Here's a place to post and talk about any games you started but aren't going to finish, for any of a multitude of reasons.

Brothers in Arms : Hell's Highway

Huge fan of the first two games, Road to Hill 30 and earned in Blood, but for some reason this immediately put me off. I don't know if it's the overly long cutscenes in the beginning, the cumbersome cover system that doesn't allow me to use ironsights, the regenerating health or that it almost feels CoD-esque in terms of the sheer amount of enemies that's continuously thrown at you.

I quit Hells Highways a year ago for the exact same reasons
Felt like a rail shooter with CoD mechanics.

Slime Rancher

I had an epiphany I described in my review for the game; that it's working actively against it's own end goal.

The Outer Worlds

I'm actually cheating here because I started playing it in late 2020 and forgot about it over the holidays, but now that we're well into 2021 it clearly ain't coming back. While not a terrible game overall, it doesn't really know what it wants to be thematically and the gameplay and plot both started to get rather boring after slogging through the first couple of planets. In short, it's a B-list RPG at a time when there's no shortage of A-list RPGs to choose from and I have other priorities.

Two games that are generally well-rated:

1. While I was really enthused for Cat Quest II after loving the first, I ended up taking the Steam refund option after about 45 min.

As someone who only planned to play solo, I found the balancing and particularly the "AI" companion to be pretty lousy. Would I feel different if I hadn't played the first? Possibly - the gameplay and humor is a bit simple but charming. But, even just as a matter of time and not the $10 I'd paid, I spent pretty much the whole time thinking I should just go re-play the first one.

Now, if I had friends and planned to co-op with them, then sure, I'd be pretty excited about the possibilities.

Solo, can you cheese the fact that the AI partner is unkillable to compensate for how much harder enemies hit the character you're controlling?

Yes, yes you can. And as a result I never died even when I made a mistake on a boss. It's just not fun imo though - it feels like a large part of each fight is just the game playing itself. I'd suggest if you only plan to play solo to just play the first one.

2. More of a "finally uninstalled" but I've officially given up on finishing Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown. I probably played 6-10 hours back in 2020, but similar to the above, it's not a <bad> game, it's just a game that pales a bit in comparison to the games it's modeled after.

For an old-school RPG it does have some modern QOL features, but unless I missed it somewhere, the quests and the maps are really missing a cohesive organization. Even when I had stepped away for just a few days (or in a few cases even a few hours) I couldn't remember at all what place quest text refers to.

Maybe that's partly middle age, but also that none of these locations are actually memorable, and the difference between Castle This and Castle That is really only that one place is the place you should be going next. But in terms of style, content, the places ...lack life, and that's true for what I saw of the world map as a whole. Yes, there's a desert and a swamp, but unlike say, classic M&M games, it doesn't feel like a world with memorable places to me.

I spent a loooot of those hours running to the wrong location.

Don't get me wrong - playing through some of the dungeons was pretty fun finding switches, solving some simple puzzles, and growing stronger to kill mobs/bosses that were hard on first pass. But as soon as the dungeon was done and I had to figure out where I was going out in the world based on some bland quest test...it felt like a chore rather than discovery.

While I finished all the M&M games back when, I struggle to finish them now because of the time commitment. But similar to Cat Quest II making me wonder why I wasn't just re-installing the original, this game made me constantly wonder why I wasn't just re-installing those older, better games, or even committing to finally finishing "The Quest" which I never finished but enjoyed quite a bit more.

Anyway, ymmv of course.

1 the Dark Eye

When I say the Dark Eye, I don't mean anything related to the German RPG, but a strange multimedia narrative from 1995, voiced by William Burroughs and featuring some interesting art, expecially in the characters design. The pre rendered 3D locations are of a lower quality and artistic result. It's hard to figure out what's in the mind of its authours. There is an original frame story inspired to the life of E. A. Poe, and from there some E. A. Poe tales are accessible, seen from 2 different points of view. "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Tell-Tale Heart", and "Berenice".
Despite some frustrating moment, expecially caused by the classic Myst-like movement, it's a curious and charming ante-litteram walking sim. The reason why I had to give up, is that my first game was cursed with an event not triggereng, so I could not proceed, and that happened towareds the end. There are no savegames, so I started over and this time I was stuck more towards the beginning. I won't risk another time, if all my attempts can be cursed. I suspect that the problem is caused by some audio files not playing properly - this keeps happening in-game. So maybe when an audio file also triggers the next event in the story, the game is stuck if it is not played. A pity. This unique experience has little of a classic puzzle adventure game, no inventory, no dialogue choises. just moving around and a minimal item interaction. I would suggest it for the character art and Poe stories, only if you feel lucky with running Quick-Time Movies in a Windows 3.1 software on top of MS-DOS emulation. Hopefully one day GOG can make a version that can run flawlessy - but it's probably too niche for real. Maybe I have been really unlucky and you will be able to finish it with some patience.

Inquisitor- I loved the asthetics, the world building and the investigating. The combat ruins it though, its just too easy to die very suddenly.

Hi,

it's not possible to put the fights in turn-by-turn mode in this game?

No. At least, I dont know of a way.
If I was younger with more time I would play it anyhow. But I dont have the patience to waste valuable gaming time on those kind of fusterations anymore. Its too bad, there was a lot to like about the game.

Why do you need iron sights in cover for? It's not a run and gun. Much better level design in that game than Earned In Blood too. Can't get into that one. Didn't flow like the other two. Funnily enough, it's the game I quit this year! lol

Persona 4 Golden

I'm not a big fan of JRPGs in general, but this one looked quite intriguing and I thought maybe it could help me overcome my bias. And indeed, I thought the characters likeable, the story gripping despite the slower pace, the graphics and animations pretty nice, and I appreciated that you could play it with original Japanese voiceovers and English subtitles. What was a bit weird is that it seemed more like a high quality visual novel than an RPG at first, but I got used to it because it was fun regardless (although I'm usually not a big fan of visual novels either). This went on for the first 4 hours or so with just the occasional combat or new feature threwn in, until I realized that I was playing the longest exposition/tutorial that I've ever experienced in a game. It just takes baby steps to introduce you to everything, before it opens up in the fifth hour and shows its actual gameplay, which is part social activity simulator, meaning you have to choose how to spent your days, where and with who, in order to improve some stats (since I haven't much experience with this genre, I felt reminded of similar parts in My Time at Portia, Hero-U, and to a lesser extent Princess Maker 2), and part dungeon crawl with combat. And ironically, after spending that much time with the visual novel style intro, now that the game finally let me do something on my own, I realized that I didn't really like the gameplay and would have preferred to continue as before.

The dungeons are pretty bare-bone corridors. Monster encounters trigger a separate combat mode, very classic and oldschool JRPG design, and they also use the usual static menu-based system that I dislike because it gets boring and repetitive pretty soon. At first I was surprised that this game automatically controls your companions in combat by default, giving you even less tactical options, but when I changed the setting so that I would be in control of the whole party, the combat became even more of a chore and I quickly switched back to AI, because you waste so much time on the same, slightly varied trash mob encounters, always with the same limited tactics, pressing the same buttons, and it feels so tedious to me. I had to admit to myself that I really just wanted to enjoy the story, which features quite a few interesting, mature and touching ideas and is not at all your run-of-the-mill good-vs-evil fantasy plot, so I get why it's tagged as "Story rich", but you have to waste so much time on things that don't really add to the story. And yes, the game has something like a story mode, too, the easiest difficulty lets you go through the battles without much resistance, but you still have to do them, can't skip them, and not surprisingly they feel even more pointless that way. And the boss battles still take quite a while to beat, even on the lowest difficulty (I don't mind that as much, at least they were a bit different from the trash mobs and more challenging; just saying, to illustrate how much time is taken up by combat). So when I looked at the estimated game length, which is over 70+ hours, and I could see the pattern behind it all, I didn't really feel like continuing to play the game for that long.

I didn't test much of the social simulator side, but it seems mostly aimed at giving you better fighting stats, and the game seems centered around the idea of improving your persona fighting abilities, while, as I said, the combat was my least favorite part of the game, so I didn't expect much from that either. In the end, I finished the first dungeon which gave me a partial conclusion to the story, and then uninstalled the game. I got about 8-9 hours worth of mostly nice entertainment out of it, and I now have a certain idea what the game is about and how it plays, so I don't regret buying it (on sale), but my initial hope that this could be the first JRPG (after Chrono Trigger and the Western variants like South Park and Costume Quest) that I would like and completely play through, was not fulfilled. I suppose it's a very good game for those who like the classic menu-based JRPG combat and possibly don't even mind a bit of grinding, but it's just not for me.

That’s easy, Cyberpunked 2020. It’s obviously one of the worst products released in modern times, from innumerable bugs, terrible game systems (open world simulation hahaha, AI hahaha), and being one of the only products actually removed from PS Store, but also review buying and lies from developer and even treatment of customers through GOG.. Even EA were impressed! Truly something to behold.

That being said however, it has been a blessing in disguise. Since then I have not brought anything from GOG (true was only part of that decision), and also it has made me go back and reassess games that I had previously discounted as being average or bad and replay with this lowered bar. One for instance, doom eternal, I only played about 2/3 of before and quit, citing a weird story that didn’t follow any other doom game, lack of ammo for a shooter, and Mario gameplay. Now obviously it still has all that, however it is solid, no bugs, everything works as it should (even if I don’t agree with the design decisions), and I completed it with most secrets. So I raise my review from middling 5-6 to 7-8 out of 10.

Going to start calling this the CP effect, whereby games seem better compared to something far worse.

(Do note, I actually have two lists now, games I keep even if rated low as I might go back and reassess as in eternal, and games which get permanent deleted never to trouble my bandwidth or disk space again.)