For me? Rogue Trader. Maybe it got better but after sinking a lot of time into it, what I found was that you’d get to a certain point and after that the game fell apart. Each patch pushed the point back, but it never fully went away.

Not really sure if it’s been posted yet, but for me that’s GTA Online. I can’t pretend it was ever masterpiece material, but it was compelling enough for me to sink over 4000 hours into (over 12 years). It’s remarkable how much GTA has become a parody of itself. GTA 5 had materialism and insane money spending as some of its themes, something it parodied hard throughout the story. Hell, shark cards in GTA Online seemed to follow this a bit.

And where does GTA Online sit nowadays? Normal boring vehicles costing millions, a subscription service to get quality of life content, mediocre mission design wasting a lot of your time, every update feels more disconnected from the last, and most insulting of all. The shark cards from 2013 cost the same, but have only had a 25% increase in ingame cash. A 2014 update released a LaFerrari inspired supercar costing 500k, a 2026 update released a BMW 5 Series inspired sedan costing 1.4 million. Police cars were added, but can easily cost over 4 million each, and then they still have the audacity to remove all resale value from them. Final nail for me, the last big update nerfed payouts on a lot of big heists.

I haven’t touched it in 7 months, and from what I’m seeing online, I’m not missing much.

EvE Online It was LIFE, and I love the game…nothing like it and it is NOT for everyone. When I finally freed myself from it…I’d never go back and never suggest others do. It is life consuming.

Kindom Come: Deliverance is a lot of fun, until the very first time you have to fight more than 1 person. The combat system is horrendously designed, and apparently they fixed it in 2 by just nerfing enemies.

Fucking don’t starve together. It’s just ragebait and I’ll not hear otherwise.

Among Us.

My friends kept suggesting it for game nights, but the social demands are just not compatible with actually hanging out with your friends.

When everyone’s out and about, doing their tasks and getting murdered, we’re all discouraged from actually talking with one another, for fear of revealing a dead body or whatever. Whenever there’s a meeting going on, sure, we’re “free” to talk again, but there’s not enough time to talk about anything but the game. When you’re dead, and thus finally relieved from the pressures of completing tasks or getting kills… there’s still no chit-chat allowed, because ghosts “can’t” talk.

It’s worse whenever random players are involved; having to coordinate between voice chat with friends, and text chat with randoms, or worse, when the randoms are in a voice chat of their own, coordinating to be assholes.

The moment that finally made me say “I don’t enjoy this game”, was a round with two random players in it: one of them spent the whole round watching security cameras, and the other was blocking the one doorway into the room, both players working with each other and refusing to do their tasks. No way for the lone impostor that round to kill them both. When we started calling them out on this, they flat-out said “we’re going to keep doing this just to spite you”. Timer ran out with unfinished tasks. Crewmates lost.

Literally any open world survival game.

ARK

Valheim

Rust

No Man’s Sky

Grounded

The entire fucking genre is tired and tedious. Exploration is the best part of the game, but you spend 90% of the time base building, researching upgrades to your base, gathering more stone/wood/BS to improve your base, optimising the layout of your base, crafting automation to produce MORE stone/wood/BS to further improve your base. And all this with a cumbersome inventory or weight management system.

And they always look like absolute crap. It’s either clean sci-fi structures that stick out like a sore thumb, or shoddy ramshackle buildings that look like they were slapped together by an ambitious crack head. So you spend hours placing decorations (that you also have to research and gather materials for) just for it to look kind of ok.

I fucking hate base building.

Really deeply disappointed by Claire Obscura: Expedition 33

The combat is semi-turn based, so it feels unnaturally slow and clunky. But then it requires you to respond to the boss animations with twitchy reflex commands if you want to have any hope of beating even the first couple of levels. So, I’m supposed to strategize on offense but twitch-defend on defense? Bleh.

The game also took a hard turn into gratuitous gore very quickly. And the gore didn’t really add anything to the story or even the atmosphere. Especially when the opening scene is people turning into flower petals, implying the much more romantic melodrama. The scene on the beach is this sharply contrasted pile of mutilated corpses that took the game from sweetly sad to needlessly gross.

Like, if you want to do an Elden Ring knock off with some French flair, cool? But this got a zillion awards. It shouldn’t feel so derivative and hack.

As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin’s creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.

Eventually I pick up Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.

Perhaps it filled a good ‘get home from work and crash’ need for me, and the experience wasn’t wholly bad by any means, but it’s so bland. I’ve dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.

I tend to hold off calling anything that’s not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin’s creed doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it’s blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.

I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn’t have an ounce of passion in it.

These games aren’t helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.

Destiny 2.

Every time Destiny 2 approached a point where you could call it improved, Bungie would shit the bed. They could never figure out what they wanted, was it a PVE game? Was it a PVP game? Was it a PVPVE game? Yes! Though it was a poor excuse for each compared to what could have been if they just picked a fucking lane.

Underrated grift of the decade by Bungie, Sony got hardcore scammed.

Not an avid gamer and play mostly indie.

Tunic. Was recommended for fans of Outer Wilds (fantastic game), but I see no similarities. Tunic’s cover art looks like a Zelda ripoff, world borrows from Hyper Light Drifter, and the game plays like a Zelda + Hyper Light Drifter ripoff, but very poorly tested, unfair, and misleading at times. I get the impression that game designers had zero external opinions and very little playtesting.

Exploration is “bump into every nook and cranny to find a way forward”. Bosses are absurdly difficult, clearly catering to the “git gud” crowd, and do not feel fair (as a counterexample, HLD felt difficult but fair). Puzzles are all backloaded to the latter half of the game, they are mostly fun, but at least one relies on a mechanic that is never hinted at nor used in the game otherwise. The untranslated manual, main gimmick of the game, is misleading at times. Midgame apocalypse / dark world is not that, it’s… Night time (not putting the spoiler because that is just absurdity)

Yes, I finished it, and got the good ending, which only elicited “Um, ok?” from me.

Wizard101.

I probably have over 10k hours in that piece of shit. Autistic obsession for like 5 years straight. Been playing on and off since it came out. Fuck Kingsisle, fuck microtransactions, fuck them lying about it being “free-to-play”, fuck features that only exist to incentivize paying. I still like the game in some ways, it just isn’t a good game.

Darkest dungeon

Cyberpunk 2077. The game seems so perfect for me, but after 4 hours, dropping it, trying again for 4 hours, it just wouldn’t stick.

I do wonder if it was 3rd person if I’d enjoy it more. I tend to love visual environments, and I think the first-person perspective hurts the game (for me).

Elite Dangerous. The early game up is brutal and you don’t get much help. Mid game is very long and a grind. I’m only on a few engineering trees and still haven’t left the bubble.

I haven’t even gotten to end game.

I can’t even do PvP because I get gonked too fast.