The game is Night in the Woods. It’s a story about a depressed anthropomorphous cat who quit college and moved back in with her parents. You play day by day and each evening you can chose which of your friends you wanna hang out with.
If you hang out with a particular friend one night, you will visit the woods together. There, you have to play a game where you try to stab each other’s fist with a knife. There are mechanics to stab and retract your fist to avoid getting stabbed. This is considered fun. There is no way to progress the game without stabbing your friend.
I’m sorry, I’m probably too old and soft for this, but no, I don’t wanna stab my friends for fun with a knife.
I always really wanted to like The Witcher, but just 30 seconds with the shitty movement system makes me quit every time I try to give it another shot.
Yeah. Here’s hoping the feee remaster addresses movement and combat!
Which one?
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN CJ
Spec ops the line. White phosphorus.
Can I ask why? That’s where I gave up, but I keep having trouble articulating why.
You’re forced to do something stupid and evil for the story to progress. Even if you try to avoid it, the game won’t let you continue unless you commit an obvious war crime.
Ah yeah, I think that’s it. I was felt mad that I kept trying everything to avoid dropping phosphorous. They take away your agency, and force you to do a war crime. I’m guessing that later they call you out for being a bad person for doing that?
Yes, and worse:
Tap for spoiler
Immediately afterwards you learn that you fired on civilian refugees, not soldiers.
Ah, that’s dumb. That whole area of the game had strong “Stop hitting yourself” vibes.
start a new game
first we’ll need a crafting table
hit the tree to gather wood
alt+f4
If I had a group of friends willing to play and endless time I would enjoy these games. Unfortunately I have neither.
No Mans Sky. I just wanted to fly about and explore new planets. No! You must repair you ship first; find 30 jizz crystals. Ok, there’s some. To mine jizz crystals you need a shart hammer. To create a shart hammer you need 13 arse nuggets. To mine arse nuggets you need a piss laser etc etc etc
Let me fly dammit!You chose the wrong gamemode.
Apparently so! I may revisit it soon
I’m not ashamed to admit I selectively enabled free crafting to skip grinding in that game. I have very little patience for games that force me to spend time doing loads of boring busywork to “earn” the right to enjoy the fun parts. But at least No Man’s Sky allows you to tweak the gameplay experience very granularly to make it suit your taste. More games should be like that.
Can you please go into further detail? Like it looked like a game I’d love but then like the above poster I just walked away from it.
One of the main ways you progress in the game is by obtaining blueprints and then finding the ingredients to craft them. But you also have to craft things like fuel, ammo, etc. and to repair things. It’s fun but can get tedious at times. Luckily the game lets you fine tune the experience at any time (it’s actually probably one of the games that does this best imo) and one of the options is free crafting which lets you craft ending immediately without finding the ingredients first. My rule of thumb was to mostly only use it to skip grinding for ingredients I’d found before but needed more of it finding them would be too annoying, but not to skip searching for stuff I hadn’t seen yet.
The game is worth it imo. There is lots of content and it goes on sale from time to time. And all the DLC is always free which is nice.
There’s an indie platformer called Fallen Leaf that has really good reviews. In the opening cutscene you are told a story about how in the past the world was saved by sealing away a great evil underground. The first level of the game sees you exploring a cave that your main character didn’t even want to be in, at the behest of his sister (IIRC).
Some ways into the cave your path is blocked by a talking bear who politely but firmly explains that it is dangerous ahead and no one may pass. If you attempt to get past them, they gently boop you back.
What the game clearly wants you to do is shoot a stalactite so that it falls on the bear. No, game, I don’t think I’m going to murder this innocent bear just so that I can be the one who releases the ancient evil I will spend the rest of the game fighting against. I will just quit here while the world is still safe and the polite bear is unharmed, thanks.
I hate it when games make you do heinous shit like this just to advance the plot. Call me any name you like, I don’t enjoy being a terrible person in a game that I didn’t go into with the expectation of playing the part. It just sucks and makes me not want to play your game.
I’m with you guys on this. I don’t want the plot of a game to hinge on me both being the villain and the hero.
Zelda Breath of the Wild: Weapon durability. Fuck I was so annoyed by that. Even the Master Sword with it’s cooldown. That felt like a really disrespectful design choice for OG Zelda fans.
Will be the last Zelda game I (attempted to) play, although it pains me.
For me it was the cooking system, I got sick of trying to remember what combination of bs mixed together into something useable. The buffs don’t even last that long so you have to constantly be eating and cooking
First time I picked it up I had this same problem but you get far enough into the game and you never really run out of weapons so I eventually just ignored it
at least you didn’t need to keep fusing stuff to them to make them do anything but provide a light tickle to enemies
Regarding to traditional design of Zelda, yes! Yet it’s intentional to keep you detached from your weapons, forcing you to try out everything.
It’s always at a point where the game suddenly requires a skill that isn’t part of its usual gameplay. I played a crafting and exploration game that suddenly has a huge platforming element in the late game in a dungeon, and it was even timed! The rest of the game involved no platforming, and it wasn’t even particularly difficult to do but I suck at platforming, never enjoyed it, and I especially did not need the stress of a timer in an otherwise relaxing game.
Another story rich game which was heavy on logistics suddenly turned into a shooter. No, thank you.
Another thing I hate is when I turn the difficulty down and the only option is to do it across the board so I may as well stop interacting with the game. I know I’m bad at fast-paced precision inputs. That doesn’t mean I don’t want cool puzzles to solve or complex systems.
I know, I know: “get good.” I’m old. Shooting and platforming are not the skills I care to be developing at this stage of my life.
I quit Skyrim when they threw a mandatory stealth mission at me and I hadn’t leveled Stealth at all. Granted, most people don’t play it for the underwhelming story anyway…
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC does this, unfortunately. Halfway through the story, Myst-like exploration of an abandoned location turns into horror wandering around pitch black locations with a janky lantern, being chased by creepy-looking aliens. Nope, made me stop playing. (Horror and jumpy enemies are fine if I have a weapon and can control the protagonist. But not if it’s a death cutscene at a single touch in complete darkness. It made me more uncomfortable than Dusk, or Quake, or Blood did)
Did you try the “less scares” setting? I think it makes this part easier, because I was watching someone struggle with this and as soon as they turned it on they passed it on the next try.
Doesn’t that just turn off their screeches or something?
I absolutely loved Outer Wilds, except for our friends in Dark Bramble. But once I had do those parts of the DLC, I installed a mod that lit the place up and made the things in there not know around.
I was in for a puzzle space exploration game, not a stealth horror game.
IIRC no screeches and they move slower. Not sure how much that would help though since in one location, they wander in the dark, and player cannot see them without alerting them.
I played on the Switch, so no mods for me. I would lighten everything up, at least.
Oddly, the Dark Bramble didn’t bother me as much. I got a surprise once without even seeing the guy, then a jumpscare once, but generally, those guys are chill, hang out in one place, and are visible (or have a giveaway, at least).
Loved the original Outer Wilds too.
It seemed like it made there be literally less guards but maybe she just got lucky on the winning run.
This.
Starfield. God awful pacing and dialog that made you go “oh please shut up”. I went to neon and every vendor had a 5+ minute cutscene wah wah side quest story i couldn’t give a shit about.
“Oh somebody fucked my robot and now im sad so let me explain that again with 20 paragraphs” -Shop Keeper I don’t give a shit fuck about your dumb robo bitch i have 20 spacesuits i need to sell so i can fast travel again.
The fact they didn’t bother to add a dialog box first to access a service or buy/sell goods before the vendor starts telling you their life story was enough to make me not play again.
I was on the verge of breaking down and quitting after I did the math on all the
dragon shoutspace wizard powers, and realized that in order to level everything up to max, I would have to sit through eight hours of just the shitty temple minigame. But that just made me stop trying to get dragon shouts.What broke me was another notification saying that my mannequin of a wife had another gift for me.
Doki Doki Literature Club I went in blind. I got through the first chapter and got so pissed off that there was no option to be a better friend to hopefully prevent the first negative event. It made me drop the game. Years later I learned about the game from an analytical video essay and I reposed that was probably the War Games style winning move.
The Finals
Another player spouted off unambiguously Nazi BS. I reported them. I doubled back to check. They hadn’t been removed after weeks. I don’t play a game that doesn’t even do the bare minimum of removing the open, unambiguous Nazis.The Red Lantern/ Heavy Rain These can be grouped. I have a rule which says ‘If I’m not making a choice of what to do in your game, I’m already not playing your game, I’m fighting your game to get the chance to play it, so if you can’t show me something damned quick to make me want to fight for it, it’s time to walk away.’ It pushed me away from Chicken Horse. It kicked me out of Heavy Rain too. The Red Lantern felt like it was mechanically sound but the connective tissue was not there. It’s good design to tell a player, ‘you can sacrifice resource A for a chance at resource B, or don’t. Your call.’ It’s terrible design to say to a player ‘Yes or no?’ with no details, no context clues, or even false context clues and the question actually being in reference to something extremely significant.
Ark
Way back when it was nearer the peak of its popularity, I tried it. I played for a bit. Learned about just how much grind it takes to make even a little crapshack, and how shitty the mechanical design is, and dropped it. Really, there have been many like that, dropped for just not being good/fun. Hell Let Loose was like that. Battle royale games are like that. Civ-likes that aren’t Civ are like that. All the intentional skinner box games are like that.Shovel knight, when you have to fight all the bosses again in a row. I didn’t rage quit, I just thought I did not went to spend my time doing that at all.
Enjoyed the game before that.
In general, long cutscenes at the top are a huge deterrent. I booted up clair obscur again…and like…shit just let me play lol I think im finally in the gameplay of it all but I almost gave up again. Just feels like you wanted to make a movie. Do that. But let me play lol
Just feels like you wanted to make a movie.
That’s me with MGS5. With these exact thoughts
Believe it or not, MGS5 is by far the most restrained game in the series when it comes to that sort of thing. The earlier games would lock you into twenty minute codec calls or unskippable cutscenes several times per area. Most of your playtime was watching floating heads yap at you while Snake repeated every line they said as a question.
I think MGS4 totals something like 20 hours of cutscenes?
This is horrendous. I’ve only attempted to try MGS5 after hearing for literal years how amazing the series is, about amazing storytelling and world building and spy action and all that. And now you’re telling me that wasn’t even the most egregious?! Guess I’ll stick to Deus Ex
I almost quit Nier Automata immediately, because the game opens right off the bat with a very long interactive cutscene with gameplay elements which you cannot pause or skip, and during which you cannot save.
And if you die you have to do it all over from the beginning
Fortunately that turned out to be the worst part of the game for me, and I enjoyed the rest of it.
Voices Of The Void, the game will just randomly decide to disable pausing so you can’t save and will lose a bunch of progress if you quit.
That is when an anomaly is around. It’s to get you to go and have a look.
The RC helicopter missions in Vice City.
Rage. Absolute rage. My neighbor at the time was really good at it. We all made him do that part for us 😂
