Newer games tend to follow a formula after a while that can lead to quality over quantity and come from tropes of popular genres that make them so wildly beloved. However, there are repeated mechanics and gameplay loops that can, for one reason or another, make the game entirely not worth playing.
While I’m sure if I stuck through and played all the way to the credits, I would have found some value out of these games, but it’s often easier just to hit ‘uninstall’ after stumbling across an annoying feature. While pettier than most reasons to stop playing a game, these can still be justifiable under the right circumstances.
8Too Long Of A Tutorial
Tutorials are necessary to help players new to the game understand its mechanics and guide them towards making smarter decisions in combat or exploration. However, it can easily become a chore when you are spending the first hour of gameplay mindlessly clicking through tutorial popups, which cover every mechanic.
Not only is this the least fun part of the game, but it can also hint at the game becoming far too complex down the line, adding more and more elements that only serve to confuse you without a wiki open. Some games will have the entire first act serving as an extended tutorial, and I’d rather spend my time reading an encyclopedia.
7Died Right Away
A good challenge can make games stand outfrom typical cozy titles, allowing you to feel a sense of achievement by overcoming a hard boss or obtaining all the collectibles. Especially if a game lacks a difficulty slider, it can sometimes sap all the fun out of itself by simply being too difficult.
While there is a time and place for these games, I don’t always want to spend a Sunday afternoon in an intense battle against a demon that has killed me ten times already. If it were the third time I fell off the same platform or missed a jump between gaps, I already know there will be even more difficult crossings that will have me in a rage.
Especially in competitive multiplayer games with no skill-based matchmaking. I don’t want to have to play for over 100 hours to get my first win.
6No Autosave Feature
Especially for busy gamers or those who don’t like constantly retreading their steps, when a game lacks an autosave feature and forces you to remember to open a menu, it can be the biggest kick in the rear when you lose half an hour of progress. Sometimes it’s more satisfying to Alt+F4 than to bother starting the entire level over.
For some games this mechanic makes sense, such as most Soulsborne titles, but it can also be a fatal flaw for impatient gamers or those who already have little time to hop on. Having to quicksave every couple of minutes is not a game mechanic that I want to have to worry about at the risk of wasting time.
5Watched An Unskippable Cutscene
I can appreciatea good narrativein a story game, but when a cutscene has an obvious conclusion or is simply not more interesting than the gameplay, I will always choose to skip through it. Especially if the scene has subtitles and I read them faster than the character is speaking, having to sit through an unskippable dialogue is akin to torture.
If I wanted to watch a movie, I would have opened Netflix and started browsing, but when a game insists you need to watch the entire ten-minute scene, it starts to turn off my brain. This usually bodes that the rest of the time will be periods of gameplay constantly broken by a sit-and-wait every few minutes.
A pet peeve for plenty of gamers for justifiable reasons, having to slowly follow a walking NPC to a new location is the most mind-numbing gameplay possible. It is even worse when the mission requires you to tail a suspect or enemy, and the moment they spot you, you have to restart the mission all over again.
The worst version of this is when the NPC moves faster than you walk but slower than you run, so that you have to balance the distance between you, or sometimes end up restarting again. It is so unfortunate that this is a wildly popular mechanic, usually because it is easy to code and serves as a narration dump, but always at the player’s expense.
3Bland Character Creation Options
Character creation menus are where I sometimes spend my first 100 hours of playtime if they have the options to allow me to create a unique character. Some games, unfortunately, will only present a handful of presets that make the process far more frustrating than just creating a singular protagonist you are forced to play as.
What is less of a problem now than before, having a lack of diverse options for gender, body type, and hairstyles could be enough to stop me from even creating my character in the first place. At least I know there is usually a passionate modding community that will add plenty of stylish options for me.
It can also go too far in the other direction sometimes, when I’m fighting the sliders to make a character thatlooks relatively human.
2Saw The Skill Tree
Skill and combat options in games are a solid way to provide players with a path to accent their own playstyle and create a character that few other players have achieved. However, this can quickly become a chore when the skill tree has so many options that you can’t even fit it all onto one screen.
This can make a game feel like I have to pull up a spreadsheet with the wiki open to build an optimized character, or be constantly guessing at which choices will make a character feel fun. This can be worsened when the game expects an optimized build and scales the difficulty accordingly, which is more work than is usually worth it.
1Fell For A Jumpscare
Sometimes my nervous system doesn’t like being jump-started over and over for a few hours, and games tend to be far scarier when you are in control and can walk into a monster at any moment. If I’m sweating through my shirt and I hear a cackle of laughter at the end of a dark hallway, that’s usually a ‘no’ from me.
Sometimes, I can hype myself up and be braver than usual for the sake of a popular game with a unique story, but being startled by constant jump scares is the fastest way to make a game less fun for me. If it’s daytime, with other people in the room, and a modicum of expectation of what to expect, then I might give it a chance.
