This is where I write about games (or other media) I wanted to continue with but didn’t, some things I remember about them, and where try to come up with reasons for stopping despite feeling a desire to continue. If I wrote about every such case, this list would be hundreds of pages long, so I’ll confine myself to the ones that weigh the most heavily on my mind.

I got the idea from Joelchrono’s blog.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

This one’s fairly easy.

FF7R is fun by merit of its presentation, cutscenes and fights. However, shortly after I met Aerith it dropped me into a hub area where Aerith is having fun making Cloud run errands for locals. Things like finding lost cats.

It’s. So. Boring.

Washing the dishes is more fun that watching Cloud crawl between the debris that is placed to obscure loading times. I don’t care about finding lost cats. It’s all padding. I feel compelled to go through it all, because I don’t want to miss out on a Materia on account of not finding all the cats, and then be stuck on a boss, underpowered. I keep mentioning the cat quest, because I remember them the most. The other side quests were just as boring and apparently even less memorable.

Disco Elysium

Aaah… tough one. I keep meaning to return, but it’s been a while. I’m afraid I’ll Ihave forgotten which of the NPCs I already talked to, or what they had to say. I’ll have to go through the same dialogue trees again while thinking “Didn’t I hear this before…?” I’m still fairly early in the game, I believe, but I’ve done quite a few things in the first area. Last time I played, I was wandering around trying to see if I’d missed something, because I didn’t have a specific place or thing in mind to continue. All the moseying around. The game doesn’t hold the players hand and this is the right decision, over showing a quest marker. After all this isn’t Dragon Quest where you grind to get a level up, but a game that lives through its world and dialogue. But for someone like me, this leads to a risk of not coming back.

Citizen Sleeper 2

I haven’t played the first game, but Citizen Sleeper has always caught my eye due to its art style. Since it may be a lesser known game, I’ll describe it a bit: It has great writing, by which I mean the prose is really solid and evocative. Like Disco Elysium, the UI is focused on making the reading pleasant and the text isn’t only dialogue but environments and character’s actions are also conveyed through prose.

The game itself is a bit divorced from this. It feels almost like a board game or pen & paper RPG. The mechanics seem abstract. You don’t control or even see your character directly, but click different spots on a space station, select actions and decide which one of a number of dice or resources to spend, determining your chances to succeed or fail.

Then I mis-clicked and wasted some resources. The game auto-saves, but it’s not a Roguelike where you get to start over quickly. You have to live with your decisions (or mis-clicks). It’s a bleak, “no hope” type of setting, which amplifies my feeling that I inadvertently doomed myself by mis-clicking.

I got this game along with a bunch of others in a Humblebundle set, so at the time there were a lot of alternatives I hadn’t tried yet.

If I want to go back to the game, I’ll have to get a hold of the abstract mechanics again, probably replay the entire beginning … I didn’t play that long yet, but the prospect of spending an hour of playtime going through the beginning of the same game again isn’t making me want to go back.

I think the game has a “narrative” difficulty mode and I’m tempted to try. But then I get doubts and think that, to really experience the narrative to its fullest I have to also go through the hardships the game presents me with.