Games that you love but don't play

[Necrosia]

All soulsborne games, I'd rather roleplay on its universe and know the entire lore back and forth than play it on increasing challenging manners as most enjoy doing.

There are many different ways to be a fan of something.

[robkies]

i'd say sonic adventure 1 and 2 and jet set radio future
i mean i could play them on pc but i really want to play them on a crt monitor, and while i do have a trinitron i wont shut up about i dont have the consoles to play them. i guess the wii counts but i dont have the controller

[wangobangy]

Like someone has previously said above, soulsborne games. Specifically Bloodborne for me. I have the game (got it with PS Plus) and I have tried it, and I am just not good enough to play it properly. I love the atmosphere and the music. I love the idea of playing it, but actually playing it is just too hard for me.

Maybe I'll try again sometime, but for now I like to stick with what I know I'm capable of playing.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I feel that way about games that encourage "fast play" over exploration, like say, Sonic or Pizza Tower. I find the characters of Sonic funky and I LOVE the animation of Pizza Tower, but I like taking my time a little too much for these games' taste.

[starbreaker]

All soulsborne games, I'd rather roleplay on its universe and know the entire lore back and forth than play it on increasing challenging manners as most enjoy doing.

There are many different ways to be a fan of something.

True, and as a Soulsborne fan I think there should be optional accessibility settings to make these games friendlier to newcomers or casual players. For example:

• turn off loss of souls on death without needing a "sacrifice" item
• make PVP optional without losing cooperative play
• in PVE gameplay, provide optional audio and visual cues when an opening to dodge, parry, counter, and backstab is available
• provide optional modifiers to enemy health and damage, including bosses
• reduce or disable enemy power boost in new game plus

Also, something I had liked about Dark Souls II was that if you killed normal enemies in an area often enough, they stopped respawning. This made it possible to eventually get to a boss fight.

And for the "hardcore" players: a permadeath option.

And for the real masochists, the Nier permadeath option: die once and the game uninstalls itself and makes reinstallation impossible without doing a factory reset on the console and creating a new Xbox Live, PSN, or Steam account. Why? Because f--- you, that's why. /s

I am just not good enough to play it properly.

Nobody is. Not at first. There's a reason Dark Souls fans have watched this video over a million times.

And nobody wants to go down to Blighttown. Absofrigginlutely nobody. (CW: profanity in lyrics)

Suppose you got to be really good at Demon's Souls back in 2009. Then Dark Souls comes out. Do your skills from Demon's Souls transfer? Not entirely. Metagame skills like knowing you need to learn enemies' patterns before you can counter them transfer, but a zombie in one game doesn't necessarily have the same moves and attack pattern as a zombie in another. The exception is the dogs. Those godforsaken FromSoftware dogs haven't changed much at all from Demon's Souls to Elden Ring and yet fighting them is still a harrowing experience.

I hate FromSoftware dogs.

What I really think, though, is that Soulsbourne games are an introduction to Buddhism, particularly the cycle of suffering. Enlightenment comes when you realize that your frustration and misery are entirely self-inflicted, that you paid good money to feel this way, and that all you have to do to end the suffering is to stop playing. Soulsborne games are all about proving that video games suck and make people miserable.

[Necrosia]

What I really think, though, is that Soulsbourne games are an introduction to Buddhism, particularly the cycle of suffering. Enlightenment comes when you realize that your frustration and misery are entirely self-inflicted, that you paid good money to feel this way, and that all you have to do to end the suffering is to stop playing. Soulsborne games are all about proving that video games suck and make people miserable.

I love this quote so much, I shall take it to life with me from now on, thank you   

I agree entirely with what you said, you can make games absurdly difficult for those who want a challenge but also have a more inclusive mode for those who like me just want to dress pretty and be dumb, having one way does not exclude the other.

Pokemon games come to mind, there are people casually playing on their own, catching their favorites, collecting and being silly(on a positive way) while there are those who take it super serious and study each critter, breeding the best ones and getting the best moves to make the unbeatable team and on my experience these two sects hardly overlap they just... coexist. 

[starbreaker]

I love this quote so much, I shall take it to life with me from now on, thank you   

No, thank you.

I agree entirely with what you said, you can make games absurdly difficult for those who want a challenge but also have a more inclusive mode for those who like me just want to dress pretty and be dumb, having one way does not exclude the other.

I agree; the designers and developers can account for both casual players and obsessive challenge seekers. It's just a question of whether they're willing to spend the time and money to implement features catering to multiple playstyles.

Pokemon games come to mind, there are people casually playing on their own, catching their favorites, collecting and being silly(on a positive way) while there are those who take it super serious and study each critter, breeding the best ones and getting the best moves to make the unbeatable team and on my experience these two sects hardly overlap they just... coexist. 

Not a Pokemon fan, but Final Fantasy XIV manages it reasonably well. There are "extreme trials" for those who want them, as well as savage, unreal, and ultimate raids. None of them are required for story progression, though. The developers have even been reworking the stuff that is required for story progression so that you can solo it with a party of NPCs.

The FF Pixel Remaster games also have some nice sliders that cater to casual and hardcore players; you can apply multipliers to experience, gil, and ability points (where applicable) or reduce or even eliminate these gains.

[kiki & ayano]

minecraft!! though i'd like to start playing it again someday maybe? i played minecraft a lot in its extremely early days, roughly 2011-2013 when i was in middle school. nowadays i pretty much never play it, and yet i'm super interested in minecraft from an enyclopedic perspective... autistic brain likes collecting information, i love minecraft fact/history videos. it's been an active game with an active userbase for so damn long that the amount of information that exists about it feels absolutely endless, and that's not even counting community history and content, which might actually be endless, practically. i also just find minecraft's position as a social game in the modern landscape really interesting. there's so many different ways to play it and interact with it - on one hand minecraft is a game built by its players and on another, it's... well it's owned by microsoft now and has all the parts that come with being owned by a massive corporation. i can't think of anything else even close to the sort of unique and longstanding legacy minecraft has!! but uh, actually playing it? singleplayer is boring and i haven't found a multiplayer experience that clicks with me in modern day, yet. i'm not a 12 year old hosting minecraft servers for the neighborhood preteen boys anymore, roleplaying defending a self-built church from monsters at night. i can't even re-enter that brainspace for the sake of nostalgia. none of my friends are really playing it either which makes it harder, i'd probably have to seek out a new community and frankly that sounds like way too much for my already full plate right now. but one day i might play it regularly again! in the meantime i will continue to put on my hours-long minecraft video essays LOL (somehow i dodged the recent minecraft youtuber craze that exploded over the course of the early pandemic, though. never found interest in it)
- kiki

[zanarkand]

i've never played a single second of The Last Of Us but i've watched the entire game as a let's play/walkthrough (without commentary of course) and i think it's so amazing. the story is captivating and i have so many feelings about the characters. ;_; i think i could play it fine because i'm not scared of horror games but i'm not amazing at shooting XD but i don't have the right console so alas i cannot play it. maybe someday!

[starbreaker]

I think Control would have been better as a novel than as a video game. I love the setting, Jesse Faden is a great character, and the Service Weapon really reminds me of the Black Sword in Michael Moorcock's fiction. However, the third-person shooter gameplay itself felt to me like an unnecessary obstacle to enjoying the story and setting. Maybe Control would have worked better for me as a point-click graphical adventure, but they don't really make those any more. At least not as games with a budget capable of supporting Control's production values.

[Yukari]

I have been a Touhou fan since 2009 but I’m abysmally bad. The last time I beat a game on a difficulty higher than easy was Touhou 13, and I haven’t downloaded any of the games past Touhou 16. When new games are released, I am more excited for the new soundtracks than actually playing it. There’s a lot of let’s players (and even speedrunners) I just watch instead.

I’m going to be honest, I don’t even like the ‘bullet hell’ genre!

[OneMillionFurries]

Guilty Gear! I am abysmally bad at fighting games due to a few disabilities (watch the Jimquisition episode "The Accessible Brilliance of Street Fighter 6" for someone that mirrors exactly why I can't play fighting games) but I LOOOOOOOVE Guilty Gear and the characters so much!! Especially Faust/Dr. Baldhead and Robo-Ky!!

I hope to god that the next gg game has similar "modern controls" options to SF6. I wanna be able to play my man Faust SO bad </3

[Bede]

I absolutely ADORE the characters of the Sonic the Hedgehog and Guilty Gear franchises, but, unfortunately, I can't get into the gameplay of either of them.

Regarding Sonic (with the exception of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog), most of the story-driven games that I'm interested in are on old hardware that I don't own. Anything I am able to play, the gameplay doesn't 'click', for one reason or another. I'm considering giving Sonic Frontiers on Switch a try, because I've heard good things about it, but I'm still sitting on it.

For Guilty Gear, like @OneMillionFurries said, it's very much an accessibility issue. Plus, fighting games are just difficult for me to get into, in general. So many button combos to learn...

[BlazingCobaltX]

I love Tekken, but I am abysmal at competitive fighting games and am not willing to get better. Not sure if this counts because I have played it a lot in the past, but its current iteration is entirely focused on PvP play, to the point where there is no real single-player content in there. We still have to see if Tekken 8 is gonna be any different but if not, I won't touch it. 

[Nonomino]

Like a lot of people, I love watching let's plays of horror games. I love horror but I'm too chicken to play that kind of game haha. And oh my God Shevek if you read this I love SOMA too. It is such an amazing game. It's sad, but beautiful and so much more than just horror.

Also? Five Nights at Freddy's. Yeah I may be too old for them but I don't care. For some reason, when I feel depressed, watching let's plays comfort me.

And like appleAle, I feel this way about the Fear and Hunger games too. They're great, but I wouldn't be patient enough to play them.