Bloodborne.

Don’t get me wrong, the game has fantastic mechanics and great art direction.

HOWEVER. The game relied too much on its lack of hand-holding in order to be enticing but it came out just raw fuckin frustrating. You know what’s cool? Finding new areas by exploration and not by being told it’s where you’re supposed to go. You know what’s not cool? Being handed a list of names of places with no idea of what is in each of them and being expected to know where to go. I got really frustrated with a boss and quit for a few weeks. I come back, kill the boss, and learn that there’s no new door out of the boss arena. I open the fast travel list to find a long list of names of places I had been to but had no fucking idea which one I was supposed to explore next. That is the absolute worst design choice I have seen in a universally loved game. Fuck Bloodborne.

Yes, I will absolutely buy it when they decide to remaster it for PC.

minecraft and games like minecraft. i just dont get whats supposed to be fun about them. i dont hate minecraft specifically its a well made game, but i dont find it and others like it fun at all

Checkers. You start with only one piece type and they go to the trouble to make all those squares and you only use half of 'em.

Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.

Almost anything first person. It makes me incredibly nauseous, which is really unfortunate because there are some really neat games that use the mechanic. I recently sold my copy of Echo Night since I couldn't play for more than around ten minutes at a time. I also couldn't complete the tutorial in Half-Life because it made me so nauseous that I had to spend almost the entire day in bed. Weirdly I'm perfectly fine with Metroid Prime.

Don't Starve I already can't stand Tim Burton's style, and I really can't get over the similarities to try to enjoy this game, even though one of my autistic special interests is open world survival crafting games.

Fallout 4 Seems like a perfectly fine FPS, very much not a Fallout game. Leans far too heavily on action and not enough on the RPG elements.

GTA 5 If GTA were a candy, GTA 5 would be a bucket of that candy. It's fine if you really really really like that candy, but if you're just not THAT obsessed with the candy, it can get a bit tiring. Having three people with different stories and event going on felt like I never spent enough time with one character to REALLY get into their development. I'd rather see them innovate than just do MORE GTA

Outer Worlds Boring af

Final Fantasy VII, honestly. And it's not like I haven't tried to like it but it's just not that good to me. I'm a long time FF fan and I have played all but XI, but VII misses me. The music is bomb, for sure, and I love a few of the characters.

It's also talked about SO much by so many in the gaming community and I'm really just tired of hearing about it. I wish Square gave this level of love and attention to some of their other FF titles.

ditto rdr2 - its less a video game than it is a graphic novel read by a semi-literate slow talker

the entire dark souls series is also ruined by clunky controls. give me a Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Skyrim, etc . . . fps controls pls.

X4 fails because of its controls too. Imagine making a flight sim where you can't invert the Y axis, or an FPS where the shift key can't be bound to sprint.

Unless Pokemon counts, I don't think I have ever enjoyed a JRPG. I have zero idea what people see in these except weebs getting horny over anime girls.

GTA games are the epitome of shallowness, for me. The story is always so vague and not interesting, you never get attached to characters. Gameplay is a boring loop, but its strength has always been being some sort of theme park. But it's 2024 and "hop onto a game just to go fast on car and shoot a couple of civilians"

Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like Pokémon, nintendo developers know fans will buy new games regardless of how much new content there is to it. There is no legitimate reason for the game to be so close mechanically to its Gamecube entry, and I find it an insult to long time fans.

Any sports game, like FIFA or Madden.

Uncharted. Dislike might be a strong word. But I don't particularly like them.

The story is serviceable. Fine if you gameplay is great.

The fighting mechanics are serviceable. Fine if the story is great.

The climbing and puzzle mechanics are annoying. It constantly feels like you're not doing what the game wants you to do, even if it should work.

The characters/character interactions are the highlight of the game. But it's not enough to make the game great.

• Abzu - hated the underwater movement controls
• Deponia & MechaNika - the protagonist is an asshole
• Papers Please - too stressful (works well as a piece of art, but wasn't an enjoyable experience)

I would also choose Zelda: BOTW and RDR2.

Zelda: BOTW is a soulless Ubisoft game clone shamelessly inhabiting the dead shell of the Legend of Zelda franchise. It contains little to nothing that makes the Legend of Zelda games what they are. Gone are fascinating cities and towns, no colorful cast of characters, no real dungeons or temples, no progression system so the entire game is just 50 hours of the game exact same copy-pasted things over and over and over with no change in difficulty or approach. It’s like the first Zelda game in history without a memorable score, in fact there’s hardly any music in it at all. Theres no plot to speak of. It introduced some novel systems, and they deserve credit for that, but it’s just not a Legend of Zelda game at all.

RDR2 is a bland on-rails march from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with an incredibly lifelike and immersive world that… doesn’t really give you anything to do. And what it does give you, there’s no reason to do. The game revolves around your camp and allies but the camp hardly serves any purpose. You can’t customize it in any significant way, keeping everyone happy and supplied does very little besides reduce the amount of audible complaining. And the game shoves so much money in your hands from the word go, that you never have a reason to do any money making activities, and it upends the plot of the whole game “We just need a bit more money” Dutch says as I have $10,000 stashed in my saddlebags. Everyone seems to love Arthur as a character but he’s just such a bland, indecisive milquetoast guy who doesn’t hold his own opinion on anything. He doesn’t have any personality to speak of until the last third of the game, and then they expect you to have an emotional reaction to him by the end. John was hands down a better protagonist and it’s not close.

I played Call of Duty Black Ops III and I don‘t understand how anyone can enjoy that multiplayer, it‘s such an overloaded piece of crap lol

Campaign and Zombies was fun af though.

Also, any sad dad game. I don‘t wanna be sad when I play videogames.

I'm gonna get a lot of flak for this...

I really don't like Sekiro. Like, at all.

I played the inspiration for years (Tenchu) and loved that so much, but Sekiro just feels hollow in comparison. I know it's not a stealth game, nor is it trying to be, but I can't help but feel like the cliffs and stuff are just "cheap" ways of making the game more difficult. Idk, maybe I'm just not ninja enough lol...

Speaking of stealth, Dishonored. I REALLY wanted to love this game. It's just not open enough for my taste. There's only usually one main walkway to the objective (I say walkway, but there are of course roofs and stuff you can teleport to - I'm just saying, I wish you could get on the actual roofs of buildings Assassin's Creed style or explore the city open-world style). Cool story, cool theme, but the gameplay falls through for me. I felt the same way about MGS4.

Also Red Dead Redemption was meh for me. Could have been better, could have been worse. Undead Nightmare was great though.

The 2 that you mentioned and God of War 2018.

I honestly don't get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.

I get that the story is good but it's not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.

Hard agree on the Zelda example.

Survival elements without base building?

Combat that feels closer to Dark Souls than Zelda? Odd.

I'll add in a genre rather than a game: Battle Royal games.

We used to play a variety of games. Halo, warcraft, Smite, League of Legends... Now I have no gaming friends left as they refuse to play anything other than Apex Legends or the latest greatest Call of Duty.

Outer Wilds: too boring for me.

RDR2, Horizon series, probably many more others I don't even remember: a lot of busywork in an empty uninteresting giant open world.

Souls-like: I understand why people like them but it's not the kind of challenge I like.

Star Wars anything, Shadow of Mordor, Hogwarts Legacy: couldn't care less about the setting.

I think these are about it for "generally liked" kind of games. There's some more about less popular stuff but in general this is it.

BioShock Infinite. Mostly because I hated all of the characters, with the exception of the Luteces, and even they were on thin ice, mostly because of Rosalind. And Elizabeth as a NPC companion? I would prefer Ashley from Resident Evil 4 over Elizabeth any day. It didn't help that every time I tried to listen to a voxophone, she'd start talking about some bs, so I'd wait for her to finish and start the voxophone over, only to have her start talking again. When it happened 4 times with one vox, I had to take a break from the game. I just wanted to listen to the damn recording.
Gameplay is great though. I'll play the heck out of the Clash in the Clouds dlc. I get the fun action, and none of Booker and Elizabeth's constant whining.

All the recent PlayStation Studios games.

I don't dislike it, it's brilliant, the epitome of SupergiantGames' beautiful craft, but I just can't play Hades, it released after I had already burnt out on Dead Cells, Curse of the Dead Gods, Grime, Enter the Gungeon, Blasphemous, Gunfire Reborn, and whatnot, I can't bring myself to play it because I had already explored the genre so many times...

Dark Souls 3 and only Dark Souls 3. I love Dark Souls 1 and 2, Elden Ring, Bloodborne is my favorite game, and Sekiro. But Dark Souls 3 is just so boring and unfun. Even the ingame world feels uninterested in this game, (because it kinda is over the whole age of fire thing.) Everything is gross and brown it just makes exploring kind of icky. DS1 had a good balance of gross and majestic locations and enemies. DS2 suffered from too few monsters and too many generic armored knights, and locations felt too clean and empty.

It feel like this game does not like you to diversify your build. Armor is basically cosmetic, and offers very slight damage protection. Poise sucks, and is basically removed, so making a tank build kind of sucks. Its so damn fast and doesn't give you a ton of options like Elden Ring does. DS3 is certainly the most actiony of the action rpgs, and idk, I'd like more rpg. I remember watching a video about how playing these games at level 1 is the intended and best way to play. I can kind of see that, I think that discredits a lot of the rpg elements in these games. I always saw permadeath runs as the more fun way to play, especially in DS2, that game was like designed to be run as an arcade game.

The game also feels like it rides on nostalgia pretty hard. Anor Londo? Thats here. Andre? He's here. Firelink Shrine? Thats here, too. Artorias? There's a whole cult trying to cosplay as him. I actually think DS2 handled this sort of thing better, it being so far it the future from DS1 that most characters and places from 1 are only legend or ancient history. I think it gave 2 a sense of discovery, even if DS2 certainly has much less coherent lore lol.

There are good things in this game. The dlc is fantastic. Certain areas look downright stunning, often helped by the muted color palette. A lot of the bosses are fun when you use the correct play style for them. Pontiff Sullivan or Champion Gundyr is my favorite boss on my most recent playthrough, but I haven't gotten to Gale, the Twin Princes or Midir yet.

Kingdom Hearts. I like action RPGs but KH is too weird and I don't dig the whole Disney crossover thing at all.

• any 3d Zelda games. I didn't play OOT until I was in my late 20s and it was awful (specifically controls and camera). I tried watching people Speedrun it or do the randomizer, but the sound link makes when rolling (which most did most of the time) drove me crazy. BotW seemed like something I would like on paper, but Nintendo just had to work their new controls into some shrines and I found it frustrating. Also didn't like the breaking weapons. Link Between Worlds (神様のトライフォース　２) sits in a weird place. I mostly liked it, but hated the gimmicky 3d bits on the 3DS.
• goldeneye for the same reasons - felt like a step backward and I had no nostalgia for it, playing it for the first time in my 30s.
• anything with the N64 controller for the same reasons. It felt so unnatural and weird.
• most roguelikes (but not all). Losing to random chance is annoying. Some randomness is of course fine
• dark souls and the like. Watch boss. Die. Try again. Die. To me, that's boring. I'd rather have in-world ways of learning about the boss.
• pokemon. I was already in high school, working part time, and doing a lot of school stuff (band/theatre/sports) and just never got into it. I tried Pokemon go and didn't care for it (but did like Dragon Quest Walk that came out later)
• Final Fantasy 7 -- hated the camera and other similar things. Story and all was fine
• Most 3rd person shooters (with the exception of Just Cause). I would line up the perfect shot in Sniper Elite only to shoot the few pixels of the corner of something I couldn't see because my character's dumb body was in the way
• starfox. I was already playing better games like that on Amiga and other platforms, so it felt like a step back to me

Souls games, cod and most other FPS games namely the multiplayer, god of war, RDR2

Hogwarts Legacy: To be fair it is a big Openworld but it doesn't catch me. The Story is kind of lame the voice sounds a little bit too Much like a crappy TTS. I tried to finish it but I always stop after like 30minutes played.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt I dislike that the Openworld is like a movie. You don't need to think where you want to go, you just follow the little dots on your minimap until your are there. Its so utterly boring. I love the souls franchise, you see an NPC, walk up to her talk to her and write the important things down on your Notepad. To be fair, Wircher 3 looks absolutely beautiful after the recent patch.

Edit: I really really dislike Fortnite. Its highly overrated and it isn't even original.