Basically, what sort of terms that are used to describe games or elements of games can dissuade you from buying or trying a game just by reading them and why? I'll do a few for example.

Immersive/Narrative Driven

Usually means that gameplay is not the focus, and that's what I play games for.

Horror

Sort of the same as the above. There is no way for a game mechanic to be "horrifying", so if your emphasis is on such elements then I assume gameplay concerns are secondary.

Minigames

Signals unfocused game design to me. I want one, whole, complete game, not a bundle of discrete, trifling ones.

Management/Sim

Definitely less critical and more personal than the other three, but I've personally always found these games to be tedious and stressful: more like work than a game.

They don't make me refuse to buy the game, but I find words and phrases like:

Immersive, innovative combat, real consequences, robust, rich lore, deep interactions, etc.

to be basically meaningless. Pretty much every game in the genres I'm interested in throw these terms about and they don't really mean anything in the long run. I tend to ignore those descriptions and look closer at other aspects of the game.

Sometimes that's true (such as games where the whole game loop is "run and hide from monsters") but it also applies as a setting that doesn't really detract from the gameplay. Think Resident Evil. Definitely tagged with horror, but you wouldn't say they've sacrificed gameplay for it.

Tags that tend to put me off simply describe genre's that I don't tend to play. Driving, for example. I'm not a big car junkie so racing and driving sims don't really do it for me.

But you can't really judge a game by a cloud of tags or phrases. A good review or lets play (or whatever your preferred pre-purchase review is) will tell you a lot more than tags in a game.

Half the time the marketing department writes the descriptions and marketing like to use buzzwords. It helps consumers zero in on things without having to think. Always take all marketing blurbs with a dose of scepticism.

Procedurally generated
Often makes levels less interesting, props and assets will arbitrarily appear here or there, not because someone explicitly put them somewhere to best effect. Exploring loses quite a bit of its meaning, if it's all just random design and not 'hand-crafted'.

Permadeath
Translates to "waste of my time" in my language. I don't like losing all of my progress, and I also don't care for Replayability, so having to start from scratch again and again quickly becomes boring to me.

Rogue-like
Because these games often combine both/all three of the above. And because it feels like there are so many of these already, like every second indie game wants to a be Rogue-like or Rogue-lite or so.

Tower Defense
Another genre that seems to have been done to death by now. Or maybe just not my thing.

Souls-like
I don't get along with the concepts of Dark Souls, so this is not a positive thing to me. In addition to that, it's also overused and often not even true, because devs and players don't really understand what makes Dark Souls special. They often just seem to mean "frustratingly difficult".

Quick Time Events
Although you rarely find that as a tag, but too much focus on "Simon Says" minigames can ruin the fun for me.

Visual Novel
It's not a complete turn-off for me, there are some nice VNs, but I'm seldom in the mood for something where the whole 'gameplay' consists of reading. I think I'd rather read an actual novel or comic book instead or watch a series or movie.

Hidden Object
Similar to above, there are some decent ones, but in general I don't like the kitschy graphic style of most, and I don't care for the Hidden Object screens that make you search for random objects just because, with hardly any relation to the rest of the game.

Strategy
Just not really my genre, usually a huge time investment with little reward for a player like me who likes exploration, story-telling, atmosphere, action over abstract themes, calculations, challenge.

Quite a few, and unfortunately they describe most games on the market right now:

Retro-Inspired
I hate that we are stuck in the past. Most games described with this keyword are worse (not bad, just worse) imitations of an already existing video game from the 90s. I mostly play old games, ironically... But I don't play new old games that are intentionally made old. What I love about old games is that they were trying to be new at the time!

Pixel-Graphics
This goes hand in hand with the previous keyword, but isn't as much of a turn-off. There are great pixel-graphics games that have a lot of effort poured into them, but... Again, I don't like looking at old technology to make "new-looking" things out of.

Rogue-Like
Have given this genre a lot of chances and I just can't enjoy it. I love games that make me feel like I am on an adventure, and Rogue-Like games don't do that at all. I do enjoy Arcade and old console games where losing all my lives means starting over from scratch, but rogue-likes add randomization to the mix meaning that you can't easily get better at the game. Genre name is also stupid.

Battle-Royale
I am not against multiplayer shooters. They used to be one of my favorite genres! Unfortunately, Battle-Royale adds randomization and a lot of "time waste" mechanics such as having to run around to find guns and such. Basically, in terms of multiplayer shooters, I like the exact opposite of a Battle Royale: Team Deathmatch Arena Shooters.

Narrative-driven
I like narrative in games. I enjoy games like Planescape:Torment for example! But whenever "Narrative-driven" is mentioned in a modern game, it means that a lot of time will be spent on listening to drama scenes that I often find very predictable (just expect a sad thing to happen and you're right 90% of the time). A good example of this for me is A Plague Tale: Innocence. It's not an objectively bad game or anything, but it is absolutely the opposite of what I want. I do want to go on an adventure, but I want it to be gameplay-driven like Beyond Good and Evil, for example.

Co-Op
If a game is designed around Co-Op, it is not for me. Playing with other people means that you won't be able to take in the environments, music and story (unless it's an MMORPG which you can play by yourself most of the time). As such, the game will be designed to be as dry as possible, like the two recent Ghost Recon games.

Survival
I have not given this genre much of a chance, to be honest, but that's because it looks unappealing to me. It means having to grind up resources and looking up info on wikis most of the time. I also hate games with time limits (especially invisible ones) and survival games seem to devolve into games about time management.

any descriptor that reads "with friends."

mostly because i don't have any actual friends that game like i do.

Inspired by beloved classics [insert titles of beloved classic games]

This is by no means a guarantee that the game will be remotely close in quality to the classics it claims to succeed. I find it a way of disingenuous advertisement. Games should be sold on their own merits and not try to appropriate decades-long nostalgia.

Stealth:
* After playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which has two mandatory insta-fail stealth sections that are enough to ruin the game for me (and make me not want to re-play it), I am likely not going to ever try a game that advertises this.

Permadeath:
* I like to experiment when playing games, and I don't like to be punished if an experiment goes badly. (Experimenting is something I've found fun; I've probably spent more time experimenting in Baldur's Gate 2 (with the help of the cheat console) than actually trying to play throug the game.) Also, it feels like it's poor game design to have a mechanic (death in this case) that punishes the player so harshly that it needs to be avoided rather than used for the player's advantage.

Roguelike and roguelite because it usually implies permadeath or what I've seen referred to as permafailure (which has the same issue of punishing experimentation).

Real-time with pause:
* This battle system, in my experience (Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale), combines the worst aspects of turn-based and real-time while lacking both the rhythm of turn-based and the fluidity of real-time.

Multiplayer:
* I only play single-player games, so games focused on multiplayer are not worth considering for me.

I could also mention RPG; that term doesn't make me avoid the game (RPG is actually my favorite genre), but the term has been overused when it shouldn't, making its meaning rather diluted. (I don't consider games like Secret of Mana, Ys, and Diablo to be RPGs, yet they're commonly listed as such. I have played and enjoyed the first two games on the list, as well as a couple Diablo-likes.)

Also, there are certain genres I avoid, like FPS (after trying to play Metroid Prime, which also had the issue of slow pacing compared to 2D Metroid), Sports (particularly realistic sports), Racing (I just don't get the attraction to Mario Kart, for example). I don't mind it as long as the list doesn't include games that I found to not be good, but that people for some reason like. (For example, Final Fantasy 7, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, pretty much any major FPS.)

Multiplayer... and especially... Multiplayer Only

To a lesser extent...

Quick Time Events

Procedural Generation

Visual Novel

And just within the last few months I've soured on...

Remastered

It's not an automatic dislike, but for me it does now signal caution over excitement.

Really only MMORPG or Multiplayer Only.

I hate playing online, much prefer single player.There have been a few decent looking MMORPGs but ive not gotten them due to them being MMORPGs.

Free to play, Microtransactions, Monetization, INSERT TERM HERE Club, Lootboxes
Different terms for extortive methods.


HD
Usually means that the graphics are bad. If it's a remaster it's a sign of badly upscaled and smoothed textures.

You're quite right, but "run and hide from monsters" games, as you aptly put it, seem to make up a large majority of the genre to me. But I agree that the term doesn't necessitate the exclusion of gameplay, as RE shows. I do tend to think of those games (particularly with 4 and after) more as Third-Person Shooters than horror games, but since we're talking about labels, you are right on the nail, since they are almost always referred to in a horror context, and not a shooter one.

I agree with you on the idea of these terms as marketing as well, which consumers should always be wary of, but at this point in time the market is hugely oversaturated, and it doesn't look like it's going to be clearing up anytime soon. Due to this, it is nice to have some keywords that you can help orient yourself by while deciding what is or isn't worth your time e.g. several people here have already expressed dislike for procedural generation and permadeath, and it's probably pretty safe for them to ignore games tagged as roguelike.

Ahh, Stealth! That's one I definitely could have put in my opening. I think the problem with stealth is that as a mechanic what it usually translates to is waiting, which is probably just about the most objectively un-fun activity you can have in a game. Even classics like Thief and Deus Ex I feel are only held together by the fact that you can save/load anywhere, and without that feature many would find those games tedious slogs(maybe not, but that's how I felt about them). Indivisible Inc. is probably the only stealth based game I can think of that manages to implement it in a fun way.

Funny you should bring op OoT, because I just started playing it for the first time about a week ago. I was very unpleasantly surprised by the first stealth sequence, which happens very early in the game. I think that's another problem with stealth: developers think they can randomly pepper it into any game and it adds "variety", a practice that seems especially prevalent in AAA games.

yeah. i guess if we had all the time and money in the world we could sample everything and see what we liked and what we didn't. give everything a fair chance. but at some point we just have to draw our lines.
i mean i make judgement calls on things by screenshots occasionally so it's not like i'm not guilty too.

and i agree with "retro" as someone mentioned before: invariably means "way too difficult to be enjoyable" to me 90% of the time, or "unashamed remake without even trying to update ui or controls to suit modern tastes". that is a real bugbear to me. we've made so much progress in ui and controls. bad ui and controls were not what made old games good. the ideas behind them, that's their strong point, and maybe their simple focus. if you're going to make a new game in a retro style then that should be your focus. don't ape every little thing when we've learnt better. cut the bad stuff and keep the simple focus and experimental ideas. (imo anyway)

ah well, after we win the lotto eh? then we'll be able to properly apply the right amount of time to this leisurely activity :)