We’ve all fought our way through epic boss battles, solved mind-bending puzzles, and braved terrifying final levels, but none of that compares to the soul-crushing experience of trying to manage a bad inventory system. Seriously, nothing tests your patience like hitting a weight limit in the middle of a dungeon or spending ten minutes playing hot potato with potions and fish.
These games might be beloved (or at least ambitious), but when it comes to inventory management, they missed the mark by a mile. These titles turned your backpack into the real endgame.
You’d think a game about catching adorable monsters would be stress-free. Then you hit the item limit. Pokemon GO starts you with a 350-item bag, which fills up fast. Poke Balls, Potions, Berries, Evolution Items, Event junk, you’re suddenly playing Tetris with healing sprays and chucking out 90 Revives just to pick up one Ultra Ball. Yes, you can expand the bag in increments of 50 items, but it costs 200 PokeCoins each time.
Eventually, you’ll hit the 3,500-item cap, and even that somehow doesn’t feel like enough. It’s wild that in a game about catching them all, you spend so much time throwing stuff away. It’s not just inventory management, it’s inventory guilt. Did I really need to delete all my Max Potions just because I walked past a few too many PokeStops.
Fextralife Wiki
Baldur’s Gate 3 has epic storytelling, great characters… and an inventory system that feels like it rolled a natural one. Instead of a shared party stash, each character has their own bag, which means you’ll constantly be juggling gear between them, despite the fact you can teleport items freely. Why even pretend there’s a system here? Add in a clunky UI, inconsistent item highlighting, and a total lack of basic quality-of-life features (looking at you, “sort by weight”), and inventory turns into a mini-game of micromanagement.
Want to sell junk quickly? Too bad. Vendor interactions are awkward and time-consuming. Even trying to find the loot in a room is weirdly frustrating: one barrel glows when you hit the highlight key, but the one next to it, full of rare gear, doesn’t? C’mon, Larian. This is a D&D world, we want to loot like dragons, not babysit a medieval spreadsheet.
For a series known for deep lore and stealth mechanics, Peace Walker’s inventory system stands out for being, well, confusing as hell. Instead of a clean, intuitive menu, you’re navigating a vertically-stacked system that buries items behind layers of awkward inputs. Selecting the gear you want mid-mission feels like trying to assemble IKEA furniture in the middle of a gunfight. And the layout doesn’t do you any favors; it’s hard to tell what you’re equipping, what’s a one-time use item, or what half the abbreviations even mean without a manual.
It all contributes to a feeling of friction, like the game’s more interested in testing your menu navigation than your tactical skills. In a title where every second can count, fiddling through an obtuse inventory screen can turn a slick operation into a clunky mess. Snake deserved better, and so did our thumbs.
Valheim is a survival game with incredible vibes: Viking mythology, building longhouses, and sailing stormy seas. But once you open your inventory, the immersion shatters. First off, there’s no separate slot system for gear, so your equipped armor and tools take up the same precious spaces as your loot and crafting materials. Want to boost your health with food, and that’s three more slots gone, just for meals. Add in a frustrating weight limit, and suddenly your heroic adventures are constantly interrupted by inventory anxiety.
And heaven forbid you go out on a resource run, you’ll spend half your time tossing rocks and trophies on the ground just to bring home a stack of iron. The real pain kicks in back at your base, where sorting chests and trying to remember where you put your feathers becomes a full-time job. It’s Viking life, sure, but couldn’t we get some magical backpacks?
No Man’s Sky has gone through one of the most impressive glow-ups in gaming, but its inventory system still feels like it’s stuck in a black hole. You’ve got your exosuit, starship, freighter, and multi-tool… all with separate inventories. Items stack weirdly, upgrades eat up space, and trying to manage it all feels like dragging suitcases through an airport in zero gravity. Oh, and if you accidentally fill your ship’s cargo hold with trade goods while in the middle of a firefight? Good luck finding the one item you actually need.
The menus aren’t particularly responsive, either; tabbing between inventories during high-stakes moments is clunky at best, fatal at worst. It gets especially irritating when you’re trying to build something cool but can’t because you forgot your Chromatic Metal is in your freighter orbiting a different moon. Inventory in No Man’s Sky isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s an entire game mode.
Minecraft
Minecraft gives you a 27-slot inventory plus a hotbar, and that’s it. It sounds generous until you start actually doing things. Exploring? You’ll need tools, food, blocks, and weapons. Mining? Add in multiple pickaxes, stacks of ores, random cobblestone, and the twenty-five other things you accidentally picked up. If you’re farming, better bring buckets, seeds, bonemeal, and whatever else your cows demand. And heaven help you if you want to build something aesthetically pleasing, suddenly, you’re lugging around seventeen types of wood and every color of terracotta like a mobile Home Depot.
There’s no auto-sort, no stacking past 64 (or 16 for some items, for reasons), and barely any visual cues. So, unless you’re willing to go full chest-gremlin and build an entire warehouse with signs and item frames, your backpack becomes a chaotic nightmare. The real Ender Dragon is that one unnamed stack of gravel that’s been wasting space for six hours.
In a game all about cozy living and decorating your dream island, Animal Crossing’s inventory system is aggressively uncozy. Your pocket space starts off laughably small, forcing you to choose between bringing a shovel, fishing rod, and bug net, or, you know, carrying anything else. Expanding your inventory takes time and Bells, and even when maxed out, you’ll constantly be juggling tools, furniture, DIY ingredients, and a terrifying number of fish. Want to move furniture from one room to another?
You can’t just drag and drop; you have to pick it up, store it, and then redeploy it in a slow, awkward process. Even selling things becomes a slog if you accidentally carry too many items to Nook’s Cranny. And don’t even get me started on how long it takes to craft things one by one. Animal Crossing wants you to relax, but its clunky pockets make every trip to the beach feel like a chore.
Starfield promised the stars, but forgot to make enough room in your space backpack. You’ve got weight limits on everything: your personal inventory, your companion’s inventory, your ship’s inventory, and they’re all managed separately. This means you’ll spend way too much time paused, scrolling through nested menus, trying to figure out which pile of aluminum is making you walk like you’re underwater.
Even worse, most loot is absurdly heavy. If you want to pick up a cool-looking helmet, congrats, you’re now over-encumbered and can’t fast travel. And while there’s a way to offload junk to your companions, they’ll also hit their own carry limit and refuse to help unless you manually reshuffle everything. It kills the flow of exploration. Bethesda wanted us to feel like space-faring adventurers, but most of us ended up playing intergalactic inventory interns. Who knew the real final frontier was storage space?
