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?
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
most multiplayer shooters to me, they’re typically filled with the most vile shit you’ll ever hear coming from an 8 year old, and the adults are just as bad and should know better.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I think I’ve tried a couple times solo, but never really put serious effort into it. So I’d play for like 30min then just quit. I think the bad experience with my friends made me just avoid it. Realistically, it just happened to be Factorio that we were playing that time; it could’ve been any game. And it has happened in other games. The one friend who was the worst offender, I rarely play games with anymore. It’s silly, I know.
However, one day, when I’m bored and looking at my Steam library, I will make the attempt again. I feel like I should, but I just don’t know when that might happen. The picking Factorio part; I’m frequently bored staring at my Steam library!
I never got to finish Just Cause 1 and Kill Zone 1 🤔
I wouldn’t say they were unfun, but definitely I felt JC was very repetitive that I sort of left it behind and same can be said with Killzone, I played Killzone 2 and 3 and never got back to 1, but I intend to.
KZ1 was one of my favourite games, but goddamn, the mechanics sucked. I really only liked it because of the level design, like the places you were fighting in were actual places where people had lived once. It was easy to get immersed. The story was good too, imo.
Games usually have to grab me pretty quickly, or I just drop them, so I don’t play a lot of unfun games for a long time.
Some exceptions were Final Fantasy 13, and to some extent the most of the Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).
Final Fantasy 13 I just tried a bunch of times, put in a combined 40h over the course of like three attempts, I don’t know why, but it was just mediocre at best. During the final one last year, I made it about halfway through, and actually got turned off from gaming altogether for a few months. The story sucked, as well as the characters. I thought the combat could be interesting, even with the auto-battles, since you’d have to decide what “stance” your characters were in, but it was just lame for the most part.
The Trails series is a bit different. I actually liked the gameplay (turn-based JRPG combat is fun), but the story and especially the villains are just complete garbage. Two years ago, before Cold Steel 4 came out on PC, I sat down and played through all the games in like two months. While Trails in the Sky is trash, I was actually surprised to really, really like Zero and (to a little bit lesser extent) Azure. Those gave me hope, but Trails of Cold Steel just goes back to being terrible. I might still go back and play Cold Steel 4 and whatever other games continue or maybe finally finish the story, just because I’ve invested too much time at this point.
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 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.
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.
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.
I think Celeste is designed to be a super narrow experience - pure platforming. I found it pretty pleasant, but not what I’m generally looking to play. I personally don’t think it’s overhyped - the platforming design and movement is really very excellent. Having said that, not my cup of tea either.
Even if I enjoyed it, which I found it impossibly boring, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around favorite of the DECADE. In 10 whole years you haven’t played a single game that you enjoyed more than a simplified platformer? Mind blowing.
Nothing at all my friend, I LOVE 2D platformers. Mario World is one of my favorite games. But I don’t know, they don’t hit me in the feels like something like Fallout New Vegas or Metal Great Solid. Celeste just wasn’t nearly enough content to be better than everything else from the last 10 years IMO.
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.
papers please. i thought i was doing pretty well in the beginning, but i guess it’s built in to the narrative of the game that no matter how hard you work, your family will still get sick and die, and the story progresses by you unknowingly screwing up and letting in a terrorist. not only are you responsible for paying for your own mistakes, it only gets harder and more unforgiving with each level. i realized pretty quickly that it’s not fun at all to spend my precious free time playing an extremely punishing game about working.
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.
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
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. ♥
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
Good to see some player opinions on Triangle Strategy. I’ve had the game on my Switch wishlist forever, hoping to snag it if it ever went on sale or I cleared some of my backlog. Now I’m not even sure I want it if it doesn’t come close to the greatness of FF Tactics.
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.
“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.
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.
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
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