half-baked ruminations on games I didn't finish this year
I keep a running tracker of media that I experience each year. I've titled the spreadsheet “The Big To-Do” in what was probably intended as a weird Raymond Chandler reference, but I think that framing can cause the list to harm me more than help me. It's nice to look at and remember that earlier this year I saw Detective Pikachu (on a plane! it was fine!) and did a replay of Final Fantasy VII using a bunch of mods (a much better experience overall than Remake). But then I pick through the list, a spreadsheet to which I have added a very self-indulgent level of auto-formatting, and I see in my “Status” column some items marked “In Progress” that I had really not meant to keep marked that way, and those items haunt and pick at my brain as evidence of little failures.
Which they're not, of course! It is good and OK to drop games if you aren't digging them, if they're not doing “it” for you, for basically any reason and at any time. My personal problem is that I suffer from ADHD and executive function disorder, and it can be hard for me to discern the difference between dropping something on purpose and dropping it by accident, especially when I'm otherwise in an annoying ennui-filled mood of unspecified regret. “I'm wasting my time,” I think, “and here I could be playing more Death Stranding instead!”
So, in the interest of closing the book on some of these half-written chapters, here is a list of the games I've abandoned this year, including some I abandoned so quickly that they didn't even get a line in The Big To-Do, and some thoughts on why and how I dropped them. If my will to play and experience can sometimes feel entirely out of my own control, at least I can pretend that in retrospect I had control the entire time, right?
THRONEFALL
I filed this game under “I've Seen Enough” because, well, that's how I felt after completing a few levels. It's not that I didn't like it – more like the gameplay loop wasn't doing enough to keep me invested.
LORDS OF THE FALLEN
I also filed this game under “I've Seen Enough” but wonder if maybe I should append a “(derogatory)” to that. This is as down-the-middle as Soulslikes go. Far superior to its old namesake, in that it isn't a floaty rolling mess of generic-AAA aesthetics, but nonetheless a little too sloppy and a little too much of a trudge for me to stick with it.
I fought through to one of the most supremely annoying bosses I've ever experienced in a Souls title, killed him and his stupid horse mostly through dumb luck and ram-head-into-wall stubbornness, and then dropped the game to pick up the Elden Ring DLC instead. This is what is known in the business as a Good Decision.
DEATH STRANDING
Narratively this game is best taken as absurdist comedy and I very much enjoyed it on that level when I wasn't getting bored to death by Guillermo del Toro giving me another tutorial on a gameplay mechanic cum worldbuilding feature about which I already knew. I love that this game exists, and I love its dedication to the stupid kind of game that it is, a dedication that vaults the stupidity back around to brilliance as often as not.
But the type of game that this is, I think, is not my kind of game. Its dedication to realism is of course deliberately arbitrary and hyper-specific in the ways that a sicko like Kojima cares about (as opposed to actual realism, which is not a thing that games can or should do) but it frequently creates tedious and annoying situations that I can enjoy once but not the second time. Eventually after a few missions, I felt like I'd experienced all the first-times that I could get to without being overburdened by the god-this-agains. It's tragic because it means that my personal Sam Porter Bridges will never again take a shit and have someone else bottle it up to use as a grenade–at least not until I forget enough about the game to give it another stupid and wild spin.
ARMORED CORE 6
This is a particularly weird and sad one for me. I've become such a huge From Software nerd that I was frothing for this game at launch, even having never played another Armored Core. The aesthetics are so rad, the flexibility and scope so ambitious, the execution so polished and inviting.
I think that my problem with AC6 is that, unlike a Souls game, I cannot at all decipher the on-screen action. Maybe this is age, or some progression of my executive function issues; anyway the game reads like a garbled mess to me half the time, and if I can focus myself enough to see what's going on I still miss half of what I'm critically meant to notice (target lock warnings, enemies in the periphery, etc). I end up playing it a lot like how I play fighting games: press all buttons, hope enemy explodes. But while that works if I'm doing a Mortal Kombat 11 playthrough on Easy mode, it's less applicable to a From title, especially this one, which expects you to do at least some of your homework both in mech prep and on-field tactics.
I pushed through a few bosses and felt pretty decent but most of the advanced mechanics washed in and out of my brain with the tides and a couple days' break from the game has now lasted months. It's distressingly hard to imagine coming back to it any time soon.
CHANTS OF SENAAR
I mean, this one's straightforward: I hit a weird road block, walked around the explorable map a few times trying to progress the story, and couldn't, so I stopped playing. I'm sure there is something relatively simple I should be doing to get forward, but the gameplay loop requires a pretty steady investment (you're meant to be invested not just in translation but in the learning and meaning that translation provides) and that dropped out really fast for me. I might have to give this another go one day all the way from the top.
THIRSTY SUITORS
I got far enough in this one to know that for whatever reason it does not appeal to me at all, as much as it feels like it is a game that can and should definitely vibe with someone. Perfectly OK reason to say no thanks to a Game Pass flyer.
FINAL FANTASY VI (PIXEL REMASTER)
Breaks my heart to have this on the pile. I've never fully finished a 2D Final Fantasy, despite considering the franchise a precious source of nostalgia and fondness; I managed to get nearly a dozen hours into this playthrough before something un-clicked and I dropped off entirely.
ALIEN: ISOLATION
Hey did you hear about how this xenomorph fella is insanely scary and mean? I was well aware of this going into A:I and the game's infamous difficulty and delight in stressing you out; I hadn't realized that I am so bad at first-person spatial awareness in video games that I could barely function even in the parts of the game that precede the titular many-toothed nasty. When it did finally show up, some part of me made a decision that I was not going to enjoy what followed, and so I abruptly stopped playing.
Many accolades to this game's absolutely stunning art direction; it's of course a rip off homage carbon copy etc of the 1979 classic film but it does the job so thoroughly and so seamlessly that I really like looking at the game, perhaps from a great distance, such as when a YouTube essay tells me about it.
OUTER WILDS
If another person tells me this is their favorite game of all time and how have I not played it yet, well, it won't have been that many people but enough to make me frustrated all over again.
I'm noticing a trend here where first-person games in particular struggle to keep me locked in these days. That's not universally true either within this list or more broadly, but I do think there's something about that presentation that doesn't work very well for me. Perhaps in some ways it feels to me like an overextension of the “silent protagonist” of classic RPGs – an abdication of the responsibility to characterize the protagonist that makes me feel unconnected from whatever their motivations might be.
I don't think the motivation is meant to be super concrete in Outer Wilds anyway. It's an exploration-loop game. My brain is only intermittently in a space to accommodate that sort of thing.
PRINCE OF PERSIA (2008)
In part this is probably the PC port's fault. The controls felt absolutely awful and floaty and untethered to my controller, like I was playing a nonstop QTE Simulator even when it wasn't actively engaging in irritating of-its-time QTE mechanics.
But also the game also looked shittier than I'd expected it to by reputation and felt shockingly generic. Contra the premise of this post, I do not regret setting this down.
DISCO ELYSIUM
I've tried to play this fucker several times and dropped off before the first hour was up and I hate that about myself. File this under “I'm not done yet” because I remain stubbornly convinced that one day this one will absolutely click and become one of my all-timers, to the degree that I'm not even going to entertain the eulogizing conceit I have going on here.
Not yet, at least.