Breath of the Wild. I just don’t see the hype. The weapon durability system really turned me off from the game.

Red dead redemption 2. I really just can’t ever get into Rockstar games, I hate the controls, they really just feel bad, so much that it makes it unplayable to me. Having watched a playthrough, I can kind of understand the hype behind it, but haven’t found any enjoyment in it myself.

PvP in any context. I find going against other players very stressful, and even when I’m winning, I know I just made the day of other players a little bit worse, and that just sours the experience.

The whole souls universe. It’'s not difficult it’s tedious. I get why people like it, it;'s got great atmosphere and design and ideas. just not for me.

Any Soulslike anything. I have gotten my ass beaten by enemy NPCs in Smash Bros, and I have gotten my ass beaten by enemy players in Battlefield, and I stuck around with both until I got quite good (Smash Bros more than Battlefield, but still).

But Dark Souls, Demon Souls, Elden Ring… I’ve actually owned all of them and played none of them for more than a few hours at most. I got the furthest with Elden Ring but it’s just not fun, it’s harder than Smash Bros but about as fun as Ghost of Tsushima combat - which is to say, not very fun.

Oh also, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla or whatever the viking themed one was. I’m not a picky AC player, I loved the originals and I loved Origins and I loved many (though not all) in between those. But the viking one just had the slowest, least satisfying combat in the world. Which sucked since I’m Danish American, can’t even live out digital viking fantasies, but pirate fantasies are a decent second I guess.

On the flip side, the Stanley Parable is so good that I haven’t finished it because it makes my brain feel like it’s tripping but in a disorienting and uncomfortable way. It’s so good but I cant handle it for too long.

XCOM 2. I love enemy unknown/enemy within, but bounced right off 2. There were so many little details that just made me quit after about an hour. In comparison, I’ve run through the other dozens of times.

Heaven’s Vault.

I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I’ve seen so far, and would like to see more.

But I just can’t get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.

While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you’re doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don’t take them, you don’t know what you’ll miss.

Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it’s also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination… An option that shows up according to the developers’ whims, so you don’t know how long it might take to show up.

On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went “Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong”, and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done “on time”, instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you’re having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?

In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven’s Vault’s language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.

I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.

Super Metroid. It’s supposed to be a classic but I can’t stand it. I just hate the way the physics feels so slow. Jumping and left/right acceleration just made the game feel terrible to play.

The Metroid prime series were great though.

Honestly? Witcher 3. Heard so much good about it. Started it like 10 times. I hated the combat method. Made me hate the game.

Baldur’s Gate 3. I dislike turn-based games. I thought I could get over it 'cause I really liked Neverwinter Nights and wanted to recapture that feeling of pulling all-nighters playing NWN back in college. BG3 just didn’t hit the same.

The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As a die hard Zelda fan, I was beyond hyped for this one. Probably my biggest letdown in all of gaming.

• No real story to follow
• No cast of interesting characters outside of optional collectible flashbacks
• Repetitive, lifeless gameplay. No real dungeons or temples, every “mini dungeon” that does exist is the same copy pasted theme.
• No score of memorable unique music, just the MiNiMaLiSm of some understated occasional piano.
• Atrocious lack of enemy variety.
• a focus on exploration that rewards you with precious little given that any weapons your find will just break, and there are no unique combat or traversal items to unlock.

Came back to my save a couple times to push through, but the entire game is just the same 4 activities copy pasted 300 times with no variation or progression that makes your 50th hour unique from your first. It’s like. Soulless kowtow to Ubisoft game design in a once beautiful and innovative game series. Makes me mad just thinking about it lol.

Elden Ring, Lords of the Fallen (the new one – I strangely enjoyed the original enough to beat it, but this one just didn’t captivate me).

I also left Lies of P near the end, because I found a boss too exhausting to keep trying, and life got in the way at some point. Might pick it up again, eventually? Not too sure.

I played and loved Dark Souls 1 and 2, Bloodborne, Sekiro (particularly Sekiro), so it’s not that the genre doesn’t interest me. There’s just something about the above implementations (and DS3, but I did finish that one) that didn’t really captivate me the same way.

I hate Battle Royale shooters, all of them.

There is nothing I find more unpleasant than inventory management under pressure. I don’t even have time to look at what I just picked up and figure out what it does before people are shooting at me. I say just pick a lane, you can be a competitive shooter, but skip the loot. Or go maximum inventory management, like borderlands or stalker, but not in a competitive multiplayer game.

Monster hunter. You need to hit the monsters like 1000x and they don’t even have a health bar. Its like using a mixer: boring and takes long.

LoZ: The wind waker. I thought it would be like that one world in Paper Mario: TOK where you get a fast ship, but instead you get an extremely slow nutshell.

I have tried to play Hollow Knight multiple times and I just can’t get into it. I find the art style clashes with the gameplay, it’s difficult for me to tell what is and isn’t a platform to stand on, what will and won’t hurt me. I also just don’t think the Souls-like system really works for me in a side scroller, I had the same issue with Salt and Sanctuary, it just wasn’t how I want to play one of those games.