¡Recently, Abandoned; Games!

Achievements or trophies are only bad if you let them effect your game (MP ones are awful as you get arsehats doing stuff just to get them)

Achievements with MS rewards is pretty good as you every time they do 10k rewards, thats £10 store credit (plus the quests etc)

Journey to a Savage Planet.

Gave up at the point where I realised I was playing a platformer rather than the exploration / FPS that I thought it was. I don't enjoy platforming at all, so have a very low tolerance for it. Up until then it was okay, but a bit annoying with repopping mobs and gated exploration. Humour was hit and miss.

Talking of humour...

Destroy all humans
I'm no longer in school, so poo and sex jokes don't do much for me and I felt embarrassed playing the game in case my kids heard. The game itself was... Boring. Dodge shots. Throw humans. Suck their heads off. Fly about in a saucer doing the same but with less accuracy / control.

Not for me. At least with Stadia is not costing me to realise I don't like them. Nor do I feel obligated to have to play them.

Observation (PS5)

Bought this on sale on bit of a whim. Really liked the concept and found the story and setting intriguing, but had to delete it after just a couple of hours (during which my wife actually came into the room to check I was ok as she could hear me swearing so much). Two aspects really pissed me off - first, this game has the worst puzzles I've ever come across in a video game. One example was a 10 x 10 grid on which you have to draw a specific route, and the game just literally gives the solution to you but doesn't let you look at the solution and the grid simultaneously. So you have to look at the solution, memorise it, and then input it on the grid from memory. Totally brainless. Another puzzle involved Simon-like inputting of strings of symbols. Nothing clever or interesting or satisfying to work out, just pure mindless busywork. My second issue was that the excruciatingly bad map and confusing, disorienting environment made the game just a nightmare to play in my opinion. If ever a game needed clear objective markers it was this one. Scanning a camera with a really narrow FOV slowly across each room looking for whatever it is the game needs me to click on next is not my idea of fun. My impression overall is that this game could probably be a brilliant two-hour narrative experience but is padded out to ten hours or so by lazy, frustrating mechanics that are designed primarily just to slow you down and constantly put roadblocks in your way, and by vague objectives that leave you wandering aimlessly in search of what to do next.

There are some people here who enjoyed it, including me. In contrast to nanocrystal, I liked the setup of navigating through the space station using drones and jumping into the main computer for other stuff.

I had a go at Evil Within 2, did the first boring tutorial area, started wandering through the village which looked cool but I'm just not in the mood for this kind of weirdness, something not clicking - binned.
Dishonored 2, I have a save from Chapter 3, went back to it, died lots, not quite sure why it's not clicking, maybe some games really suffer from a break...
Control - Started a save as well, died a lot, I love Remedy stuff but just not clicking, may go back to later.

You did the right thing with TEW2 as its fucking shit.

Less so the other two though. Although I'm not sure I would have the patience for Dishonored 2 any more.

Control is immense though. I say this alot, but it is.

Just level up the one that gets you throwing shit first, then upgrade the hell out of it. It's too much fun.

Tried this one too, gave it a few hours more but it doesn't really do anything to set itself apart from similar games in the time I gave it. The mechanics are solid, it's well voice acted, everything just works, but there's nothing that is going to make me remember this game in three months. 

It feels like they created the gunk fluid mechanics first and then built a game around that, which would explain a lot.

Okay Death's Gambit, I've cut you a lot of slack. Your leveling system makes it pointless to do anything but dump all my points in Strength. Your weapon movesets are shit and spamming strong attack is the only effective way of fighting. But you've got some charm and wit, and I like running down enemies on my horse.

HOWEVER.

You seem to think you can pull a Dark Souls and get away with including obtuse, easy-to-fuck-up NPC questlines that encourage multiple playthroughs. You can afford to do this if players have some good will towards your game that you can afford to burn, but you do not have that. I could forgive this if you didn't have an NPC in your not-Firelink who kills the other merchants you rescue and return there if you let him live too long. Fuck you for doing that. I'm done with your game.

Oh no, I was eying up that one- is this the afterlife version or is any of that changed in that rerelease?

I was under the impression Death's Gambit was a bit rubbish anyway (haven't bothered with it) but a stamina bar has no place in a 2D game. Mobility is one of the things I love about them, to neuter that with a stamina bar is a big no for me

Blasphemous is solid

I’ve heard -someone- raving about deaths gambit but can’t recall where.

Roguelikes are absolutely my genre, but there are a bunch of notable exceptions I've never gotten along with, including BoI and Spelunky. Noita I really wanted to like, but I was so confused by it. There's so much world just outside the confines of the starting area, you can traverse a ridiculous amount of terrain if you get past the tree and just keep going left, but the wands required for that are so rare that I can only get them in like one in three runs. Why have all this world if you're not going to give me a way to consistently explore it?

I have to get a suitable set of wands in the first area to be able to tunnel through solid materials. That allows me to access different biomes, but they're filled with incredibly powerful enemies and I'm not specced out well enough to fight them. But it's an enormous chore to climb back to the surface after having gone down for more powerful wands, and then what? I don't know what I stand to gain by backtracking through the entire game and explore different biomes if I'm just going to die there and be sent back to square one.

I would love it if it was possible to play Noita in a more exploratory fashion and I tried to nudge it in that direction with some mods, but it's too easy to completely screw up the balance and make it completely uninteresting to play, so I decided I wasn't interested in doing the developers' job of balancing the game. If anyone has suggestions for how to make more progress in the vanilla game though, I'm open to hearing them.