Thanks for Nothing: The Worst Games I've Ever Been Told to Play
There are no refunds for your time
Happy Thanksgiving, folks. Whether you celebrate it or not, this is the season for gratitude, for acknowledging the good will and charity in ourselves and others, and cultivating the deep, rewarding connections we make with each other. In honor of that, in celebration of reaching 50 subscribers, and in anticipation of the many suggestions, recommendations, tip-offs, and demands such a vast readership will undoubtedly hurl at me in the coming year, I thought it’d be a good idea to give everyone a taste of the bile with which I often receive the most well-meaning endorsement.
I’m sure some of these will be your favorite game, or at least one you’d be shocked by someone having genuinely very mean things to say about. Make no mistake, it’s not just my hipster cred and general bad attitude that caused me to dismiss any of these… at least mostly. They are truly bad games, I’m mad that I played them, and I’m madder at the people who sold me on them. Let’s take a look at the games which people were sure I’d like, or at least tolerate, and so revealed how little they understood my impeccable taste.
In order of how badly they missed the mark, here are the worst games I’ve ever been personally recommended.
Night in the Woods
Night in the Woods, by my own criteria, probably shouldn’t even be in this list. It wasn’t really recommended to me per se – it was given to me as a gift, from someone who genuinely enjoyed it, and knew I would not, with the explicit expectation that I would find amusement in ‘tearing it apart.’ No, it’s earned its precarious position on the fringes of this list anyway purely out of how much I despise it. An embarrassing navel-gazing from the dullest dredges of humanity, the self-satisfied nihilism of the millennial drop-out class, and a colossal waste of time, both in development and in the lives of every player, all wrapped up in a sub-webcomic aesthetic.
I hate it. I hate everyone involved in it, I hate everyone who reviewed it, I hate everyone who played it, I hate every character in it, I hate myself for the hours I willingly bled into its mewling maw, and most of all, I hate being reminded it exists. And to again forget it exists, I choose to stop hating it, to move on, to things that I hate even more.
Little Witch Luana/Bruxinha Luana
Few games on this list will be as obviously crap as this, but if you really know me, you’ll understand why I let myself get pestered into playing it anyway. This Brazilian-developed platforming shooter looks, sounds, and plays like a slapped together student project, is far too long for its own good, and, being Brazilian, requires fighting-game style inputs to perform basic actions. [I have no idea why Brazilian devs love to do that, but I’ve seen it too often for it to not be a real trend] I could only beat the final boss because it eventually bugged out so bad it got stuck, and that reprieve is just about the only nice thing that happened in the entire time I played it.
It’s hilariously poorly localized, with foul-mouthed villains told off by even more foul-mouthed little girl protagonists, it’s very ugly, and there is not a single thing to genuinely recommend it for. Which, of course, is all why I was repeatedly told I had to check it out.
Little Witch Luana, by happier circumstance than NitW, is also spared a deeper placement on this list. That’s because the developer, Del Player, went on to make the Revenge on the Streets trilogy, a series of sidescrolling brawlers that start out about as rough as Luana, but become slightly more playable with each iteration, eventually becoming… not at all good games, but ones I played with an appreciative eye.
The passion for game development, and drive to improve, are evident, and while I’m still a little mad about having played Little Witch Luana, I would regret not knowing about Del Player. I’m genuinely looking forward to Jack and Kenne, which looks to be another sidescroller, in the vein of Comix Zone, and hopefully bringing enough to the table that I can one day unironically advocate for one of this developer’s games.
Red Dead Redemption 2
How can I loathe RDR2 so much, when so many of my favorite games are slow, boring, focused too much on emulating world systems and mired in misery and player-hostile mechanics? Well, this time it really is because I’m a hipster – if RDR2 was exactly the same game but with a simultaneous player count high of 30 people on Steam, I’d probably never shut up about it. Instead, every reviewer, every blogger, every streamer, every moron who had ever held a controller spent about a year pretending that open-world survival games had just been invented out of thin air by Rockstar Games, breathlessly relaying the exact same scripted events they’d seen happen ‘randomly,’ weeping in awe at the cinematic decision to play a shitty song over a too-long forced walking sequence… and, no, it’s different in Death Stranding, Kojima is a genius.
To this day, people still claim that RDR2 is a high water mark of some kind, though it’s hard to tell of what. Is it the game with the most unrelatable protagonist, the most unlikable allies, and the most forgettable antagonists? Is it the game with the greatest volume of assets nobody is going to examine in detail, like canned peas and bits of shit-smeared cloth? Is it the game with the highest quotient of literally nothing-to-gameplay? I suppose it’s all that and more, and more, and more, and then it just keeps fucking going.
RDR2 holds a special place in my black, shriveled heart – once I realized how much I hated it, I resolved that I would have to swallow my bile and finish it, if only so I could say, with informed and absolute confidence, just how bad I thought it was. But RDR2 defeated me. It was too bad, too boring, and too goddamn long. RDR2 is my white whale, and that fucker can just keep swimming for all I care.
World End Economica
I don’t play, or rather read, visual novels all that often. I’m a little too impatient, a little too temperamental, a little too, dare I say it, actually literate to stomach sitting through hours of what I generally assume to be a poorly written, repetitive, and juvenile narrative doled out in just about the most irritating way possible. But I know, deep down, I probably would enjoy a few of them, if I could give them a chance. And so my ‘short’ list of VNs that I want to get through grows each year, only rarely thinned out.
Among those titles, World End Economica was, for a long time, near the top. As a fan of author Isuna Hasekura’s Spice and Wolf, I saw the synopsis for WEE and immediately felt drawn in. A young man, running away from home, family, and responsibility, obsessed with becoming a successful day trader, on an off-world colony on the Moon – it’s that same mix of star-gazing fantasy and cruel, economic reality that I thought could recapture some of what made Spice and Wolf uniquely compelling. And so, a few years ago, when I decided I should give myself a month’s worth of dedicated VN time and get through as many as I could, I was persuaded to make WEE the first of many.
World End Economica sucks. I don’t mean that it’s merely disappointing compared to Spice and Wolf. I mean it sucks. It’s boring, it’s repetitive, it’s too long, it’s terribly, terribly localized, and worst of all, I found absolutely nothing to empathize with or even sympathize with in any of the characters introduced in the first several hours of reading. They are all, as a modern media analyst might say, ‘the worst people.’ Every night, when I would sit down and boot up WEE, I found myself feeling a little bit of angry dread, like when you realize a despised co-worker is about to walk into the office and start yapping. World End Economica killed my enthusiasm for VNs for another year, and I will never finish it no matter who tells me it ‘gets better.’
Stray
Never in my life have I been so insulted by the idea of a game as I am by Stray. But if Stray were merely a sappy, dumb, cloying, and cynical way to get every hack reviewer and gamer’s girlfriend to coo over the concept of a game where you play as a heckin kitty cat, I swear to you, I would just shake my head and do my own thing elsewhere.
Stray earns my ire, because it isn’t just a shit idea, boardroom borne to sweep losers off their feet, it isn’t just a bad game on its own rights, it is a game that actively degrades itself, takes every idea, good, terrible, or middling, and treats them all with the same disrespect, the same lazy, half-assed, ‘good enough for a Gamespot hands-on’ implementation. No part of the game merits even mild acclaim, no teacher would hand this assignment back without bleeding their red pen dry.
When I first wrote it up, I called Stray “a ridiculously overpriced, boring, trite, soulless open wound on the gaming industry.” Every time I am reminded of Stray’s existence, that exact phrasing leaps unbidden to my mind, and resonates powerfully in my bones. It’s an automatic response, like a lizard shooting blood from its eyes at a predator, and probably just as cathartic. I’m reading it now and nodding along with every word. Fuck Stray.
Scorn
Wait, no. Fuck Scorn even worse. This is another game that looks like the kind of shit I’d play, doesn’t it? The Beksinski grotesqueries, the dreary, entrail-stained hallways, the aborted fetus juicer, the statues of people giving each other blowjobs… Scorn is a thoroughly immature, poorly envisioned and even worse implemented, utterly miserable game. So why don’t I like it?
Scorn is rightly titled – it’s rare for a game to try so hard to be so unpleasant in every respect. The combat is sluggish, the exploration is agonizing, the UI is abysmal, the puzzles are laughable, and the game stops you, frequently, to smear a filthy hand on your face, sneering at you as you sit there unable to physically reach the developers to give them their well-deserved swirly.
The pretenses of horror and alien architecture are tissue-thin, and the game is, once turned over briefly in your hands, nothing but a shitty corridor shooter with too many animations and too little substance.
The spittle-lickers who defend this game insist it’s improper to judge it with any criteria you would an FPS – after all, Scorn is no mere First Person Shooter, no crass corporate product, no, no, it’s a work of art. Bullshit. Scorn is an FPS, and it’s a fucking terrible FPS. Go blow a statue of yourself.
Pentiment
Yeah, that’s right. It’s been fun and games up to this point but now it’s time to get serious - time to say goodbye to 50 subs. I had to wait this long to put this game on blast so after all you… Pentiment apologists throw your little tantrum I can pretend I still have readers among the bot accounts left over.
And you know what? It’s not even because Pentiment is really that bad. It’s whatever. It’s fine. I wouldn’t play it or ever think about it again, but you do you. No, Pentiment gets under my skin because, like a terrible cousin or in-law, I have to watch it get treated much, much better than it deserves, by people I love, and love a little less for how much they demean themselves in praising it.
Where Stray appeals to people who want to pretend to be gamers but find gaming exhausting, and RDR2 appeals to people who want to pretend to enjoy depth but only have the mental capacity for shooting galleries, Pentiment appeals to people who want to pretend to be sophisticates but find nuance a bore. Pentiment has the most shallow story, the most hollow characters, the least meaningful choices of any game with pretenses toward literary erudition.
It’s not a brilliant retelling or response to or adaptation of Umberto Eco’s excellent novel The Name of the Rose – it’s an eighth grader’s book report on The Name of the Rose, a list of distinct elements the director remembers, and a thesis arbitrarily chosen in panic ten minutes before the turn-in deadline. And then, on top of that, it’s a bad adventure game, wasting your time at every turn until the final twists reveal that every single choice, conversation, and clue up to that point was a waste of time. It railroads you into a single ending, totally discarding any facade of depth or complexity, and the story itself wasn’t that interesting to begin with.
In a lot of ways, it’s much like 2019’s Disco Elysium. And you could issue almost every criticism I have of Pentiment about that game too – it’s uglier than people say, it’s less well-written than people pretend, it’s railroady and shallow and rides too much on the feeling of self-satisfied snobbery in identifying irony.
But Disco Elysium at least has teeth. However you feel about its references to racism, fascism, neoliberalism, communism, drug addiction, fashion, feminism, and all the other ills of modern, or post-modern, or post-post-modern life, at least it’s saying something about them. Sure, it’s not doing shit about any of it, but who does?
Pentiment says nothing, or worse, it says little, and it says it in a quivering whimper. If you have any interest in any of its supposed topics, there are real games with real stories and real balls that give you real choices that you could play instead. If you just want to read a sort of game, with complex characters, agonizing compromises, a sense of place and time and the melancholy of it slowly slipping away, there are also games like that, and with much better writing. In the same way you might exhort someone to please read a single book besides Harry Potter, I fucking beg of you all – talk about a single narrative or Middle Ages setting game that isn’t Pentiment.
INFRA
INFRA is a game that is impossible to really describe without making it sound much more interesting than it is. You play as a structural engineer going out to survey and inspect infrastructure around a fictional Finnish city, armed with flashlight and digital camera to catalog every leaky pipe, every exposed piece of rebar, every crumbling concrete culvert you come across. Along the way, you can optionally do your best to restore abandoned water treatment plants and the like to functionality, uncover a decades-old mystery, and unravel a conspiracy.
Except none of that shit is at all worth doing, and the game is insanely miserable to play, for many reasons, chief among them the choice to build it on the Source engine. There’s something unnatural and evil about Source engine – it is as though you are playing INFRA on the failing, compromised infrastructure featured in the game. But the developers didn’t do themselves any favors beyond that. The maps are infuriating to navigate, the interactive elements all but invisible, the puzzles exhausting or incomprehensible. And worst of all, the game is, occasionally, really, really funny.
Your character is constantly blurting out really cheerful comments, failing to comment on dead bodies, pointing out a ceiling collapsing on his own head with ‘someone should look at that!’ and snarking at the destructive results of his own meddling. It’s something that could be very entertaining, in much smaller doses, with much better pacing, with a coherent and navigable world, or anything of any interest as a reward for exploration or effort.
Instead, you get a middle finger. INFRA is not interested in what you think of it – it’s wholly devoted to stroking off structural engineers everywhere. I am almost in awe of how precisely crafted INFRA seems to be to specifically piss me off. Me, personally. It’s as though INFRA was created by a bitter guardian angel, inflicted on me as a kind of personalized test, to force me to confront some inner failing, some venom I’d held too long and which was endangering my eternal soul. Have I failed that test, or is INFRA just a piece of shit? I urge anyone desperate to prove me wrong, about any game on this list, to dedicate 20 hours of their life to photographing rust stains.
Honorary Mention - The Forgotten City
I mention The Forgotten City here because nobody I know told me I should play it – and yet I still feel a tinge of rage, because I feel somehow that someone should have warned me against it. In this case, the fault is ultimately mine – I saw comparisons to Outer Wilds and thought there had to be something to them besides a child’s comprehension of similarities.
No, The Forgotten City has nothing in common with Outer Wilds aside from the very superficial inclusion of a closed time loop. It is an embarrassing, amateurish, and poorly made Skyrim mod that was then remade to make everyone uglier somehow. It’s a high-school-quality stage play with awful pacing, worse combat, and a complete lack of tact, intelligence, or depth.
The plot is drivel, the dialogue dull, the gameplay meaningless, the ending unbelievably insulting. The whole experience is humiliating on some level. If you would stain the name of Outer Wilds by uttering it in the same breath as The Forgotten City I spit on you.
So that’s my list, not of the worst games I’ve ever played, or the best games I have an irrational dislike for, but the games that I still nurse a grudge for having been put through. Today, across the table, over green beans and mashed potatoes, I may catch someone’s eye, and remember that they still think ‘Red Dead Redemption 2 is pretty good, you gotta admit the world is impressive’ and wonder if I’ll even come next year.
If anyone felt a little hurt or personally offended by anything in this post – that was, in fact, the intention, to make you feel bad for liking one of these games in my presence. Enjoy the holidays, and remember: Night in the what? Night in the who? Never heard of it.
This guy definitely has a 5 star review of one of those Korean dating simulators where u try to score with a 13 year old with comically large tits
Disco Elysium is the greatest work of existentialist literature produced this century and I will die on this hill.