Most bad games aren’t really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize “wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into”.

I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.

The game has 3 main phases. The main “gameplay” is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.

The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But… No, he doesn’t. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.

These might be hot takes, but they’re honest, I just have real specific tastes:

The first big one that stands out to me is Tales of Berseria. This game looked incredible to me, but holy shit do I hate the combat with every fiber of my being. I love action games with strong action combat like a Devil May Cry or a Bayonetta, and I love RPGs like Final Fantasy, Persona, and countless others (it’s ones of my favorite genres), but I basically hate almost any and all hybrid action-RPG systems. I just genuinely cannot understand the appeal, and I couldn’t even make it more than a couple hours into Tales of Berseria before giving it up because I hated every single combat interaction I was in.

My other thought was Civ: Beyond Earth. I’ve heard I might have liked the game more if I had come at from a Civ 5 or prior background, but I game into after spending 500+ hours in Civ 6 and by comparison C:BE felt frustrating and meandering and pointless. I enjoyed exactly zero of my minutes spent on the game.

Real life.

E.T. for the 2600. It was so bad it quickly went on sale. As a result it became a birthday present. I tried to figure it out but it was simply terrible. It quickly went to bottom of the pile.

Shadow Madness was an amazingly bad PS1 RPG. The details have faded with time, but I remember it was an incoherent hodgepodge of every RPG trope, every party member was a bad cliche, the random encounter system was this terrible “red light, green light” thing. It was insultingly easy, and Harv-5 was like someone’s shitty Shadow the Hedgehog OC of Bender from Futurama.

I have had a grudge against this terrible game for 25 years.

Kane and Lynch 2 was pretty awful.

RoboCop for the NES. Just terrible.

I can’t pick between “Bioshock Infinite” and “Borderlands”. I did push through Bioshock though, because the worldbuilding was cool, as with previous entries. But Borderlands was so utterly boring I must have played 2hrs tops

Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.

Monopoly. Tragically boring.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the NES. Unreasonably difficult first level, vague hit detection boxes, enemies can stunlock you into a cheap death, pathetic reach of your weapons. Still beat it because I was a kid in the 90s and there was shit else to do.

Maybe a hot take but I stand by it.

Red Faction: Armageddon. It was just so very boring and inferior to its 3-year-old predecessor. THQ actually tried to claim that no one was interested in the franchise anymore because of the lacklustre sales of that game. But the franchise is excellent, Armageddon was just a bad game.

Mario Party.

I. Fucking. HATE. Mario Party.

7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.

Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was ‘defective’. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn’t work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.

I can’t really remember what I didn’t like about the game…probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.

I bought Sonic 2006 when it came out. It was my first experience with a truly terrible, broken game. I’d played things that weren’t up my alley or were subpar somehow, but that was the first time I was truly blown away by how bad a game could be.