Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 both bored me to sleep. I didn't find anything in their worlds to care about, and the meta-game of endlessly memorizing monsters' attack patterns just doesn't hold my interest for more than a few minutes. I guess soulslike games are not my cup of tea.

Gran Turismo 7 was the worst offender I've had in a long time. It was very pretty and very well put together but it just wasnt fun.

But a few years later and a YT rabbit hole or two and I decided to give it a go on a very basic simrig setup and... yep, theres the fun.

Red Dead Redemption 2. The cutscenes are too long and boring.

For me, it's Elden Ring. I wanted to love the game so bad but it didn't recapture the magic of Dark Souls 1 for me. I never get past the early areas of the game because I just get bored.

Elden Ring just doesn't make the experimenter part of my brain feel good. I want to try out everything and do everything and constantly adjust to the enemies. But, in ER you are much better off focusing on one thing and getting really good at it. The game is about mechanical skill and pattern recognition, not solving the enemy like a puzzle. So, I just get bored doing the same repetitive attacks and learning when to dodge the enemies. Maybe you get to do a little bit of fun planning by picking the right element or buffs but that's about it.

I was actually really sad about it, but I came to realize that I just want to play games that are very mathy and allow me to test out lots of builds and strategies. I've actually taken an interest in JRPGs as a result and I'm enjoying it so far.

God of War 2018

I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

• The game is littered with "puzzles". The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to "solve" it. They just waste your time.

• Stats don't matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about "showcasing" my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

• The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

• Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your "cinematic angles" mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

• There are so many "cutscenes" that have you walk at a snails pace. If your "gameplay" can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn't immersive.

• You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

• Probably some more things, but it's been a few years.

The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that's what I did your second entry.

Doom Eternal.

I like the original trilogy, adored Doom 2016, and I even thought Doom 3 was a decent game in its own right. So a direct sequel to Doom Eternal where Heaven gets involved and everybody says is bigger and better? Sign me the fuck up!

I bought the game and all the DLC. I played through to the end and beat the final boss, and I did not enjoy one second of it (I only finished because I can be a stubborn fool).

Things got off to a bad start when I had to sign into my Slayers Club account before the game would show me the main menu. Then when I was playing, it paused every few seconds to tell me that it couldn't connect to the server, which utterly kills the vaunted flow of combat.

And the combat. Ugh. Doom 2016 is excellently balanced, providing 10 fun weapons for different situations which let people find their own playstyles, and prioritising ammo drops when the player is low on ammo and health drops when low on health. Eternal fans claim that there is no reason to use anything other than the super shotgun, and I have no doubt that strategy worked for them, but I used all the weapons, and I don't think I used the super shotgun very much at all.

Eternal officially gives you nine weapons, but each of them has three different fire modes (except the super shotgun, which just has two fire modes and also a meathook), so there are really 26 guns plus two different grenades. And every single fucking enemy has a hardcoded weakness to two, maybe three attacks, and are barely hurt by anything else. These aren't weaknesses to individual weapons, but to specific weapons in specific modes, and some of those modes have to be unlocked by meeting specific conditions. Every single demon hits like a dump truck and moves like a motorbike, so by the time you have selected the specific weapon that will do more than a papercut, you have a completely different demon in your face. And the guns in this Doom game hold fuck all ammo even when fully upgraded. And getting upgrades often requires playing suboptimally.

Speaking of ammo, the chainsaw has been downgraded from powerful emergency weapon to tool for obtaining ammo. You can find the odd ammo pickup in levels, but 90% of the time, the only way to get more ammo is to chainsaw a weak demon (demons don't drop ammo otherwise). Because you can barely carry enough ammo to kill one heavy demon, I spent the 90% of the arena battles running around, desperately dodging attacks as I waited for the chainsaw to refill so I could get some ammo to shoot at the big demons. And the arena battles don't use waves; as soon as you kill a big demon, another one teleports in to replace it, so there is no respite until you get near the end. This did not make me feel like a berserker-packing man and a half. I felt like a weak, terrified wimp, desperately trying to survive. Fighting hordes of demons isn't epicly badass, it's a long, tiring slog, and at the end of every arena, I didn't feel empowered, I felt exhausted and relieved it was finally over.

To make an analogy, Doom 2016 is like an Italian pasta dish: a small number of high-quality, carefully-chosen ingredients that work well together. Doom Eternal is like making a sandwich of rashers, sausages, fried eggs, strawberry ice cream, venison, raspberries, spaghetti, and chocolate cake. All those things are great on their own, but the sandwich is just too much, and the flavours and textures all clash with each other.

Lol, I feel you with Balatro. Played on and off for the past year and reached a 6/8 at most. It's fine for a quick short run every now and then but i do not get the obsession with it.

For me one is Ghost of Tsushima. Must've started it like five times before finally deciding I just don't dig katana fights.

Another is Baldur's Gate 3. I rally want to like it and it does look like a properly polished game, but man I hate the DnD dice roll mechanic with a passion.

Guilty Gear -STRIVE-

Played it and played it. There was just so much loading time. Loading to get to the main menu, loading between matches. I never even bothered going online. I beat it with all the characters. Then beat it again with a few without losing a round.

No joy. Sold it and got the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection instead.

No Mans Sky. I think my biggest turn off is the interface - its so unintuitive and slow, I just can't seem deal with it. I try it once every big update but that part of it doesn't seem to improve. I haven't tried it in a while.

I really wanted to like Last Epoch, played for probably 30 hours or so, just didn't feel like it was worth it to continue

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I don't find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That's just dumb design.

Most open world games I can't seem to get past a few hours. I've started RDR 2 about 4 times now, Watch Dogs/Assassins Creed games probably more than that and even stuff like Forza Horizon (I love FH1 though) is part of that too.

Skyrim.

I tried it for 25ish hours with around 30 mods, mostly QoL stuff with a few other tweaks thrown in. I don't like 1st person melee combat (and the 3rd person camera sucks), so I went magic. I had a magic overhaul mod, but the best spell I found was just double fireball. Every time I tried other spells, I would think "this kinda works, I guess, or I could just kill them with double fireball." Combat got pretty boring, since every engagement boiled down to double fireball until out of mana, then use bow and arrow until everything was dead.

Side note: I evidently was bitten by a vampire at some point and didn't realize I had turned into one myself until several hours later when I received the message that my vampire powers had been fully realized. I was confused as to why guards kept asking me if I was sick and commenting on how I looked so pale.

Sonic Mania. For a game where you're supposed to go fast, it's terribly frustrating when you slug through each level because you don't know them well enough to fly through them. I feel like this game is more about memorizing maps and less about having quick reactions.

Balatro should just be renamed to Flush, every single time I win it's because I use the "discard until you have a flush" strategy, and augment that with Jupiter, wild cards, steel cards, and jokers that give bonuses for flushes or single suits.

Witcher 3.

I've started it 4 times and I never make it past 6 hours in, it's just painfully slow and feels like a chore to my brain.

witcher 3. I just don't like the mechanics and the character.

Witcher 3

The combat isnt very good compared to… souls games.

Dyson Sphere Project. It's exactly the type of game I'd love, and I've tried to get into it 3 or 4 times, but it loses me after the first 4 hours or so.