It sucks because I was really looking forward to it - it's published by Annapurna which has an amazing track record, and the trailer and concept looked really interesting. But it just kind of devolves into a really basic point and click game with one location where you just have to try every combination of things until something works. And the story itself is just a trainwreck. I wasn't left satisfied or with any interesting thoughts, I was mostly just confused as to what the hell I was supposed to get out of it.

If you want a good time loop game published by Annapurna, just play Outer Wilds.

Terraria, it's a hot take I think but I just dislike it so much.

I dislike the controls, the appearance, the sorta jank, I just find it to be a more boring Minecraft and Minecraft can already be boring. I don't understand the love for it and I think it ruined a friendship with a group that really only wanted to play that and league of legends

Octopath Traveler. The UI was terrible, the loot was nothing but stat sticks, and most of the dungeons, of which there were too many, were just long tree walk with potions at the leaves. Genuinely the worst game I've ever played. The three-directional sprites were also extremely lazy. I think I lost my mind right at the start when the lazy script response saw one of the characters' childhood friend suddenly develop amnesia and treat him like a stranger because everyone needs generic dialogue.

The music and cast of thousands worldbuilding was fantastic, but otherwise, I hated almost every single of the 80 hours I put into it trying to give ti a fair shake.

I'm gonna piss a lot of people off, and say that I really, really cannot stand Halo - the whole franchise, not just the 343 stuff.

The way I see it, my problem with the series is twofold: storytelling and gunplay. The storytelling is weak at best: whilst I'm usually a huge fan of environmental storytelling, there's just so little information in game for me to go off! It wasn't until I read the Reach novel that I figured out who the Covenant were beyond just "evil aliens". I questioned this issue on the site we don't talk about and was told to read the books, but put simply, if I have to read a book to understand your plot, then you haven't told your plot well enough. Chief is presented in the game as this incredible figure (as are the Spartans), but the games never really tell you why, and as such I never really care about Chief or his bullshit.

Regarding the gunplay, I find it (and movement) simply too floaty to be enjoyable. There isn't enough recoil from a lot of the weapons, and the SFX on most of the guns don't give a great sense of power.

I understand that it's a massive series of nostalgia for a massive number of people. I understand that it redefined FPSes, and I respect the games for this. They deserve every bit of praise people give them. They aren't bad games, but I just do not enjoy them.

I bought ARK because dinosaurs. That is the only thing it has going for it. The core gameplay loop is watching a progress bar fill up.

Vampire Survivor.

I began playing it after so much praise from all over the place and it just uses predatory tactics to hook the gamer. I only had fun with the game for maybe a day or so but overall clocked in many more hours of hate-playing. The only good thing is that the developer (who's background is developing gambling games) does not use those tactics for microtransactions.

Once I deleted the game, I was never even tempted to go back.

That's a hard question, but the first two games that came to mind were Final Fantasy XV and Snowrunner.

FFXV is just... There's no nice way of saying it, it's garbage. A huge open world with nothing interesting in it, the story is pure nonsense and it's all full of holes, the characters are generic jrpg fodder, the shallow combat literally plays itself and you don't even get to drive the damn car yourself. I was never a fan of the series, but after that one I swore off it completely.

And Snowrunner is just utterly disappointing, for a game that describes itself as a "driving sim" the physics are horrendous, the trucks squid all over the place and they have no traction whatsoever, the entire game revolves around you driving from point A to B through the most sadist maps imaginable, if you get stuck or flip over you have to start everything from start and it's such a slow game, I can't stress this enough it's glacial slow. It's just incredibly frustrating and stressful, coming from Euro Truck Simulator 2 (a game that I consider zen like) this was just torturous.

I tried Dark Souls once, I think it was DS3. I can't figure out what would make it fun for anyone.

Deeprock Galactic.

On paper it's everything I like in games. But when my friends invite me to play, I get bored so much, that I have microsleep episodes. It's so incredibly boring I can not understand the hype at all.

I've got one - Hotline Miami 2.

Hotline Miami 1 was such a fantastic game. Frantic, high energy, fun, good art style, a confusing at best story but that's not why you played it. HM2 was full of off-screen instant kill bullshit that you literally could not prepare for in any way other than to die to it a handful of times before you memorized enemy positions off-screen. In the first game, you could always see threats before they could kill you. Not the case in the sequel. "You died and there's nothing you could have done to prevent it" is a bullshit mechanic in any game.

I'd say Dark Souls 2.

When you get to the area with the bazillion spitting statues that respawn when you do, it became very clear that Fromsoft was out of ideas for making the game both interesting AND challenging.

The one I still remember is Donkey Kong 64. Just a boring collectathon with too much retreading. And it missed the funny writing of previous Rare platformers. Also it had a cringe rap song like every piece of pop media had in the late 90’s even my eleven year old self hated it.

I loved Rare games before that. After that game I stopped buying any Rare games. Probably because Dk64 was the first game I bought with my own money that I saved for a long time. I didn’t even buy Perfect Dark

Its very rare that I actually finish a game that's just plain miserable but I got a nomination since it was also (thankfully) short: Photographs

Photographs is an indie puzzle/narrative game, where you solve dilemmas through a different set of mechanics in 5 different narratives. So far so good, that's somewhat interesting. It falls apart completely, however, on the absurdity of its attempts to be tragic. Every story in Photographs has to be a tragedy - which in itself is already a negative point. You start each of these vignettes already expecting how it'll all go wrong, which by the third or fourth time is already stale. You're just waiting for what will be the inevitable Bad Thing™ that will randomly happen to these people.

But its biggest failure is that those tragedies just don't hit. I'll spoil some of those so be wary if you're still interested in that. In one of those, a swimmer is caught in a doping scandal, which ends with her being scorned, kicked out of the competition scene, and homeless. In another, a newspaper editor decides to only publish bad and infuriating news to get more readers, and ends up being bombed by one of his former employers, after publishing a paper that says people deserved to get fired. The quickness in which things go south and the intensity is absurd, to the point of almost being comical. Worse of all, it also fails in one critical point (one which even big names fall for) which is not building up its characters. You rarely get an idea of who you're dealing with before tragedy occurs. You'll often only have a general understanding - old man lonely, athelete stressed, editor scared of bankruptcy - before the inevitable happens, and by that point you're on the rollercoaster watching a castle fall down, but it was more like a makeshift, straw castle that you never really cared about.

And at the end, you get one final "tragedy" where you as the player will decide one of these stories to rewind and have a chance at a happy ending. Its a distressing attempt at emotional manipulation where the multiple characters will beg you for their lives and futures, but once again...you have no investment in any of these. They're all 1 dimensional cardboard cuts, all struck by baffling circumstances. You might as well pick at random - for my part I did the one story that angered me the least, the lonely alchemist - but at the end its just one more alternate future for empty characters.

Its by far one of the games I've hated playing the most, and a massive stepdown from a developer that made some kickass mobile games before (You Must Build A Boat is still a must have)

Now I kinda want to make a thread for highly rated AAA games that disappointed you...

Final Fantasy 15. I've never been a fan of the modern (post FF7) games but fell for the hype around 15, purchased it, played it, actually finished it constantly wondering when the game would suck me in, and was left wondering what all that hype was about. The game had literally nothing I wanted in a JRPG as I found the story bog standard and the combat and traversal piss poor. That game officially made me give up on Final Fantasy since the only recent-ish game I've liked is FF Tactics. Make a sequel to that and I'll reconsider.

Sunset. It was a walking simulator back when they were all the rage.

You might think including walking simulators is cheating for a 'most unfun' game rating, but no matter what game comes to mind when you think of 'walking simulator', Sunset is more boring than that.

If you've played this type of game, you'll know that the best ones are the ones that have their plots unfold in interesting and engaging ways. There isn't a lot else going on in these games so a good plot and interesting ways to engage are paramount for this genre.

Sunset had you walk through an apartment to guess what object to interact with to advance the plot in a completely linear manner, driven entirely by post it notes. The plot was also pretty basic for the genre too.

How this game got 9/10s, 4/5s and a game awards nomination is fucking mystifying. The reviews talk about some deep commentary about civil wars or some shit, but I was too bored out of my mind to notice anything other than a high-schooler's attempt at writing about war. It's so far up its own arse about its 'war is bad' message that it forgets that it needs to convey it in an interesting way.

The game was received so badly by audiences that the developers just noped out of the video game market.

This is gonna be a deeply unpopular opinion but the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is my least favorite game I ever played. I like rogs but never owned a nintendo and my friend was always raving about it so I finally played it a few years back and I just hated it. The gameplay didn't feel good which I expected given it was still the wild west of 3d graphics but the thing that really annoyed me was how much sitting and waiting you had to do. All enemies are just sit, wait, dodge, hit in the right spot, repeat. Plus everyone wants to talk to you to tell you everything about the gameplay instead of just letting you figure it out. I found the whole experience frustrating.

Noita, it's the most sadistic "normal" game that i've ever played, barring those troll game that's meant to be rage inducing. It's a good game, but dang this game is bloody hard it become unfun the more i play as i couldn't make any progress.

Maybe i'll give it another try in the future 🤔

Fallout 4

The changes they made to the game mechanics ripped a lot of the roleplaying out of the experience. I kept hoping to find a lot of what I loved about Fallout 3 and New Vegas in it, and never did.

It's not even necessarily a bad game, but the aspects of the games that I found fun were either heavily reduced or removed completely, leaving behind an open world shooter with a bad story.

Need for Speed Unbound.

The stakes are just too high and the limit on time and funds you can safely earn just makes it feel stressful when it should be fun.

I can get the appeal of the risk/reward but it crosses the line from exciting and tense to anxiety inducing for me.

On top of that the game was kind of unstable on release and if you crashed it counted as losing the race and your wager etc and you cannot load an earlier save or anything, if that was the case the whole game would actually be decent apart from the lack of event variety.

SimCity 2013 or whatever the full online one was.

It was bugs and lies all the way to the bottom of it.

I found spelunky to be a game not fitting for me at all. I really wanted to like it, but I found myself to be unmotivated when I kept losing and didn't feel like making more skillwise progress. I might just suck, but I just don't feel like playing that punishing roguelikes.

Stardew valley - it sells itself as a harvest moon inspired farming Sim but as someone who grew up playing a lot of harvest moon, I really can't help but be super disappointed in it. Harvest moon games have a complex and more importantly moving relationship system - you start to go after one marriage candidate, the others will pair themselves up and have kids alongside you. People move in and out and you need to really get to know people in order to progress the game and unlock things. Stardew valley? Super flat in comparison. All the candidates you don't marry feel super flat once you lock yourself out of them. There's not much locked behind friendship so there's less reason to get out there and really work on befriending everyone.

Also fucking combat - it's a supposedly nice and peaceful farming Sim, yet combat is an unavoidable part of the game. I didn't sign up for combat! It's not fun it's just annoying.

EA's F1 completely ruined due to shit AI ramming and acting completely unrealistically

Most of the games of my childhood - they exclusively came from the <$5 bin 🙃 at least we had a PlayStation 2 but Crazy Frog Racer 2, Frogger: The Great Quest, Zathura, Animal Soccer World, and Street Vert Dirt are noteworthy “highlights”.

Satisfactory.

Totally my fault, it's not a bad game it just wasn't remotely what I was looking for when I bought it.

I got it expecting "factorio in 3d", however in reality it was more like Subnautica or Fallout 4 if the base building in those games was the main part of the game.

By the time I had finished loading the first phase of the space elevator I had came to terms with this.

As it turns out, the game that scratched that itch was heavily modded Space Engineers.

Idlegames, though I kind of dont want to count those as games in the first place. What make them anathema to fun to me is that they are designed for you to waste your time on them. They dont teach you anything either, maybe some prioritization if you really get into them.

Triangle Strategy. It's basically a visual novel with 5 minutes of combat every hour or so.

I tried playing Blasphemous recently and had to drop it in a couple hours. I might've stuck with it had I tried it when I was younger but I've discovered that nowadays I don't have the patience to play games that require you to beat your head against a brick wall until it breaks. So many frustrating enemy placements and insta-kill spikes, the movement is slow, the combat is unsatisfying, I just didn't feel like I had much incentive to continue playing (minus the art style which is absolutely gorgeous).

Minesweeper. Because I found it ugly and boring and it still managed to put me on edge.

Before I say this I do admit I am in the wrong, and that an overwhelming majority of people love this game, and I understand that on an objective level it was both ground breaking and excellent.

I cannot, for the life of me, enjoy breath of the wild due to weapons breaking. I played maybe 5 hours? I got excited when I found a cool sword, and then proceeded to never use it because I was afraid to "waste" it. (and repeat that with new weapons, to save which I have to go find some little seed people to have more inventory slots?)

I understand that they want me to try new things, but for me, for some reason, it just wasn't fun. I want to be excited when I find new loot, not anxious. Maybe it's because I grew up with Diablo-like games, where accumulating loot was the fun part, but I can't seem to enjoy it when the game takes toys away from me.

The binding of Isaac. You just do the same thing the whole game. You shoot stuff, and gather stupid RNG items. That's it, such a boring game

Progress Quest.

It's certainly funny but it is not a fun game. It plays itself. Literally. That's the point. It was something you ran along side with your mIRC client to show your uptime in a fun way.

I don't find any of those kinds of games fun. From Cookie Clicker to most mobile games, "idle games" are just the most unfun, un-game-like games ever made.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Now, it's kind of the point. But I don't know if it was my mouse or what but I found the controls to be too poorly implemented with how difficult of a game it already is. Sometimes, the hammer would basically glitch out or would apply way more pressure relative to my movements and fling me back down to the button. It served as an element of frustration that I think goes against the design goals. I've seen speed runs that make me think it could have been my hardware, but I'll never know. Actually, remembering, I think I switched to a different mouse eventually that was better but still not great.

I also just didn't really ever buy into the premise. I know it's an ode to B games, but the piling of random assets is not what I would consider good design even if they serve the purpose of what the game is going for. There are plenty of difficult video games that are about perseverance but still put in the effort in level design, mechanics, controls, etc.

Tbh, I found it an interesting enough experiment with failed execution. I don't understand people who hold it up as one of the better "art" games in the medium.

In recent memory the two that have stood out to me are Risk of Rain 2 and Halo 4. I thought some 3rd-person action in the former would be fun but I found the core loop and overall shooting boring after a couple run attempts so I guess it just didn't click for me.

Now Halo 4... I think gameplay in that title is an exercise in tedium. Add on (what is in my opinion as:) poor AI, a bit too much melodrama, dumb retcons, "do X three times!" a bit much and I got a campaign that felt like a chore and haven't touched it since I left off at the level with the Mammoth. The Prometheans are a pain to fight and I felt funneled into making do with Forerunner weapons to take ranged potshots at Watchers above all other targets and then rushing to kill the one Knight I was targeting before it regenerates, also above all other targets. Yuck. (Update: Coming back here since it occurred to me that I could sum it up as: my ability to make mid-combat decisions and play in the sandbox was kneecapped by poor enemy and maaaybe level design respectively.)

Good music though.

Eternal Sonata. It actually felt eternal, the whole game is just a super slow slog of boring repetitive combat with infrequent opportunities to save.

Any multiplayer game. They sacrifice a deep and interesting storyline for the sake of pointless grinding and slaughtering.

I'll go with a classic, "E.T. the extraterrestrial" on the Atari.... It was bad. It's badness is legendary for a reason.

We had a few cartridges for our Colecovision that I could never figure out how to get to do anything very game-like. I don't really remember the names of the bad ones. I'd be hard pressed to remember the names of the good ones other than like Donkey Kong. They were pretty hit or miss in general and the controller was really weird, but it made a memorable introduction to gaming and a great starting point to watch it all grow from.

I think the worst game I've ever played was the Dragonlance game for NES. There are other equally bad games that are even bad in largely the same way, but I'm a big Dragonlance fan and when I finally got a copy of this I was very excited for about 5 minutes. It's just bad. I have vague memories of throwing Tass into a hole a bunch of times and like maybe a little bit after that, but it was a mess. Maybe if I'd been able to get past the controls I'd have found a gem in there somewhere, but it just wasn't there. I feel like if a pizza company can knock out a class A platformer, TSR should have been able to manage.

It's odd, because D&D crpgs have usually been innovative for their time, using the D&D rules and hitting the ball out of the park. The Dragonlance game didn't come that long before the Black Sun game they made, and I'm pretty sure they had been making similar crpgs previously. I feel like I remember playing another early one on our 8088. But they decided to make some half assed platformer instead. Huh?

But Dragonlance always seems to get shafted on adaptations. I remember Tracy Hickman talking on Palace in the late 90s about making a live action Dragonlance movie with Aaron Eisenberg as Tasslehoff, but it seemed to just evaporate and instead we got that kinda weird but cool to see very stylized cartoon. I do like that it looked like the book covers, but it was a long way from what we'd initially expected to see.

Some day Dragonlance will get some real love. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will help.

As far as being overhyped beyond belief: Celeste. As far as playing an entire game to the end just to finish it: A Way Out

Maybe not the most unfun game I have ever played (I've played games since the late 90s), but certainly the most unfun I have played in recent years: Elex.

I liked Piranha Bytes' old Gothic series a lot despite its weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. The Risen games weren't that great, but the reviews for Elex were pretty promising. So I gave it a shot, and tried for about 16 hours to find the fun in it. I stopped playing when I realised:

• I couldn't hold my own in almost any battle because I didn't have good enough gear
• In order to get better gear, I had to join one of the game's factions
• In order to join one of the factions, I had to perform a number of tasks for them
• The factions were all just dickheads, and I didn't want to do anything for them, much less their dirty work

So yeah, no fun to be had with this one.

Homeworld. I know that's blasphemy. I love RTS games and the game is cool and beautiful but so slow and boring and tedious.

i'm trying desperately hard to like Haunting Ground for the PS2 (i'm a big horror game fan) but keep being interrupted from puzzles and exploration by each of the 'stalker' enemies. for context, they can't be killed or gotten rid of permanently, you can only run and hide. it's a shame because otherwise it's a very fun and unique game.

The Last of Us. Over-hype definitely didn't help, but it looked brown and dreary, seemed to mainly involve walking around waiting for press X to do thing to appear on screen, and having plot thrown at me when I actually wanted to play a game.

I never got to finish Just Cause 1 and Kill Zone 1 🤔

I wouldn't say they were unfun, but definitely I felt JC was very repetitive that I sort of left it behind and same can be said with Killzone, I played Killzone 2 and 3 and never got back to 1, but I intend to.

I have a few:

• Tunic: I thought it had more than one puzzle, with how it was being talked about online, but it ended up repeating the same thing for 6 hours reusing the same gimmick over and over - after a below average first half.

• Xenoblade Chronicles (DE): the characters were really uninteresting, the story kept spoiling every attempted twist it had with needless foreshadowing and the combat felt really boring. The world was empty and it felt like a dead MMO.

• 13 Sentinels: I won't spoil anything specific, but the story was just a bunch of the most generic sci-fi cliches.

• Monster Hunter Rise: I love World/Iceborne and really enjoyed the parts I played of GU and 4U but Rise just felt bad to play.

• Games that force daily tasks/gacha games: I hate being forced - or even just being hinted at having - to grind daily. It just ends up pushing me away from the game, even if I'm enjoying it. I can't play games like Genshin Impact and Star Rail, but also the daily challenges in sf5/6 bother me every time I see them.

I also don't really get roguelikes, but I'm not sure if I just haven't found one I enjoy or I don't like the genre.

Gloria Victis. It's an MMO with factional PVP warfare that uses directional combat (like Mordhau). I'll admit, I'm not a fan of these games, but I gave it a try since a friend of mine was interested in it. And I do like MMOs for the story content and to see what players can do with and within the world.

It was horribly boring. The main draw of the game is its PVP, but they definitely tried to also cater to the PVE playerbase, but the quests and story were generic and forgettable. I never even got to try the PVP, which I think my friend said was just OK anyway. I stopped playing after like a week. Apparently, the game is shutting down end of October, after releasing back in February 2023.

Another is the first Watch Dogs. I had played and completed Watch Dogs 2 and really liked it a lot. So thought to try the first one. I knew it was a very different mood and style from WD2, but thought it'd be OK. I can deal with moody and edgy. But it just wasn't at all fun or interesting. I think I played for a couple hours and then uninstalled.

Beyond the beyond.

It was just... bad. The particle effects didn't make things look good they just made it hard to see anything, the plot was stupid, everything was stupid really.

Worms Blast. I didn't look at any of the game screenshots and thought it would just be like a normal worms games and not more like that arcade game where you throw the coloured balls up to the ceiling to match them.

I have nothing against that style of game, but I just didn't like it in the Worms style.

My go-to for this is Resistance: Fall of Man. Invisible walls everywhere, a cover system and a health system that were absolutely at odds with a gun that shoots enemies through walls, and an uninteresting story told in boring slideshows. The only reason I played through it is that my college roommate and I were broke and needed another co-op game after we finished all of the good ones.

Honestly, Armored Core VI. Endgame spoilers below (idk if there's a way to do spoiler tags?).

The final boss is absolutely godawful. Just utter garbage. It took me hours, and I hated it from my first attempt. It's categorically different from anything else in the game, and there's never a point where it's fun. Probably 20% of my total playtime was on this one boss. I was absolutely loving the game up until then, but that one boss is so unbelievably poorly designed that it ruined the entire game for me. It's genuinely impressively horrible.

This is a hard question to answer, because the really unfun ones either get dropped so fast I forget I ever played them unless someone jogs my memory by naming them directly, or I'm willing to just shrug and say "this is probably great to some people, but it's not a genre I like." I guess for this category, I would point to The Witness. I heard so many recommendations for it, but aside from the occasional "oh, neat" when I saw how a puzzle was placed in the world instead of on a board, I couldn't tolerate it for nearly as long as it wanted me to keep doing the thing.

The game I memorably should have enjoyed - that I had the highest hopes for (and the biggest subsequent disappointment for) was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

At first, I loved the deeply disturbed main character and grim Norse fantasy world being crafted around me, but the combat felt so disjointed from the story (on purpose) that it felt like there was one guy on the dev team who liked combat who everyone was afraid to piss off, so they had to make concessions and put one token immersion-wrecking battle in every so often. And it's mad that Senua has two entire character traits - "psychotic" and "warrior" - and one of them managed to feel immersion breaking.

Then the ending destroyed the bits of the game I DID like and made me feel like a tool for ever having bought into the grim fantasy world to begin with. That shit is everyone's most hated ending trope, and I walked away from the game feeling like I'd wasted my time.

At least it was short.

Story of Seasons AWL, it was nostalgic but the fact I couldn't go to Mineral Town/ The City was a bit disappointing and broke the nostalgia.

Games usually have to grab me pretty quickly, or I just drop them, so I don't play a lot of unfun games for a long time.

Some exceptions were Final Fantasy 13, and to some extent the most of the Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).

Final Fantasy 13 I just tried a bunch of times, put in a combined 40h over the course of like three attempts, I don't know why, but it was just mediocre at best. During the final one last year, I made it about halfway through, and actually got turned off from gaming altogether for a few months. The story sucked, as well as the characters. I thought the combat could be interesting, even with the auto-battles, since you'd have to decide what "stance" your characters were in, but it was just lame for the most part.

The Trails series is a bit different. I actually liked the gameplay (turn-based JRPG combat is fun), but the story and especially the villains are just complete garbage. Two years ago, before Cold Steel 4 came out on PC, I sat down and played through all the games in like two months. While Trails in the Sky is trash, I was actually surprised to really, really like Zero and (to a little bit lesser extent) Azure. Those gave me hope, but Trails of Cold Steel just goes back to being terrible. I might still go back and play Cold Steel 4 and whatever other games continue or maybe finally finish the story, just because I've invested too much time at this point.

I rented Sim Earth for SNES and it didn’t come with instructions. I had no idea what to do, and it was confusing and frustrating.