What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype?

Skyrim, it's so damn mundane.

That's because you're playing it wrong. You see, at it's core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you're finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.
- Damn. I feel so seen suddenly.
- The end-game lasts about 30 seconds after boot.
  "Oooh, pretty sky. Ooh, wavy plants. Ooh, god rays. Alt+F4."
- Actually. I tried Skyrim so many times and never got into it, then I decided to give it the best shot and play with a cavalcade of QoL mods. I went from a hater to a true Skyrim enjoyer. At this point, with how pessimistic I was about the game, I think with the right setup ANYONE can enjoy it.
- I'm in this comment and I hate it
- Real. Without my 800 mods I would‘ve never bothered finishing it. Playing/modding was probably 50/50 in terms of time spent.
Skyrim came out 14 years ago.
- Thanks for the tip
I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).
Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.
Just get openmw and play a real elder scrolls game before Bethesda got got
- Or spin up TES3MP with some friends and experience it together!
I recently tried Fallout 4 based off of the same expectations. Probably didn't even make it a quarter of the way through the main story. I was having absolutely no fun. The thing that finally killed it for me was spending 5 minutes calculating which items needed to be sold at a shop and which I should keep, then getting blown up a block later, then respawning right before I did all that inventory management.

Just played through Doom: Eternal cause it was on sale for 4€ a bit back. The entire time I was wishing I was playing Doom 2016..

The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn't enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn't sit with me. I haven't tried Dark Ages but it seems like it's doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn't mean I don't like what they're doing. I think it's brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
- Both of your comments are a testament to why I love the new Doom games -- they're different and don't seem to be meant to be enjoyed by every fan, every release, every time.
  Apart from the first two games (and Doom 64 for that matter), each offers different gameplay and feel and it's so, so beautiful.
  I feel lucky having a blast in each one. Doom 3 is my favorite, actually, especially with the vanilla flashlight (for the uninitiated: where you can either have your weapon out or the flashlight).
Yeah. I didn't really enjoy it, but I got into it and finished it. Once I realized that you're expected to die and respawn frequently, and you don't lose anything when you do, playing went a lot better.
I still don't get that decision, because Doom has never been like that. Even arcade games don't do that. It just felt trivially cheap at that point.
Yeah, I enjoyed a bit of 2016, but got bored a didn't finish it. I think Doom Eternal I had from Steam Family Sharing (or other source I didn't pay for) and just couldn't get into it. I hate both of them forcing the melee kill thing that takes you out of the action to watch a cutscene, but Eternal just didn't feel like it worked for some reason.

Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.

There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.

5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.

For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20

In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter's attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).

All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.

I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.
It's a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.
My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.
- Heartbreaking that they decided static item attack rolls and DCs was a good idea. It's my biggest gripe with the system. Some items, like the Holy Avenger, subvert this and are pretty good, but most items suuuuuck the instant you outlevel them. Like, Sparkblade is cool, who doesn't like chain swordbeams? Anyone over level 4, aparrently, because every creature you come across has learned to dodge lightning from that sword in particular
I haven't played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I've played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn't say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I'd say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character's role is less preordained ("you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y") and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.
2024 is even worse. On top of that, they also stack extra abilities, and try to give everyone everything.
One of these days I should try Pathfinder
3.5e being the best is an opinion I've heard for my entire life. I would say preferring 5e is a more unpopular opinion.
5e character progression does feel kind of bland.
I feel the 5e rules are poorly organized, too. Lots of interdependent rules scattered far from each other in the books, and sometimes buried in the middle of seemingly unrelated sections, so unless you've memorized multiple chapters, understanding how to resolve common situations sometimes requires stopping the game for 15-30 minutes while someone digs through the books to find all the relevant factors. Even when you do find the relevant info, it's often in ambiguous language describing what could have been made perfectly clear with a few keywords. The books are pretty, and the text might be nice to read for entertainment, but they're pretty bad the the job of being game manuals.
Does 3.5e use the d20 system? Does it have the advantage/disadvantage mechanic? I like those aspects of 5e; they're simple and they help keep games moving along.
Maybe I should give it a try. Or perhaps 4e, which I have read does a better job of clearly defining its gameplay mechanics.
- 3.5 does use d20, but lacks advantage/disadvantage in favor of doing a lot more math every moment of every round of combat. This is the biggest appeal of 5e, it's approachable and keeps the games moving.
  I wouldn't recommend 4e, it strongly suffers from the aforementioned "everyone can do everything and feels samey" much more than 5e.
  Pathfinder 1e is basically just dnd 3.5, and as others have mentioned, PF2e is more of a middle ground
Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you're not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you're looking for.
As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it's a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don't feel like you're just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you're left with is the only thing of value.
I liked 4e the best.
- 4e did some really cool stuff while also going a bit off the rails for me. I think overall I like 5E more, but we played a ton of 4e and I’ll always remember it fondly. I was really into the more defined roles, and how classes were a bit more self contained so they could just keep making more and more niche ones
I started TTRPGs with Pathfinder (1e). Some people talk about it like some impossible thing to play. It does have a lot more detail than 5e, but it isn't that bad. (I did play one character as a wrestler, who did grappling a lot, which is notoriously one of the most complex systems.)
5e sells itself as being simple, and it is in how little control it gives you. However, the rules are anything but simple. There's so many contradictions and stipulations every player has to memorize. It's a mess. For example, some spells can be used as bonus actions, but not if you've already cast a spell, except for some that can anyway. It's stupid.
Pathfinder 2e seems to make things so much simpler for everything, while still giving players freedom. Actions are just actions. If you've got the points you can use them for anything. Movement, attacks, spells, etc. Pretty much everything just is what it says.

All the souls games. I don’t get it, they’re just no fun 🤷‍♂️

Also, never finished doom eternal, far too busy. Dark ages was great tho

There was a time when I could not have imagined liking those kinds of games. My partner got me Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and I hated it. Hate may be too kind a word for how I felt. I’ve always loved metroidvanias and the style seemed right up my gothy, witchy alley, but I couldn’t get past the first basic zombie.
Then we watched a bunch of videos and realized that the game was designed to be played slowly and deliberately. There were no “junk” enemies and paying careful attention at all times was the game. When it clicked, it clicked, and now From Software games are my favorite.
- I had a similar experience. Went the wrong way in DS1, headed straight for the catacombs, went "oh. This isn't hard. This is punishing." And dropped off. Later a friend gave me some guidance and some pointers on what the game did/didn't expect of me and I've been a giant fan ever since.
  Sekiro took me a little time to figure out what it expected from me, too, but now I absolutely adore that game. That's more of a mechanical "what should I be doing in combat" statement of the fact that the game expects you to act aggressively while focusing on defense. Though
Souls games didn't make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon's Souls. Mechanics that I didn't know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.
My first attempt was Dark Souls 3. I went in expecting challenging but rewarding battles, and a mysterious world to explore. Unfortunately, I found myself bored within an hour every time I played, and gave up on it after maybe a dozen sessions.
I tried Elden Ring maybe a year or two later. I stuck with it for longer, but the experience was roughly the same. The combat felt tedious. The art and animation didn't appeal to my tastes. The world seemed big, but desolate. The controls somehow made me feel awkwardly disconnected from my character. Nothing about the game made me care about it at all. The biggest challenge was in keeping my eyelids open.
I wonder if I would find soulslikes more appealing if I had grown up on console games. They're clearly popular, but it seems they just aren't for me.
- I actually bought DS3 twice, For the PS4 the first time, and couldn't do anything. I'm not a console person by nature. Then I found out it was on PC, my jam, got it and OMG is that port shitty
I've enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.
- Now I'm wondering, which non-From Soulslikes did you enjoy?
I love the fuck out of dark fantasy. The problem is that while souls-games and Elden Ring, are drenched with dark fantasy elements, the game execution itself just didn't appeal to me at all. I just don't like the idea of tediousness mixed with a scale of difficulty where all and any progress of mine are just dashed because a slight misstep.

I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.

The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.

Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.

The game makers had no respect for players’ time.
I don't know that game, but the importance of respecting the player's time cannot be overstated.
I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.
- It's a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn't respect the player's time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.
I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.
I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.
- I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn't gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.
  Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole "ability to decide what room you're going into" thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.
  Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I've owned it for so long I'm outside of the refund window.
I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the "main" puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.
I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
Same. The game is fantastic but the RNG is only cool on paper and falls apart just a few hours into the game. The methods they give you to influence your luck are just not enough to do much at all.
It's really frustrating when you are trying to do something but you constantly have to do something else because that's what the game is giving you.
I cheated at the end and gave me infinite rerolls for rooms so I could create the layout I needed in that moment. Much better that way.
Check out Seance of Blake Manor, doesn't have the rng
- It’s funny, I literally downloaded that one last night.

You know, one man's trash is another man's treasure. I'd say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it's got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it's still on the short list for most outlets' game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn't even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they've ever played, but I don't think they're even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you'll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don't think Silksong is making the cut.

But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.

A big part of the appeal of Hollow Knight and Hades are their respective art styles. They are both genuinely gorgeous games, and it really improves the experience. I would rather open up Hades again instead of, say, TBoI for exactly that reason, despite my thinking that TBoI is the better roguelike.
Admittedly I can't bring myself to enjoy Hollow Knight at all, but that's just an issue of me disliking metroidvanias.
- hades' strength is its narrative; hk's strength is its worldbuilding.
  it's very difficult to stand out on pure gameplay in the 21st century.
I agree regarding Hollow Knight... It was fine. I don't really get the hype though, people would make you believe it's the best game ever made.
I'd go for CO:E33 too. Its a decent enough game but I don't understand the absolute hype it receives. Probably a 5/10 game for me.
- I can answer this for you. So imagine a genre of game that you grew up playing, loved, and sunk possibly thousands of hours in. Now imagine for like 15 years they only made the most dogshit version of that genre of game. Then someone comes along and makes a decent, even passable, modern version of that game.
  It's like giving dirty water to a dehydrated person. Is the water good? Fuck yeah in the moment it's fantastic. Is the water the greatest water you've ever had? Well technically no, but please don't take away the dirty water please.
All of the games you listed here were pretty under hyped IMO except for perhaps Silksong.
I understand this is all subjective, but I think you're leaning toward like indie gaming hipster material with this comment...and that's my opinion.
- I leaned toward games that came highly recommended that I actually played.
I played E33 for about 4 hours. The combat system is atrocious. It feels like I'm playing a turn based RPG but with elements of Dark Souls? The almost necessity of dodging in combat made me give the game up.
- I just played it on easy difficulty then it became enjoyable for me.

Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have yet to finish it but apart from robot dinosaurs, it feels so generically open world… Admitedly, a very pretty-looking open world. Can‘t really get into the story so far either since it takes itself so seriously while I‘m having a hard time not thinking too much about how ridiculous its world is. So apart from sight-seeing, there hasn‘t been much in this game for me thus far.

Edit: This comment section is a treasure trove of hot takes, so many of my beloved games mentioned making me go „What the fuck…,“ I love it

It's absolutely a generic open world game, bit that's not necessarily a bad thing. The formula is fun if it's done well, which I think it is for Horizon Zero Dawn. The combat style is also uncommon and provides a satisfying loop of stealth and bullet time mechanics.
I liked both games, but combat is ruined in the second. Literally just constant spamming of massive AOE attacks. All the nuance of the first is literally nuked from orbit.
- Are you playing with gyro aiming? I also loved the gameplay of the first one and was disappointed by the second. My hypothesis is that aiming without gyro was too tedious so they updated the gameplay to require less aiming. Not that the game tries to be realistic anyway but the combo/special attacks and the time spent in the inventory/wheel kinda break the immersion/flow for me.
Took me awhile to get into it. I did eventually finish it. My criticism of the game was more that the dungeons aren’t really all that challenging and are mostly just places where the story advances. Not many puzzles or fights. You just do your fighting out in the open world. Also, eventually the fights are easy as you learn how to fight each type. Eventually you just avoid confrontations because they’re just time consuming.
Dude. I have tried like 3 times to get into the horizon series. Just can’t do it. It’s so generic, just pretty.
I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there's a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.
I don't think it was quite as generic at the time of release, but yeah I tend to agree

Deep Rock Galactic. I was really excited to play it and I tried to like it. The colors and graphics were 10/10 awesome, I just found it to be extremely boring and repetitive.

i thought it was boring AND fugly. the price tag feels outrageous for what the gameplay entails.
Very fair, I had a lot of fun with it as a casual game to relax with. Not so easy it's trivial, not so hard it needs a lot of thinking.
Man I LOVE drg. A good team on a call made this the most fun I've had playing in recent years. Unfortunately, the population is lower and one may have trouble finding new players. Veterans are usually happy to help, but you'd need a patient one.
For me, deep rock really shines when you're playing the higher hazard levels. Seeing a wall of the cave move because it's covered in enemies, and then hitting them with a fat boy gave me happy chemicals.

Elden Ring. It is good for what it is, probably the best in its genre, but after so many Soulsbornes, it just feels like more of the same. Formulaic. I've tried it three separate times and it never grabbed me.

To me, the Souls combat does best in a tightly knit and highly curated environment. I really enjoyed Elden Ring but I do not think it was a step forward for the series. Open World worked to the detriment of the game IMO.
- I echoed this in another thread. I honestly feel like ER is the weakest "Soulsborne" game they've put out. It feels like a lot of conflicting design philosophies at once.
  The lore and worldbuilding are phenomenal but gameplay-wise it falls short of what made their past games shine.
It's definitely not the best in its genre, if only because they did away with the level design ethos that makes their other games so good.
- This is something that gets completely lost in the translation to an open world game. The DS trilogy, Bloodborne, and even the original Demon's Souls feel hand-crafted and carefully structured without being completely linear. ER loses a lot by leaving that formula behind.
  On top of that, the boss/enemy design is imo some of the worst they've ever done. The past games (with DS2 being the one with the most exceptions) typically give you very fair but challenging fights. Telegraphs are clear without being slow and obvious. Particle effects and such are generally kept to a minimum to prevent visual clutter from taking over the screen. Bosses hit hard, but very few hits or combos, if any, would one-shot most builds outside of challenge runs. ER throws all of that out the window - bosses tend to hit like trucks, are visual clusterfucks (either enormous models with a terrible camera, tons of particle effects blasting out the ass, or both). I feel like the final boss of the DLC as an example is the most egregious example of this sort of design philosophy. Hell, Nightreign works so much better with the exact same designs because it's such a faster-paced game where getting knocked down once or twice isn't usually the end of a run.
I (re)play Soulsborne for builds, and I think that's necessary to appreciate ER. Trying out all the spells and different weapons is most of the fun, the rest being trying them out on bosses.

Cyberpunk 2077.

It's okay, but it's a far cry from giving me the feelings of a cyberpunk world in my opinion and I'm a massive fan of blade runner and the like.

Why am i spending so much time wandering at the street level where everywhere just looks and feels the same. Travelling is so boring.

And the voice acting of V (I played female) is so overreacted, it's one of the cringiest performances in gaming, considering it's meant to be all serious and whatnot.

it's literally worse than it was at launch too. dialogue makes less sense for the sake of "having choices" even though the choices are meaningless and they changed the driving from "not great but passable" to "literally the single worst video game driving i've ever seen in my entire life". the combat sucks, the dialog sucks, the driving sucks, the worldbuilding sucks, the story sucks, CDPR are just terrible at anything that isn't "spend 500 watts of power to make shitty models look half decent with post processing" and idiot redditors think that makes a game good.
Why am i spending so much time wandering at the street level where everywhere just looks and feels the same.
What game are you fucking playing?
“Looks and feels he same”!?
What are you even going on about? Every neighborhood, every nook and cranny, looks and feels different and has it's own personality and story to tell!
Night City is the real protagonist of the game! I could spend hours upon hours just walking those streets, experiencing the city (and have), and I'm far from the only one...
And the voice acting of V (I played female) is so overreacted, it's one of the cringiest performances in gaming
I'm sorry, what? Cherami Leigh got a well deserved BAFTA nomination for that performance!
(Lost to Laura Bailey for her work as Abby on The Last of Us Part II.)
What, were you playing with your eyes closed while listening to something else..?
- Night City is the real protagonist of the game!
  this is hilarious and more damning than any criticism i've ever made of the game lmao. and i fucking hated that game.
  Cherami Leigh got a well deserved BAFTA nomination for that performance
  did they have cotton in their ears? she wasn't as bad as keanu reeve's terminally hammy ass but she was pretty fucking bad, all the dialogue feels like a BAD anime dub where everyone recorded in separate rooms without hearing each other.
- To me every nook and cranny just looks bland with nothing to do there. Everywhere just had the same sidewalks and railings. There's no way i could ever navigate that game without waypoints.
  And with the acting the emphasis she puts on certain words in a sentence just don't match the situation and the others she's talking to, and it feels like she swaps between extreme emotions on the same dialogue and it's like tonal whiplash to me. There was no nuance to lay in between, and nothing to unpack for the listener. You know when she's angry because she has her 110% angry voice on and so on.
  Unless the situation is heightened and dire, it just never fit in my opinion. Her performance fits a stage play more than what's meant to be an immersive video game in my opinion.
  Jackie's and Keanu's voice acting though was stellar.
- My problem with Cyberpunk is it feels like all style and no substance. Night City is probably the best looking city I've ever seen in a game. The world designers did a phenomenal job with the visuals and atmosphere.
  But it just doesn't feel like there's enough to do in the city or ways to interact with it or the NPCs. There should be more buildings you can enter and more activities to do. For me that's what sets GTA and Red Dead apart from Cyberpunk. They have much more to do when you're not on missions.
Agreed. I have bounced off this game a few times for similar reasons. For a game that is about a cyberpunk future, it felt so much like a gta clone. Having played the ttrpgs, I think I just have a different version of the world in my head, and the games version just feels off.
- i went in completely blind with no expectations beyond "cyberpunk (genre) video game" and hated every second of it. cdpr are just bad at what they do.
Yeah seriously, V gets so worked up over fucking everything and I just couldn't give a fuck. Calm the fuck down and take your Xanax, V. She's stressing me out over nothing.

Fallout 4. I could never bring myself to finish it. The furthest I ever got was just before the Mass Fusion mission between the Institute and the Brotherhood, with the Railroad already dead. I just couldn't summon the will to continue. In every playthrough after that, I rush to Nuka World, finish a few parks there, and call it quits again.

I picked up Vampire Survivors, played one round, and was like yeah I think I’m done here.

I don't know how I managed to have gone through the game as long as I have. I got it for free when it was a giveaway on Epic. I feel that's exactly the right price because really, it's just an almost do-nothing but move slightly and just pick options kind of game. Got boring fast.
It started being really ridiculous when I got one character, a skeleton that threw bones, up to the point where all I see were just numbers, gems and other flying things from the abilities I picked. It just got comically stupid but still boring at the same time.
This game's entire premise, was that it's supposed to give you feel-good moments without having spending money like you normally would on mobile games. It behaves like a mobile game without MTX. But I think its problem is that it retains the other problems that mobile gaming has than just MTX, such as time-wasting, cheating you of your dopamine and all that.

Being on the patient side of things, two games I've played in recent years and didn't enjoy were:

God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no 'friction' - boring.

Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn't enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I've unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.

Factorio's the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It's a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.
I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what's coming. I don't have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don't even enjoy the game.
- I’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.
  That being said, that genre of game is absolutely not for everyone.
I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.
I absolutely love Factorio. I even bought the DLC the moment it came out.
I'm also absolutely rubbish at the game. I've never managed to finish the game on my own, and usually struggle to get blue science producing at all, much less at the correct ratio.
I do have fun with trains though, so I'll often jump into friends' games and just optimize (replace) their train networks.
Agreed. New GOW was much better.

The entire Mass Effect series. Many of the missions were dredging through mostly empty buildings that had copy-pasted boxes and random shit in them. Just generic buildings with generic crap stuffed into them. The world felt purposeless, sterile, and generic to me.

Also, the story just didn’t really grab me that much as I cringe at the romance parts of any story. And lastly, the gameplay was just clunky and awkward to me.

I played through fhe whole series thinking the good part was about to happen since there was hype for the game.
Out of curiosity, who did you romance, and why?
- No one. Because it’s incredibly cringy.
I do wish they'd done more with the buildings.
The structures being carbon-copy was lore, they're built in factories and dropped from ships.
But that doesn't mean they all need the same boxes in a row layout internally, some personality would have been great and pretty easy to implement.
I love the series, but I played the games when they came out. It's true that the level design of ML2 suffers from it being a cover shooter and ML1 is very dated now.
Which of the three titles did you hate most/represents your dislike best?

Hot take alert
Hollow knight silksong.

Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk.. but they did so many things that are just... mean. They disrespect the player constantly.. tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed 'flower' quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being "just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version." So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.

I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.

I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there's a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don't really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.
However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit
- Sorry late reply... yeah i realized a lot of my frustration was trying to play spoiler free... but this game seems to beg for guides/walkthroughs, and i agree w you i really dont like games that feel super dependent on constantly checking a guide not to mention just breaking your immersion n taking you out of the gameplay..... but some of the stuff is like "no way im just figuring that out!" Like egregious level of "hidden area behind a hidden area to fight a hidden boss that unlocks a hidden upgrade" level shit. Its one more in a long list of really bummer decisions from this team.

I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it's been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I've heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.

Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain't no way I'm remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.

I've put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.

You're playing a middle aged detective (though he looks older, or at least more worn down) who just woke up from an alcoholic coma after taking all the drugs, unable to remember anything about himself or the world he lives in, except for the fact that there might have been a woman, which was somehow both the best and the worst, and possibly some trivia about disco.
I don't think you're supposed to be able to remember or understand everything the game throws at you, at least on a first playthrough. That's what Kim is for.
Just go with the flow, and remember that in this game failure often leads to more enjoyable outcomes than success.
- But he's a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I'm a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.
What are you making notes of? I never had this urge.
Also, in case you weren't aware, Steam has notes built in and it saves them for each individual game
- Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.
  Steam has notes built in
  This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn't pay to the company after what they did to the developers.
I kept dying. And I couldn't figure out how anyone dies in a narrative game. I couldn't really figure out how to play the game and gave up after dying 2x in the same conversation.
I'm still so confused how one dies from conversation.
Instead I watched a video about the game.
I play a lot of games but nothing like this one. I wanted to like it but I'm too dumb to figure out the mechanics. And I even tried watching videos and found them convoluted and confusing.
Meh.
Loved the art style tho.

Dark Souls.

I played Demons Souls and it was awesome, but Dark Souls is so confuse, I couldn't understand shit about the story, and it's not that hard, harder than Demons Souls but no that hard.

Dark Souls is a 14 year old game
- you're probably right

The Outer Worlds was so bad I had to put the controller down and abandon it. A fan made song got the feeling of "dystopian capitalism in space" better than the actual game did.

And an older one that'll get me burned at the stake: Fallout New Vegas is the worst of the first person fallout games.

I couldn't connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn't give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type... for the time. It doesn't hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played... in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today's technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
- I get that people like the story and feel like they have an influence on it, but for me it felt railroaded even from the start. "Oh yeah it's open world but if you go anywhere other than the path we laid out for you you'll die by deathclaws" is what it's known for.
  My biggest gripe is that when I play fallout I want post apocalyptic retro futurism. 50s vision of the future gone wrong. I feel like I don't get that with NV and that's the whole theme of the franchise. It's the pizza at the Chinese buffet, like, I'm not here for that, why are you here? This is just Nevada but slightly shittier.
With 2 out I thought I'd give the original one more chance. I wish I hadn't. The story is just as bad as I remember, and the gameplay is somehow worse.
I mean the only way to talk about the story is that you're better off just running through without thinking about it, because at every level it just fails at its messaging. It simply is what it is. What compounds that suck is that the game isn't even that well designed of a shooter, or implemented well. The controls are gummy, your character feels weightless, and as someone almost 7 feet tall IRL I still feel like the POV is a foot too high. Guns feel boring, the skill system is unimpactful, dialog is stilted, characters are flat as cardboard, and overall the entire game just feels like you're meant to squint at it until you forget what you're doing and just reminisce about playing fallout. All I feel when I play is a distinct fear that I will see the seeds of Outer Worlds in games I loved as a kid before I knew to look for such flaws.
- I don't know if the story is bad, I just don't care about any of it. Parvati's story was cute and I liked helping her but I couldn't tell you anyone else's name and I was playing it yesterday.
  The loot system just feels like it doesn't matter. Maybe I screwed myself over by doing an INT based build cause my science hammer just demolishes everything.
Oh really? I did have fun with the Outer Worlds. Nothing too amazing, but it was fun enough to keep me invested. Parvati was also a large reason for that, I loved her character.
Well just fyi. The end missions are currently, still today, broke. So only one ending available that is regardless of whatever choices you made.
I loved the first one. I like this one but they made some bad changes.
But mostly they need to fix the mission bugs.
First one you could change the armor and weapons on the companions.
Also I really liked the vicar and Parvati. Vicar was like a snarky gay guy and I loved it. I will admit the other 3 were blah. But the new companions on OW2 are kinda bland.
I don't really like any of them. Niles and inza had potential but wasn't developed.
And I straight up dislike Tristan's personality. He's just awful.
Aza can be entertaining. If they made her more impulsive I think that could have been fun.
For instance if you take too long in negotiations and shes present. She just starts attacking people after some time limit.
Or randomly attacks strangers she doesn't like the look of.
They could have done something interesting with her.
But mostly they need to fix the damn quest bugs so I can finish the game.
Also there was a quest in ow1 where some sketchy dude asks you to do some sketchy thing. And you realize this during the quest. You can go back to him and get the reward. Or sucker punch him.
I wanted more of that in ow2. Didn't get it.
I didn't think it was so bad I had to stop playing, but I did stop playing one night once it got late and just never started it again, nor had the desire.
It seemed fine enough, but it just didn't click with me I guess.

I finally have a computer that can run Cyberpunk 2077, but it is such a dull game.

ive put 40 hours on that game and everything past the first 5 was because of friends insisting i keep trying. i dont understand the love for it at all, it's just all around awful.
LOL I could have told you that before you spent the money.
Thankfully there's a lot of good games that really shine on high-end hardware. Like that Indiana Jones game and the Spider-Man games. Also you never have to worry about games being an unoptimized mess, when you can just brute force them with pure processing power.
Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a similar cyberpunk vibe to Cyberpunk 2077 but with better gameplay and plot IMO.
- HR is great.
  MD is half a game, with disjointed quests due to it. It's sorta funny how the developers made all the Sonic and Knuckles references...
- Absolutely. The original Deus Ex is pretty excellent too. And the turn based Shadowrun games. It'd be cool if 2077 was better though, the tabletop game is sick.
I really liked and the story. But after taking a year break and then playing the dlc phantom liberty. I kinda was over it. Just felt like work. Not really fun.
So idk. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for it.
You tried playing with mods though?
- No, any recommendations?

I often stay away of new games because that exactly, the hype. If you play a new game and you say it sucks, everybody yells at you, but if you let past the time, it's the time the one who gives reason to people.

I always think it's fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It's always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.
I had to search "Bethesda space game" just now to even remember its generic name ...
- I remember at the time it was getting all these awards. When I still had game pass I booted it up to see what it was all about. Dear god was it dull. All I remember is some dude comes out and is like “you had a space vision! Take my ship!” And I thought that was the most absurd way to start a game.
- Funny thing is, starfield would probably still be relevant if it didnt have paid mods
- I was just talking to someone at a party about what games we'd been playing, and we also had to fully stop and think a while to remember the actual name of the Bethesda Space Game™.
In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There's a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I've seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.
- This happened to me with Resident Evil 3 Remake, I didn't knew that had so many haters behind but I really enjoyed the game. One thing to hate, they say, is the short duration of the game. I mean, you could beat the original game in 2 hours, if you didn't knew nothing about the game, could take you like 7 or 8 hours

Slay the Spire for me, I thought it'd be a slam dunk because I love Balatro, but it just didn't land for me at all.

Kinda the same, but I did like slay the spire. But balatro is leaps and bounds superior.
- Huh opposite for me. I have played Slay the Spire for like 2000 hours. I have beaten it through ascension 20 on all 4 characters like 20ish times at this point. I still pick it up and play it when I'm bored and it still is fun somehow.
  I could not get into Balatro like that. I think I have roughly 50 hours in it and like 3/4 of the way through it with all the decks and challenges and simply cannot bring myself to complete it. The last 10 or so hours just felt like a slog. Still a good game but the sheen wore off for me well before I could 100% it much less start replaying.
  To each their own I guess! Funny how similar the games are and how there's just some people that love one but can't get into the other.
That’s funny, I love Slay the Spire, but I have mixed feeling about Balatro.
Balatro is addicting in that once I start playing I don’t want to stop, and yet after playing for a few hours I couldn’t say for sure I had fun at any point the whole time.
Playing Balatro feels like exploring the backrooms to me - just infinite bland nothingness.

arc raiders

Do you have a general reason? Giving the name of the game doesn't do much when i don't know why you didn't like it.

Bg3. I think the flaws are glaringly obvious and everyone has heard them already (inventory, everything after act 1, the main characters being generally gross) it's just whether they're a deal breaker for you personally. For me they are, especially inventory.

The characters being gross? Im not sure ive heard that complainant, could you elaborate please
- Wyll is the least immediately unlikeable but he's boring and I hated talking to him
  Laezel, shadow - clearly intended to parallel each other but listening to hard-headed morons clash between "we should murder everything" and "those people need medicine and my only medicine is pain" is not entertaining to me. Their "growth" doesn't ever seem to fix this
  Karlach I don't have real complaints about
  Gale never managed to grow out of being pompous and annoying
  Dark urge probably the best character
  There's plenty of listicles and reddit posts with other complaints if you google "don't like bg3 characters".
Same. I tried to just 'go with it' and ignore the flaws so that I could play multi-player with my SO. Act 2 was a slog. Act 3 is where we gave up completely. The only good part is that the whiny companions started dying on their own.

The Elden Ring.

The open world just did not do it to me. I enjoy much more tighter game world like in the previous souls games.

Most of the side bosses were unintresting and if you found them too late you were completely overpowered.

I still enjoyed Elden Ring, but I agree completely. I prefer the metroidvania world design of earlier From Software games. The sense of progression is one of the best parts of those games, and Elden Ring’s open world robs the it of a lot of the magic of earlier titles, where discoveries were around every corner and in every nook and cranny. I never felt the same joy of exploration and hard won progress as I did in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro.
- Double-agreed, but from a different point. What frustrated me about Elden Ring was that some of the dungeons were literally the best designed soulsbourne levels I've ever played. Everything between those dungeons, though, just felt like open world slop. The game would have been pure crack if it had just been tighter.
Open world sure did mean lots of wandering and dying until you figured out where to go. Still worth it but too much wasted time.

Space marine 2. You shoot things with guns that don't feel powerful and you die if you don't have perfect reaction timing to do executes. I've never played a game where the world says "oh you're amazing and powerful!" but then makes you feel incredibly weak. Also, the timing for executes is not fun. It would be nice if they were bonuses but they are necessary to survive because they replenish your health. The gun gameplay is just shooting. No strategy. Boring. I'm going back to hell drivers 2.

I played this with two friends. The progression system is just awful. So we got through the full campaign once and it was fine honestly. Then we were kind of hyped to try going through it again, it was all right definitely harder. And then the third time around we just gave up cuz it was clear that they're just wasn't that much game to play, and the enemy is just become bullet sponges and you either grind endlessly to try to level up and gain unknown amounts of power if its power at all.
Intermultiplayer sessions we did have a few epic moments won't lie. But the cost just wasn't worth it. And those thin offset the issues that we had.
I personally loved it the part where i was weak. Its lore accurate and it was like travelling back in time to the olden days.
It was great nostalgia rush to play a game where you could really die and it was not unusual to need and try same fight multiple times.
Now days i feel like most games are allmost impossible to loose. I dont want it from all the games, but its nice to have games like that available.
Helldivers 2 is hard game, but dying a lot is something the game mechanics are build around and you dont loose instantly and when you loose you just fire up a new game, it does not give me the same 2000's vibe i got from the space marine 2.
Also the reaction times are not that tight. Even my dad reflexes can manage those.
- You and my buddies say that the reaction times aren't that tight. I must be doing something wrong then because they're no different than any other reaction game for me: I miss a majority of the.

Friend recommended one of the hitman games. But the steam port is so incredibly janky in regards to controller layout. And it was fucking made for consoles is what's bonkers!!!

Huh what?
- There's a game series called "hitman". A friend recommended one of the games. I installed it and had difficulty playing it because it was difficult to control the character. The game was made in an era when it needed to be released on consoles to be financially viable. If it is released on consoles, it follows that it needs to be made for people controlling the character with a "controller". The steam deck is kinda set up as a "controller".
  Despite these two seemingly perfect intersections, the game does not play well on the steam deck.
I've never played a consoley Hitman nor tried a controller, but I loved the original hitman (silent assassin) and the original series sequels up till about Blood Money. I didnt enjoy Absolution, it's too choreographed unlike the originals where you could actually be creative and kill people in a variety of ways.
Then got pretty confused when I realised they reset the numbering with "Hitman" and "Hitman 2" (why do games do this?) and just gave up at that point and haven't tried them or anything newer

Dispatch.

It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.

Persona. I didnt play it to the end. Not even sure I past the tutorial. So many text boxes. So much dialogue.

thats the point of thoese games. more story than gameplay almost
- Damn, remind me to never play them, then.
  A good story shouldn't need to be told through endless dialog boxes, it should be told through gameplay.

statisfactory 1.0: the game is pure eye candy there's no endgame. factorio is leaps and bounds better

Spoken like someone who never built a hypertube cannon to fling yourself beyond the boundaries of the map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg

Super Tux Party

I'm sorry but we need something more modern

Farthest Frontier.

I love city building games. They're my genre of choice. This one is hyped up to 11 as this great agent based logistics chain focused city sim. It's not. Like at all. The numbers are obfuscated to hell and back. It's got the slowest tier one to tier 2 transition I've ever played in a game like this. Very little does what it's reported to do. They added a useless tech tree to lock stuff up to get a sense of progression, when in reality it just adds a second layer of requirements and time to progress to the next stage of your city. They have a really frustrating combat system which is cool in thought, but poorly executed. The economy is fucked and barely makes any sense.

The most frustrating thing that's the biggest deal breaker is that pops don't move into the city upon building housing. You need extra people to fulfill basic laborer roles. I can fill up every job I've plopped and have 20 extra workers doing basic labor or nothing. Or I can have two extra workers and build more houses to increase the pop count. Problem is nobody moves in. One of the requirements to get to tier 3 is 200 pop. I can't break the 64 barrier let alone 100 because for some awful reason the dev decided to use a desirability score and not move pops in upon building a house. I have a population cap of 140 people and there's vacant houses everywhere. Yet shit don't change. I don't think peasants in the fucking 1400s gave a shit about market prices and luxury amenities when fucking bears and wolves attack every 5 minutes. Just move people in the houses when I build them.

The game is a looker. I'll give it that. Everything else is frustratingly bad.

For me, it's borderlands 2

I thought the gameplay was pretty good, in a "turn your brain off and shoot guys with gradually increasing numbers" kind if way, and I absolutely adored whenever Handsome Jack showed up, but that's pretty much it

I've heard from more than a few sources that the shooting on that game's peak, but it's just kind of generic. Outside of Jack, I thought the writing was honestly pretty lacklustre as well, even getting annoying in more than one instance (CATCH A RIIIIIDE FUCK OFF DIPSHIT). The cell-shaded artsyle is quite pretty, I will give it that

At its core, I think it's just... fine.

I love that game, spent hundreds of hours in it a while back, and don't remember fuck all about the story.
it's a shoot 'em up loot game, and it does a great job of it IMO
absolutely a brainded activity though. it and Bioshock are two different frames of mind when you're playing them
Did you play it solo or with people? I found the game to be fairly dull solo. It was better with people but the loot system still allowed a lot to be desired especially if you played with greedy people.
- I get tired pretty quick of games where the multiplayer aspect is considered important to enjoying the game. If your friends are with you, you can enjoy literally sitting in the dirt doing basically nothing, just chatting. If your game requires me to also drag friends into it like some cultist, just to make it pass the bar into 'fun' then the game is a failure, plain and simple. They don't get credit for the fun I brought with me to the show I paid for.
- I'd played through about half of it myself years ago, and again fully with a friend recently

Doom dark ages. Just upgraded my computer, and I thought 'hey, I really liked 2016 and eternal, this'll be great, and it's got great reviews'. Nah, the whole game just felt...okay. I might try it again at some point and mess with the difficulty settings, but I felt like I was forcing myself to play it the whole way through.

I'm grinding through this one now. The graphics are great, and the game does feel like a modern doom, but the fun does seem to be lacking.
I'll finish it, but don't think I'd replay it.
I personally didn’t love the atmosphere of this game. Didn’t feel very doom like. The gameplay mechanics are also different, but I got used to them. The game is turning more and more into a rhythm game like DDR or Guitar hero where you need to do the right attack at the right time depending on what enemy you’re dealing with.

Life

Graphics are great. Hardware requirements are low, but there are bugs that accumulate with more play time. Learning curve is infinite and permadeath is only option despite a bunch of claims to mod/patch it. PVP is broken, constant spawn camping and pay to play behavior. Microtransactions are a pain. Huge variety of mission types, yet it still ends up feeling like a bunch of fetch quests sometimes. Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding
- Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding
  The worst part is that you're forced to spend at least 1/3 of your time playing grinding out the main campaign. Then you are highly incentivised to spend another 1/3 of your time in game not playing due to the rest mechanic. That only leaves 1/3 of your time in game for any other tasks, including extra preparation for the main quest. Not to mention the fatigue system which often leaves you unable to do side quests when you have the opportunity.
  I'm glad I didn't roll any of the classes with extra lives, to be honest.
Yeah, mid characters except few...

Nine Sols. Played it right after finishing Silksong to keep the metroidvania kick going.

The parrying was some of the worst feeling parrying I've ever felt in any game, the world felt tiny and extremely linear, the narrative was predictable and felt extremely flat, and the final boss is the only time I've ever switched to a story mode difficulty in any game just to get it over with, I love difficult games but that difficulty spike is absurd and the game never remotely prepares you for that.

They advertise this game as a Sekiro-like metroidvania, while it feels like they completely miss what made Sekiro work or what a metroidvania is.

I felt that way for the first couple of hours and then the parrying "clicked" with me. Also you get some items/skills that make parrying easier/stronger.

Expedition 33, but I'm sure other people think that about Silksong or Hundred Line.

I love the pictos system, it's the best thing about it and I hope other JRPGs take it, almost every pickup you find is good. Resuable consumables are cool, and the first two hours or so is cinema (even on Steam Deck with crappy settings). The rest is just good to flawed by the middle of Act 2, especially parrying (I'm decent at it, but I'd rather either play an action game where it's deeper, or a JRPG where it doesn't intrude on strategy)

Ha, indeed I never even got into hollow knight and didn't even find it appealing. Big metroidvania player otherwise. Love dead cells.
Anyhow, I really like(d) expedition 33, played through on easy. Due to the qte stuff which I wish could be turned off entirely. It's also a question of accessibility imo.
Technically it's not really great and should perform way better on ps5 or pc.
But whatever, it was generally a good game.
- Hollow Knight mostly had pretty barebones movement for a metroidvania. Great for combat, not fun for going from point A to B, and HK has seemingly more backtracking that other metroidvanias. Silksong actually has a sprint button that makes it all better.
  Expedition 33 is still good, but a lot of people go as far as saying it's the best JRPG last decade, which feels like a copout when half of it is not being a JRPG. It feels like the Persona 5 hype all over again (which was a full on JRPG, mind you, but it also had problems and I felt was just good)

Luigi's Mansion 3. At least if you consider 6 years ago recent. It got some really good reviews at the time, and it honestly makes me wonder if we were playing the same game. I loved the first one, by the way - I got an A rank while also getting golden frames on all the portraits (on the PAL version where you need more money).

I only persisted with the game because it was a birthday gift (and due to the sunk cost fallacy, I suppose), but I think it might be the game I've completed that I enjoyed the least. It looks nice, and some of the boss ghost encounters were charming, but the gameplay itself was fairly monotonous since they simplified the ghost catching mechanics from LM1 (I didn't really play LM2, since it was on 3DS). Gooigi would have been a decent addition, but his puzzles generally just didn't feel very fleshed out. It felt like they were either "I need two vacuums" or "I can't fit through this grate".

Also, I think Nintendo took the criticism that the first game was too short well and truly to heart, because LM3 might be the most filler-stuffed game I've ever played. Half the time when you get an elevator button, you get screwed over in some way and have to find it again. And don't get me started on fucking Poulterkitty, when that little bastard showed up for the second time I legitimately thought about quitting the game there and then. The final boss was awful, too, which left an even more bitter taste in my mouth.

Luigi's Mansion 3 might be the only game I've ever played where I thought "Thank god I don't have to play that anymore" once I finished it.

Not sure how recent we’re talking but within the last year or so my 2 biggest disappointments have been once human and nightingale. I can usually work around jank and weird creative decisions, but unfortunately neither of these two were worth any of the time I’ve spent playing em since they felt like they didn’t seem to want you to progress.

Played once human for about 3 days, nightingale for around 3 hours and then refunded.

Final Fantasy X.

Lots of people hype the game up, but boy is the gameplay boring to me. I love a good turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.

Especially didnt like Blitz ball. And the story wasn't good enough for me to keep playing to find out. I played about 20 hours and got to the Seymour Wedding scene, after the desert area. That's about where I dropped the game.

To be fair, I don't really like JRPGs that require grinding, especially turn-based games with no tactical movement which require grinding, so I was already not going to like the game. But I had read that the story was one of the best among Final Fantasy. Also super hate random battles, especially when I am just trying to explore somewhere I already feel like I "cleared" out with battles. Also, gigachad Lulu was carrying like the entire time I played. L bozo Waka, your brother hated you bro. Ject would have been a better protagonist than Titus. Better design too.

Honorable Mention: XenoSaga.

My experience with XenoSaga can be summed up with: "When I am in a Designing Horrendous Boss Battles and my competition is The Developers of XenoSaga:"

turn-based game, but not turn-based battles.
What does this mean?
I can understand the blitzball distaste though, it was polarising even then.
- I dont hate turn-based games as a whole. I do enjoy turn-based games like XCOM, Tuned Heart, Vagrant Story (its combat is somewhat turn-based), Galactic Civilization, and Mega Man Battle Network, for example.
  I do not enjoy turn-based games where the only thing the player does is select an action from a list, with static party members and the same music/cutscene/background etc. For example: Wizardry, Octopath Traveler (I liked the art though), Pokemon, and XenoSaga. I also didn't like Slay the Spire because of this. I didn't like the autocombat in the XenoBlade games either.
  Its hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I might like one game and dislike another even if they are similar in gameplay. Legend of Dragoon held my attention because at least I had the QTE during battles that gave me something that would directly impact my actions, but my save was corrupted and I haven't got around to restarting the game.
  The only time I actually enjoyed a game with this kind of gameplay was ironically the mobile game NieR Reincarnation (RIP). It wasn't exactly turn-based, but it was similar in that all the player does in combat is select when to fire a character's skill. Everything else is automatic. But I really like all of Yoko Taro's works, and I liked the story and felt it was worth going through the combat for the story. Also, combat was over pretty fast, usually ending under 60-90 seconds.
  Blitzball was interesting but I felt like it was an undercooked gamemode. It wasn't explained super well and was frustrating occasionally. It didn't really add to the story and just felt like filler, so except for the ones time I was forced to play it, I never touched it.
Final Fantasy X is probably my favorite Final Fantasy of all time. Just don't play X-2, assume the story ends immediately.
The HD remaster has some "cheats" to smoothen your experience, if you ever want to give it another shot:
No random battles
Infinite gil
All non key items
invencibily (to make up for low levels)
This way you can enjoy the story and move quickly through the game.
If you don't enjoy turn based battles nor grinding I think this IP is just not for you. Definitely nothing before Final Fantasy 12. Maybe Final Fantasy 12 is ok, though I thought the story was on the weak side.
- Ha, yes I heard X2 was pretty universally disliked.
  I have really tried to like Final Fantasy. Over the years I have tried plyaing a few of them, like the FF 13 - 2 Lightning (?) demo, whichever game had "Lightning" in the title. I didn't really like it. I suppose the only Final Fantasy I will ever like is FF Tactics.
  IMO, if I am going to use that many cheats just for the story, I might as well just watch the game "movie" or whatever on YouTube.

Prey. It's inferior to the older Dishonored games in pretty much every aspect.

Wild, I had the opposite experience, I loved Prey (I also love the Dishonored games). What stuff did you end up not liking about Prey?
- For me the difference is simply being a scardey baby who cant handle horror
- I felt dishonored offered many more options to move around, the level design had more surprises and verticality which multiplies options. Sneaking is a viable gameplay approach which I love (personal taste here). The characters and dialogs have a lot more depth and there is a lot more lore to discover along the way.
  Also It might be my fault because I opted to avoid typhoon upgrades, but the mid game was really tedious due to ammo scarcity and the end game was too easy after that.

any game that is very short for its cost. plus i saw re6 and its just dragging on the boss battles(like making them very hard to kill) to prolong the game. SWSH to recent pokemon game, knew the slop in the beginning never bought into the future switch games, and it turns it gets worst every game. by the way the gamefreaks ceo said it was going to be SLOP after slop, but people bought it anyways.

Ghost of Yotei

It's good but way too long and gets really repetitive.

Just finished it with all achievements (except final Takezo fight, yet) in about 50 hours. It was a little repetitive yes, but it didn’t bother me much. The setting, presentation and gameplay checks all the boxes for me so I kept going.
But I would’ve also been happy if it was shorter. That’s my general opinion on games these days.
- I turned the difficulty way down in the end just to finally get it done.

Paradise Killer.

Amazing soundtrack that is on repeat with the greatest in my playlist, but terrible character design and condescending to the player character.

Too bad.

Condescending in what way?

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - the disrespect for player's time is actually insane, never seen anything like that before or since. Hundred endings which should have been like 30 tops with a decent quality control. 100 days which should also be 30 tops for each ending.

I really wanted to get to that one cool ending, but you have to play through who knows how many stupid filler routes to unlock it - I just couldn't do it.

Don't get me started on the day-to-day in the game: the repetitive slow-ass animations for every day, you having to go through motions to skip every day. And battles... Even when "skipping" them you spend literal minutes. Like why... And so many times you can't even skip them.

But what really soured everything for me is the final battle in that one ending.