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:
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.
MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.
- I didn’t say that you’re wrong or lying at all! Like, MOBAs aren’t for me but otherwise I have no problems with them. But for Battle Royales, yeah, I said that I thought that they trick people, like they’re intentionally really manipulative. For example, loot boxes - they’re fun, but manipulative. Know what I mean?
- For me it's pretty much any competitive multiplayer game. I don't dislike the games, I usually dislike the communities. That was one of the big things that turned me away from Overwatch (the first one) for example, the gameplay was fun but I just wish I could choose who I was playing with.
  Needless to say, I stick with singleplayer games these days, or at least less competitive multiplayer games. Games with good local multiplayer, like SSBU, are also pretty fun when I can get a group together.
  
  It’s a modern gaming thing, in my experience. If you play old multiplayer games, the communities are usually much nicer.
- Battle royal's taught me what it would feel like to be gaslighted. Surely nobody thinks they are fun. The only sane answer is all my friends have conspired to induce paranoia in me.
- Battle Royals - for me, it's about how the consequences heighten the tension, and how the threat of getting unceremoniously smashed back to the lobby heightens the victories.
  Playing with friends makes the the whole experience fun. If you drop and have some downtime 'just' gearing up, you can chat and hang out and goof around. Then when shit kicks off, it's just so much more impactful (imo) than a game where you've just died and respawned a bunch already and you can do the same again. The teamwork and communication has to be next level and it feels so damn good to win a round, especially when you've been on the back foot and had to claw your way out of tough fights.
  No mind tricks, not fussed about loot boxes and skins, just awesome memories from when we where playing enough to get almost half decent at it.
  ....and now I'm missing Apex Legends, might reinstall and remember that my friends don't play it any more
- That downtime in a battle royale creates a really fun tension. Unfortunately, it does feel like dominant strategies emerge in that genre a little too easily, and then they become repetitive, so you don't get that early feeling with the game for more than a few weeks.
  MOBAs can take many forms, and a lot of them don't look anything like an RTS, but they do usually give you the good parts of leveling up and becoming more powerful in an RPG over the course of about a half hour.
- Ahh, for some folks, MOBAs are RTS games with the worst bits taken out!
  
  RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody's really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.
  The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I'll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.
  To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It's not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it's going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).
  
  Oh yeah, for sure, 100%. I know that this is incredibly opinions based. Every time I play a MOBA, I just think how much more fun I’d have playing an RTS!
- I highly disagree with the 2nd point
  I hate RTS because there are so much going on everywhere at the same time that I just can't handle it. You gotta master your production while scouting while repelling raids while strategizing to see what kind of army the opponent is building while exploring the tech tree and.. damn how did they just send an army of 50 fellas??
  MOBAs allow me to fully focus on the moment and whatever I'm doing instead of being perpetually late on the actions that need doing
  
  Yeah, I understand that, and I guess they’re not for everyone. I’ve got pretty severe ADHD and I love the “everything happening everywhere all at once” feeling that RTS has
  
  @potterman28wxcv @Blake
  Imo theoretical #RTS development just stopped after StarCraft and total annihilation.
  Sup com is my favorite but nobody really tried to reimagine what "RTS" should mean.
  Not like COD - Doom(2016) did for fps.
  So both perspectives are valid and deal with unsolved problems that are unfortunately just hard and not profitable to solve.
- Are you a more eloquent me? This is exactly what I feel about both Battle Royales and MOBAs. How and why? I just don't see it. I have friends who enjoy both genres and I've talked to them many times and asked them to explain why they find it fun. I still don't get it. Dark psychology indeed. That's the only thing that explains it for me.
- Battle Royales: there are pros and cons to the format over traditional FPS. The real story here is that Fortnite in particular also frequently comes out with tons of fun and ridiculous weapons and items which is something that other companies don't really do.
  Ie: chrome that lets you turn into a fast moving blob, a katana with a charge dash range so big that it's considered a mobility item, a handheld napalm cannon
- I would respect your opinion if you presented it as an opinion, but your comment just reads as a condescending statement towards gamers who enjoy those genres. I don't play either of those genres either, but I respect that people do enjoy them.
  
  I would respect your opinion about my opinion if you presented it as an opinion about my opinion…
  Of course it’s just my opinion. I respect people who enjoy those games absolutely, 100%. No disrespect at all. I didn’t even say anything negative about MOBAs except the fact that I didn’t personally enjoy them. You’re taking this way too personally.
- the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter
  Black Mesa?
  
  I was thinking more like Unreal Tournament 1999 kind of thing. Black Mesa was a decent game though, but I didn’t play any multiplayer.
- Totally agree with point #1. I was a staunch supporter of Fortnite when it was a zombie defense base building game. Then everybody latched on to the battle royale and I hated it, and every battle royale that hopped on the bandwagon afterwards.
  Spend 20-30 minutes collecting loot just to win or lose it all in a sudden burst of conflict... shit gives me hypertension
- I have never played a MOBA but some quick sessions of Vainglory in an old iPhone... If that counts.
  I can see the charm in the genre I guess.... But battle royals? Hell no, you wrote it damn perfectly... It is a huge waste of time, whether it is for the grinding mechanics, or the camping mechanics, or the unfair situations, but that tension does well for streaming guys, I think that is why the genre got so popular? Like those brainless games that you see on social media like Facebook about driving trailers in messy roads or those Five Nights at Freddie's kinds of games?

- It's more of a tragic story than a game. The misery is kind of the point. If you don't see that point or can't enjoy that, then yeah, it'll be terrible.
  
  The video game equivalent of Dostoevsky.
- Fwiw, it is absolutely possible to save your whole family in Papers Please. First time players aren't necessarily expected to manage it, though, so you're not wrong about losing family members being the intended experience. It's definitely a game that tries to be "engaging" rather than " fun". I enjoyed it a lot back in college, but who knows how I'd feel now that I have a full-time job.
- The game is more of a short story. Which means the gameplay is intentionally grinding because the job is grinding. Which honestly IS bad gameplay, but delivers the message it's going for. If reading depressing alt history dystopia is not how you want to spend your time, then I don't blame you one little inch. ♥
- While i agree that it's rather punishing, but to me it feels like that's how it works under a dictatorship. I like how i need to work toward some of the ending by breaking the law
- For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.
  I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.
  
  I feel these games are important, but I also know I don't want to put myself through them. Thanks to people like you who tell me about them so I don't have to play them myself lol
- Agreed. I thought I would enjoy it but ended up not liking the game play.
  I want to take it slow and thoroughly examine the papers but apparently I can't because there is a time limit each day. Extremely stressful and unfun.
- Papers, Please has 20 different endings, you can definitely follow a different storyline!
- Glory to Artstozka
- I only played that game briefly, and I was so confused with the game mechanics, maybe I didn't stick with it for so long, but I remember it wasn't very clear at the beginning how you should proceed?
  Definitely sitting in my backlog though.

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.
- I wasn't interested in it at all but then my partner (who has played it a ton) and I started a co-op game. Stardew is way easier and plain more fun if you're playing it with someone else.
  
  Interesting, I hated playing co-op mode because player 2 wasn't playing efficiently!
- I guess the thing to remember is, days don't actually matter.
  If you spend 100 years to do anything, that's okay. It really just has the most feature set of all the farming games.
- The first days are indeed really short. You have to upgrade your tools and your player to have days long enough to explore. It is still a limiting factor for big explorations. You have to pack your stuff. I can understand that it can be unfun.

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.
- I don’t remember if it was like this with the game Myst specifically, but generally speaking: Some hardly solvable riddles were put into many point and click adventure in the pre-internet era, because they usually came with an expensive help hotline that they wanted you to call.
  
  I have never ever heard of a game coming with a help hotline. And I played a lot of games in that time. TIL that
  one classic example is the game "The Legend of Zelda" for the NES. The game contained cryptic puzzles and secrets that were not easily solvable. Nintendo provided a hotline, called the Nintendo Power Line, where players could call in for tips, tricks, and solutions. Calls to the hotline were not free, creating an additional revenue source for the company.
  
  I can understand thinking Riven (Myst 2) was made to force people to buy a guide or call a hotline. It had some extremely challenging puzzles. It was bearable without a guide, but you had to really pay attention to everything. but Myst 1 didn’t have anything insane.
- Oh boy, Myst… Overall I think I enjoyed Myst, but mostly I enjoyed the books in the library and the world(s). I completed Myst without a guide and I think in terms of early point and click adventure games it’s on the straightforward side… but it can be a real pain to notice some areas and some things are needlessly obtuse, and frankly I didn’t like most of the puzzles. Honestly, I can completely understand why people wouldn’t like Myst, it’s far from perfect…
  Riven, on the other hand… is kind of amazing. There’s a few things that are needlessly difficult to spot in Riven, but it’s a little easier to navigate because there’s more frames. Riven is gorgeous, though, and the puzzles are a bit more interesting. I don’t think everybody will love Riven, but it holds up a lot better than Myst does.
- For me it's any Point and Click games. Nothing seems obvious.

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.
- My biggest issue is I just can't keep up with the monetary demands of that game. Every time I finally had the excess money for an expansion they come out with two more.
  
  And now they just remove previous ones you already paid for!
- I played a little bit of Destiny 1. It was fun but I just wasn't into MMO any more, but it was still fun to dick around solo and maybe group every once in a while. But I got 2 and instantly nothing made any sense and nothing was any fun. I doubt I clocked even 10 hours on the game before putting it down forever.
  Good call on this one. I forgot I even played it until your description.

"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 can relate to this very much. I love Team Fortress 2 - it has just enough of that random hilarious stuff in almost every match that makes you laugh. I think it's a huge part of why the game is still alive and broke its player record recently.
  streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.
  Too real (talking mostly about CS:GO as I that's the one I have most experience with on your list). It's... occasionally fun, especially if your team gets into a slighly less casual mindset and plays it a bit more tactically.
  But it often ranges down to the collective team just getting mad all the time and throwing various accusations around for seemingly the fun(?) of it. Fun match? Maybe, sometimes. All the time? Absolutely not, thank you.
  Over the years I've started reaching more and more for co-op instead (Deep Rock Galactic, PlateUp!, Alien Swarm, Minecraft, Unrailed, ...) and it has been a lot of fun, both solo and with friends.
  
  Co-op games are definitely the only fun I've had in multiplayer for the longest time. Toxicity can still be found (Looking at you Payday 2), but overall they are a more wholesome, chill and more importantly FUN experiences.

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...
- The quarry was hard and I even enjoyed little hope more than most.

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.
- The first thing I do in games like that is Zerg Rush to all the towers needed to open the map and unlock fast travel.
  Once you do that, the rest of the game becomes a lot easier.
- Yeah basically open worlds that exist purely to have tons of repetitive tasks.
- Same here re: Ubisoft cookie cutter open worlds. I LOVED the first ~40 hours of Immortals and thought I was approaching the end until I realized I was less than halfway at the rate I was progressing. I have no idea how length estimates like the ones on How Long to Beat are accurate for this game; usually they're pretty spot on for my "complete what I find fun and interesting and not much else" play style. I gave up on the game after briefly skimming FAQs to see what I had left.

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.
- Okay, but isn't that game just one big bug?
- I had never once experienced this. They WOULDNT let you bring the game back early? Admittedly my days of blockbuster a few, I think they closed when I was 9 or 10, but I can't see a reason they wouldn't take it early....
  
  Yeah that doesn't make any sense. They had a drop-off slot at the desk where you just dropped them into to return them.

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.
- I felt like I wasn't able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome.
  That's generally a consistent theme in the cyberpunk genre. You can't win and you can't get out of the game.
  
  Yes this is true. I wasn't expecting a happy ending either (I never finished it). But there is no rule, that you can't be the nice guy in a cyberpunk world. In the end this still is a game which is supposed to entertain the player. I think both blade runner movies are a good example of a cyberpunk story, where love and compassion is a central point to the story.
  The advantage of story telling in games over movies is the decision making. The capability to influence the direction a story is headed. My point is, that I wasn't able to connect with the main character although the game was advertised as an rpg. And I know they acknowledged this flaw as they rebranded the game as action adventure.
- Did you play male or female V? A general consensus I hear is that male V makes a better merc while female V acts more like a real person with some compassion
  
  I played a male V and I looked into the differences now. I might have to give the game a second chance and play a female V.
  And I'm not gonna have expectations this time arround. So I might be able to enjoy the positive sides.
  Thank you!
- The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole.
  Would this not be mostly up to the player, since you control what V says when you pick dialogue options like any other RPG? If you play him without any compassion, of course he will sound that way.
- I see what you mean with the gameplay. Personally I really enjoyed the story and the setting, as well as the level design. But the gameplay wasn't very great.

No Man's Sky. (boring Sandbox exploration without a soul and very unfun crafting)
- If I like exploring and mining, will I like it?
  
  One thing that really gets me with that game is that every single planet has only one biome. There are no poles, no jungles, no deserts; it's just one environment pasted over the entire planet and that feels weirdly wrong and is kind of boring.
  
  You need to be the kind of person who likes crafting progression in itself. I enjoyed for a good while, chasing better upgrades, building a base and slowly building up a glossary to understand the aliens, but it's definitely not for everyone, and it's more wide than it's deep for sure.
  Maybe it's because I got into it late but I actually liked the exploration between planets. While a lot of them are effectively interchangeable in resources, there's a lot of interesting environments and creatures that are created by its procedural generation.
- I liked it a lot, before they added base-building and all that other stuff that doesn't align with the game's original vision.
  
  I really gave the base building a good try, but it did just feel tedious and misplaced. I wish they would expand on npc interactions and the language learning system instead
- When did you play it last? They seem to have a major update every few months. It's still NMS, just with more stuff every 3-6 months.
  
  I played it for the duration of 2 afternoons a week ago.

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.
- The huge amount of grind is what made it un-fun for me.

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.
- Wow, yeah. My kid got into minecraft and we play it together in creative mode and discover caves and build hideouts and stuff. It's fun.
  
  I've been coming back to Minecraft ever since the days of Alpha. Played it with my friends, now I play it with my kids.
- I think I had more fun making data packs for it rathen than actually playing it lol

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.
- From the moment it was announced, I could not contain my excitement for Octopath Traveler from the art style to the graphics to the music. I was even into the name. I was so enamored that I bought the collector's edition.
  Then it finally came out and never have I regretted a game purchase so much; not because it was awful, but it was so mediocre. Honestly, if it were awful, I might have been more okay with it, rationalizing how a game could turn out so bad with everything going for it, mourning what could have been, etc. It did everything it promised it would, I just realized that it didn't really promise much beyond an art style and being a turn based RPG with 8 main characters. The package was delivered, but it turned out to be Game Gear, not Gameboy.
  I think buying that game put me off collector's editions. The package for it was very impressive, but I think I finally saw the man behind the curtain and realized that what I was buying was just a bunch of plastic and art books that I was never really going to touch anyway. The only physical bonus I cared about from that point on was Steelbooks, but I don't even buy physical games all that much anymore thanks to my Steam Deck.
  Honestly, Octopath Traveler put me off blindly preordering games in general. Now I just blindly buy old games, so if they're bad, I have no one to blame but myself for not doing the research LOL
- I got about 1/2 way through the game, but as soon as I hit the first boss of act 3 I just couldn't progress. He'd wipe the party every time. Walkthroughs were useless.
  
  Yeah, the game had severe balance issues too with classes not scaling properly and consequently being either completely dominant or totally useless based on what level you were.
- I'm glad I'm not the only person to dislike this game! After going through like three of the chapter 1 missions for the characters, the game felt very very samey, and on top of that, it's probably one of the only story games that I haven't finished.

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.
- The ending is especially bad... I was rooting for some big reveal but the "twist" is just so bad it completely ruined the game for me.
- I 100%d this game, out of some kind of angry obsession and curiosity rather than excitement, and instead of feeling satisfied with myself, I felt relief that the frustration was over and I could leave that danm apartment and never return.

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
- I don't dislike Terraria per se, and I highly respect the dedication of both the devs and the community to it.
  However, each time I try getting into it, I would make a basic house, spelunk a cave... and then forget about the game for a while. I don't know why, but I just have trouble with games where you have to set your own goals
  
  Yeah I had no concept of what to do in Terraria.
  I am fine with games not telling me what to do cause I love Tunic and Outer Wilds but also there is still a somewhat obvious somewhat linear story available if you want it. The "do it yourself sandbox" games struggle to draw me in fast enough for me to not get bored and confused of learning an entire games worth of mechanics and optimization for no payoff before I put it down. And never pick it back up.
- Oh man, I thought I was the only one. I've tried to get into it so many times, but I can never enjoy it. I enjoy Minecraft, though.
  In other unpopular news, I hate DOTA also. Friends tried to get me into it so many times, and I played a bunch of matches, but found it super overwhelming with all the different heroes and choices and found the entire gameplay boring.
  
  You sound like me lol. Perhaps you'd like Core Keeper? The first game I found that scratches that minecraft itch like no other since I stopped playing minecraft long ago. I found sidescrolling in Terraria no good for me, liking the top down perspective of Core Keeper much more. Just wish you could create more than one storey in a structure somehow. I'm no developer but surely it can be done.

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.
- Even as someone who enjoys it, I also feel it's overhyped and not for everyone. You're just doing the same 8 mission types over and over. The only progression is unlocking new weapons and skills/overclocks for said weapons to use in the same missions. And whenever there's a new event, there's no actual theme or anything, you just do those same missions yet again just to get a cosmetic for said event, and the actual missions themselves don't change in any way.
  
  I think it's one of those games that you play when you specifically have a craving for it. Otherwise, playing it non-stop does get boring after some time

I tried Dark Souls once, I think it was DS3. I can't figure out what would make it fun for anyone.
- The thing about the From Software games is that they’re (mostly) fair. Most action games give the player a huge leg up compared to the enemies - the boss has a glowing weakpoint that can be revealed with the item you found in the dungeon - or you’re a badass cyborg assassin vs rank and file goons.
  In Dark Souls, you’re just a stubborn dude with a sword - and even the lowliest enemy can take you out if you get careless. But everyone is playing by the same rules, it sucks when an enemy staggers you and hits you while you can’t move - but you can figure out how to do the same to them. And the bosses really are doing everything in their power to make you dead.
  The satisfaction of Dark Souls comes from meeting those challenges head on and beating them at their own game - or being clever enough to bypass or weaken the obstacle. It’s not for everybody, and it’s certainly not for anybody all the time - but it’s pretty awesome when you get to be David finally taking down Goliath.
  
  I just wrapped up the last one on my list: Sekiro.
  It wasn’t as hard as everyone makes it out to be but that could be due to my having previously gone through Bloodborne and learned how to be aggressive.
  All of their games are superbly fun but it did take me a lot of tries for it to click.
  I started out terrible at them - and frankly am still nothing special - but am super glad that I persevered.
  While I have other favorites as well, the Soulsborne will always rank at the top of my list for gaming perfection.

- Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It's especially bad if you're a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you're good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die... Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that's supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.
  
  It's like that with every competitive game.
  You see other people playing it and think "wow, that's cool. I wanna try it", only to be welcomed by what you just described. Your success then depends on whether you have a hard skin to endure the bullshit, or if you're social enough to have others play with you that won't dismiss everything you do so easily. More often than not we don't have the patience/ability for either.
- Where baby’s first swear word becomes baby’s first racial slur! Does Mommy know you talk like that on the PSBox?
- competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you’re a new or lackluster player. You’ll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby
  I would be fine with all of that if they didn't also have the power to kick you from the match

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.
- I also got ARK for the dinosaurs. I’m fine with watching a progress bar fill up, so I hope I didn’t waste my money.
  
  Got into super breeding. Maxed out damage and health and got a lot into speed on my rexes. Its very rewardimg being able to 1 or 2 shot a 150 rex. Takes like a month+ to get anywhere with it. That rex with those stats took like a year of breeding
  
  I have 2,500 hours in Ark.
  The thing is Ark isn't a dino game, it's a scifi survival/exploration game. You start from nothing and work towards conquering the island and discovering it's secrets.
  I really hope you like it. To me it is best played with friends on a private server, or a server with good rules and active admins.

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.
- Halo excelled at being a FPS on console before auto aim and aim assist were a thing. The terrible, tank-like movement and super floaty, slow jumps would be trash in any PC FPS around its time. But having players move at Quake speeds in Halo would be frustrating, and no one would hit things in multiplayer.
  Or would, on a game without modern control assist, anyways. Games don't tend to be as fast as they used to, and Halo has really sped up as a series, but it is still on the slower side.
- Which FPS do you enjoy?
  
  Great question! Really loved the Bioshock series, along with Bethesda FPSs (although they're not great, I rather enjoy the open worlds). Cyberpunk was great fun, although disappointing in a lot of ways. The Doom series is a personal favourite, although Eternal wasn't perfect, I really loved how the stories were handled in the previous two games.
  For me, I like to seek a balance between story and gameplay. My big thing though is immersion, and being able to really understand the Universe the game takes place in.
  Whilst not FPSs, the closest thing to Halo that I loved (Space-Opera shooters), the Mass Effect trilogy tops the list.

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.
- Square’s writing has always been garbage. Only the cringiest weebs like that shit. Like the only ones I liked were FF7 and 9 and even then it was only tolerable because they didn’t had voice acting. Because I could read trough some of the awful dialogues quickly. The FF games always have cool over arching storylines but the god awful dialogues always ruins it for me. Now that their games have voice acting I can’t stand to play any of their games any more. I tried Octopath and Triangle Strategy recently and I just couldn’t force my self to listen to the bullshit those characters were muttering, voiced by those shitty anime voice actors.
  
  Haven't played Square stuff, but I'd imagine it's possible to enjoy bad writing without being one of the "cringiest weebs"...
  
  I never understood the praise for Octopath. Even though they were technically intertwined, it almost never felt like the characters were interacting with one another; it felt like they were just monologuing and not actually conversing. It didn't help I hit a huge difficulty spike at the end because I didn't level up my characters the way the game wanted me to and couldn't continue.
  
  Maybe this puts me in the "cringy weeb" category but I just put the language to Japanese and use English subtitles. Most Japanese games I've played really suffer from poor dialogue localization, and this helps. Except for Exoprimal, the English voice acting and dialogue was fucking great in that game
- I was pretty on-board with FFXV until the exact moment I realized the boat portion was supposed to lead you to a LOT of cut content instead of literally 1 other area. Definitely left a bad taste after that. I feel like it could have been a masterpiece if not for issues during development that I can noticeably feel the effects of during gameplay
- FFXV isn't the worst game I've ever played. It's not even my least favorite Final Fantasy. But it's probably the biggest lost opportunity of any game I've ever played by a wide margin. The combat is almost a lot of fun. The magic is really neat. The summons would be awesome if they were more controllable (some summons you will rarely see because of location criteria). The open world is cool, but mostly empty and completely removed from the EXTREMELY linear story.
  But the worst offender is all of the story beats that are devoid of context or follow up. Apparently all of the backstory is spread out between the movie, a cartoon, and the DLC. But playing through blind it's just random stuff happening. The game had potential to be the most epic story if they could have stuck the execution of it.
  
  I have a really complicated relationship with FFXV because while it's an objectively pretty bad game, I enjoyed it way more than I reasonably should for a game of its quality. Maybe it was the fishing minigame.
  I absolutely agree with the overambition being one of the downfalls of the game. They wanted to go too big and create some kind of multimedia "experience" where you had a movie, a novel and many many DLCs to spread the content over.
  The end result is an empty shell of a game, and even after watching the movie first and pausing the main story at the appropriate points to play the DLCs (I didn't play on launch and bought the complete edition), I was still missing context and having beats not land because apparently crucial backstory was meant to be told through the Lunafreya DLC that never got released because the game did poorly.
- I can totally see why you wouldn't like Snowrunner ... I love it, and doing rescue missions to recover flipped trucks and struggling through hard terrain at a slow pace are the parts I like about it, lol
- Please tell me you meant to say “squid,” and that there is a video demonstrating this. That’s hilarious.
  
  Shit, that's what happens when you're sleep deprived and it's nearly 3AM. I'll leave it up like that for shits and giggles though.

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.
- Here's a big question though
  What's the difference between predatory tactics to hook people into a game, and "normal" gameplay, whatever that is? If neither cost any money or have microtransactions in any way?
  Is Diablo 2 using predatory mechanics? Is Counter Strike? Is Factorio?
  Games are artificial constructs. If you deconstruct them entirely, unless they got some story to tell as the center point of the game, their mechanics and goals are entirely artificial and constructed to get you to keep playing, be engaged, and have fun, whatever that means and implies.
  Because, well, in the end, games do not have a grand purpose. Their purpose is entertainment(or be art, but not all games have that goal). And so if vampire survivors keep you engaged and enjoy the game... Is that really that much different to other games? Another example to this are idle/incremental games, as a pure distillation of what games are. Are they predatory? Is there really much difference from the very core of other, more "proper", games?
  
  A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.
  A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player's time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.
- Really? I guess you could consider the game's visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn't have microtransactions
  
  I'm not seeing how anything in the game could be considered predatory in the slightest...super confused on this.
- (who’s background is developing gambling games)
  Sure, he worked in the sector, but that's because he couldn't find better jobs. What you're implying here is really unfair, especially considering there aren't even any microtransactions in the game. As far as I know, he just made a game that he felt was fun.

- This is so true. I bought the anniversary collection years ago. When I went to play SF1 I was flabbergasted. It's legitimately terrible. Even by standards back then. Though, as someone who is a bit obsessed currently, I am so glad they kept up with it.

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 loved the first one, but couldn’t get into the second. Didn’t really like the other characters too.

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.
- it's dark souls 2, so there must be 2 of everything!
- Dark souls 2 was definitely the weakest of all From games, this coming from someone with ~4000 hous in ds 1, 1-2k hours in ds3 and Sekiro

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
- The rap is the best part!
- The cringe rap thing started in the 80s. I assume it worked because marketing folks wouldn't let it die.
  From the Super Mario Bros Super Show to TMNT2 to DK64, they just couldn't let it die. Even Mickey Mouse had a rap album out.
- This game came out pre-Twitter, so I've been surprised to see how many people hated this game. I've revisited it several times since childhood and still enjoy it quite a bit. The different Kong stuff made it feel somewhat like a metroidvania.

Pretty much all the new AAA games. Kind of lost interested the moment games stopped being innovative. It's nice to have super dooper realistic looking game and millions of small details but I still haven't seen a game that would really improve on the game play in the last 20 years. They are still full of simple rules and mechanics. For example, 20 years ago it was common to have the "enemy spotted you but just hide and don't move for 3 seconds and they will move on" rule in games and it pisses me off when new AAA games do it. Modern games are full of this shit. "If you do A in situation B, C will happen". Just learn the rules and beat the game. There are more rules, more details, animations are nicer but I still find it boring. It's still just a bunch of fixed rules, NPCs still move like robots, you can still see the algorithms behind everything. I prefer to play an small indie game that actually tries something new than AAA game that tries to build 'realistic' world and fails at it.
- I agree. I can always see through the mechanics of a game and usually break the economy too and I'm rich beyond belief usually.
  
  Have you broken Starfield's economy yet? I'm poor af

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.
- 7, 8, 9, 10 are all great I think.
  
  The only ones I like are 7 and 12. 12 especially because I hated the random battles in 7, I just wanted to progress through the story goddamnit.
- This 100℅ I even bought a ps4 to play it. It was a really dull game and the character movement felt clunky. I finished it too, but I do not care to play it again.
  Ff8 was dope though.

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 🤔
- Download the mod that allows you to infinite respawns, and explore the outer bounds of the game. I really don't understand the point of the roguelike nature of the game, except to purposely put itself into meme/streamer culture as one of the hardest games ever made.
  It's a fuckton better than spending four hours of prep on a run, securing all of the buffs, HP, and weapons to try to figure out some deep lore in some complicated area, only to die to a single pink pixel of Polymorphine. Roguelikes are meant for short and quick playthroughs, not hours-long doomed runs.
  
  Yeah, i get games like binding of isaac or risk of rain 2 that the first level i can already know whether this run is gonna be shit/fun/sure-win, or game like rogue legacy where i can slowly upgrade my stats, this one i feels like i can be ultra careful but i can still get destroyed instantly without it being my fault. It's what makes me give up
- I’m really into games centering around magic or being a wizard. Noita regularly got recommended on r/gamingsuggestions for that kind of thing. I think it might have also gotten recommended for some other kinds of things I browsed r/gamingsuggestions looking for, like deep mechanics or having lots of different ways to solve problems. And the idea of spell creation, which Noita has, really appeals to me.
  I’ve also heard of how infuriating this game can be, and I know I don’t like roguelikes or roguelites, so I didn’t pick it up.
  
  Yeah, i get recommended it a lot too, and also follow the game development since the dev start posting devlog, but playing it is...infuriating.
- I get you and you're 100% allowed to not like Noita, but Noita is one of my favorite games ever and if anyone here hasn't played it, please do.
  Noita is deeper than you think. 100% perfect game IMO.
  
  I have a lot of fun with the game and have seen how deep the the game really gets, but I do wish it would be a lot more generous with healing.
  
  I have more fun watching other people play it, discover new secrets, and talk about the lore than I ever would playing the game myself.
  
  I know, i'm enjoying the first few hours just learning thing and then the fun-ness just keep plunging afterward because i keep getting bad rng after bad rng for a few days and just decided to quit.
  
  Noita is one of the craziest games I've ever played and I love it so much.

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.
- 100% agreed. Not only was the Dialoge Choice system of Yes, yes but sarkastic and no (but actually yes) incredibly limiting, but even the story didn't really do it for me plus the whole settlement thing.

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.
- I bought Unbound as one more desperate attempt to chase the love I had for the burnout series, and yeah...I hate the time limit thing. The driving is good enough (I still miss the frenetic arcadey driving of the burnout series), but I just want to race, not spend all my time assessing the risk and reward of every event.
  I also hate the daytime/nighttime thing and just the cops in general. I don't feel like NFS has ever figured out how to do the cops in a way that isn't cheap and frustrating.

SimCity 2013 or whatever the full online one was.
It was bugs and lies all the way to the bottom of it.
- What else was bad besides the bugs? I specifically tried to exclude games that were unfun because of bugs.
  
  Oh I totally misread the question. My bad.
  Answering the actual question. Any game that spams me with dark patterns bullshit is immediately unfun.
  Oh here's your daily login reward! Ready for your dailies? Oh just fuck right off.

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”.
- Crazy frog and its sequel were genuinely good racing games for the time. I enjoyed them a lot. Split screen was awesome.

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.
- I'm one of the weird ones who likes Satisfactory over Factorio. I just can't get into Factorio for some reason. Also didn't help that my friends who I tried playing with it -- who all had hundreds of hours in the game -- are the kinds to be like, "No, you're doing it wrong - the correct/efficient the way to do it is this way..." People, let me learn the damn game. I get being efficient, but let me learn on my own for a bit.
  But didn't matter, just couldn't get into Factorio.
  
  thats imo the worst way to start factorio.
  a friend of mine tried to introduce me to the game,
  but i lost intrest after blue science.
  did you try it out by yourself yet?
  it only clicked for me,
  once i learned the game at my own pace.

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

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.
- I actually have a mod for Stardew where the other NPCs have relationship progression with each other if I don’t get in the way!
  I’ve been doing a challenge run on Stardew where I never ever engage in combat or go into the mines. Going pretty well, actually, except for the part where I get stuck on acquiring any quartz. Aside from that I think I completed the rest of the Community Center and a lot of what the game has to offer. It’s possible to avoid combat and still have game to play.
  Still, don’t force yourself to play if you don’t want to—this isn’t an “I addressed all your concerns about why you dislike the game, so you have to go play it now with the mods I mentioned for your dislike to be valid anymore” type comment (and I didn’t address the part about Harvest Moon requiring you to develop relationships to progress and unlock things while Stardew doesn’t absolutely require relationships to progress… although relationships will also unlock things). I’m not trying to insist that you have to try Stardew with 384828 different permutations of mods before you’re allowed to say it’s not for you.

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.
- Same here. Sounded amazing. Just don't enjoy it one bit. Which is a shame. Maybe I need to try again, again.

- That's all the FromSoft games to be fair. I'm forcing myself to finish Dark Souls one for the first time right now and straight up? I fucking hate this game.
  
  Curious why you're forcing yourself to finish a game you don't like. I usually drop at this point, because I play games for fun. Are you a completionist who'll get some satisfaction when it's all done, or someone who has to write a gaming review? I realize my tone seems judgmental but I'm really just curious and am not sure how to better word my post to come off as less judgmental.
  
  Hey. What are you doing? Stop playing Dark Souls.
- As soon as I saw it's locked at 30fps, it immediately killed any amount of interest I had in playing it. All the power to people who can stomach action games at what feels like a slide-deck input response.

Minesweeper. Because I found it ugly and boring and it still managed to put me on edge.
- nooooo not minesweeper ;-;

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).
- I felt this with Elden ring. Once I got past the starting area, it just felt like everywhere I went I’d find enemies that kill me in 1-2 hits if I made one wrong or mistimed move. I wish I had the skill or patience to get through it, but I just found it too time consuming to try those tough enemies again and again. Definitely may just be a skill issue on my part, so I don’t necessarily want to dissuade others from giving it a shot.
  
  That's the point of the game. It's definitely not an easy game, but it is the easiest game of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring series. And it's okay if that's not for you! It requires a different approach than your usual hack-and-slash game, and that's certainly not for everyone.

Triangle Strategy. It's basically a visual novel with 5 minutes of combat every hour or so.
- I only logged about 3-4 hours in that game and only encountered 2 battles. The story up to that point put me off too before it even picked up stream, like a classic "prince ascending to throne and hey here's your betrothed future queen who you don't quite get along with, oh hey bandits" Maybe my expectations were too high with the hype the story was getting. The dialog is so drab, it's a chore to click through.
  I just wanted to play a modernized FF Tactics, but I couldn't even find the game within triangle strat.
  I had also got FF7 crisis core reunion shortly before that. I put too many hours into that expecting it to evolve but the gameplay is nothing more than a grind in featureless terrain that you only have the option of fast-traveling to.
  Then I realized this was my first time to play squeenix. I was expecting squaresoft.
  I won't get another squeenix game.
  
  Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (or rereleased as Tactics Ogre Reborn), to me, is that modernized version of FFT. I like FFT, but I liked that Tactics Ogre game waaaaay better.
  
  This was EXACTLY my experience.
  I'm currently playing Mercenaries Blaze. It's very similar to FFT, but heavy on combat and light on stories. Between each fight there is a 2-5 minute cut scene to push the story forward, but nothing ridiculous. The game has some balance issues, but if the main story quests are too difficulty, you can run a few training missions and level up and get caught up in no time.

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.
- It could be argued that other video games are also designed for us to waste time on. It’s just that the method of wasting time is different. In one you make numbers go up, in another you kill enemies (which might just be to make numbers go up: referring to grinding in RPGs) or try to make the car go fast in the right direction.
  I personally enjoy idle games, but I understand that others might not like just clicking some buttons that will make the numbers go up faster.

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.
- That's the thing: progress quest isn't an idle game. It's a parody of modern games that was made long before idle games were a thing. It wasn't fun just like a joke isn't an interesting story.
  
  I would say it was the grandaddy of idle games. It was made as a joke, but actual games have followed its model seriously. And it sucks. It parodies JRPGs, many of which had an auto-battle option. But that was still just an option, and they typically had stories and other fun things about them.

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.
- You are not in the wrong for not enjoying a video game. A person’s level of subjective enjoyment can and will differ from objective quality.
  
  That's a fair point, I just know it's a common contrarian take and wanted to distance myself a little from that. I meant that I am aware I'm in the minority on it, it's not a purely bad feature, just one that doesn't work for me.
- I loved BOTW as a generic open world adventure game. It was probably the worst “Zelda” entry outside of the CD-i games though.
  I just pretend that it wasn’t one at all.
  The weapons breaking thing along with incredibly repetitive and boring enemies made me avoid all fights not absolutely necessary.
  The boss fights - few and far between though they were - were good.
  I had hoped that the new one would fix all of the previous one’s issues but as people like us are in the minority it seems that they kept the formula the same. I’m not sure if I’ll even play it.
  
  They did address it in the new one.
  Now weapons are all (mostly) shitty, but you can accumulate up to 999 each of powerful attachments to your weapons. If your powerful silver bokoblin sword broke, find another shitty weapon and attach one of the silver bokoblin horns to it that you have. Attaching also makes the durability significantly higher.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'll go with a classic, "E.T. the extraterrestrial" on the Atari.... It was bad. It's badness is legendary for a reason.
- And that reason was mainly because of bugs in the game!
  
  No, it was genuinely bad. Yes bugs, but it was also the classic example of corporate overlords forcing "creativity" and hoping that the licensed property would make it a success regardless of the quality.
- I played it at a video game museum and yeah it was pretty stupid

Eternal Sonata. It actually felt eternal, the whole game is just a super slow slog of boring repetitive combat with infrequent opportunities to save.
- It might be tolerance, this is true for me now for almost all turn based RPGs.