AWFUL Games

[Pink Fluffy Cat]

My most recent experience would be Elex 2, it's a arpg what despite started out decent, quickly degenerated into a MMORPG tier slash fest where all quests become tedious "kill dozens amount of enemies to continue".
Not a technically a truly awful game, but trainwreck like this one leaves bitter taste as you'd set your expectation higher than you do toward random scrappy mobile unity games.

[grovyle]

Me and my brother bought Bouncy Bob on the switch because it was like 99.99% off and it only costed a cent. Yes, not a whole dollar, not ten cents, A SINGLE, LONELY CENT. We used a (singular, lonely) credit that we had lying around from buying some better eshop game and bought Bouncy Bob.

It wasn't even worth a cent.

Also, just because FNAF security breach was mentioned above: I haven't played any of the games or have any interest on them, but in the off chance y'all haven't watched this video of a guy trying to beat it without encountering any glitches (and surprisingly succeeding), you really should.

[Spots]

One of the worst games I've ever played is Soldier of Fortune: Payback. It's basically what you'd get if you took all of the worst aspects of modern military shooters and put them all into one game. Bland visual style where everything looks gray or tan, boring, generic gameplay, stereotypical-looking enemies, cringeworthy dialogue, etc. I remember one level where I kept getting spammed with grenades and not noticing them, so I would constantly blow up out of nowhere. I never ended up finishing the game, I finally gave up during an escort mission.

[devils]

Me and my brother bought Bouncy Bob on the switch because it was like 99.99% off and it only costed a cent. Yes, not a whole dollar, not ten cents, A SINGLE, LONELY CENT. We used a (singular, lonely) credit that we had lying around from buying some better eshop game and bought Bouncy Bob.

It wasn't even worth a cent.

Could you go into detail as to why that is? I love its art style from what I've seen, I'm rather curious in that wary-but-still-willing-to-try-it-out way...

[grovyle]

Could you go into detail as to why that is? I love its art style from what I've seen, I'm rather curious in that wary-but-still-willing-to-try-it-out way...

We played it on pvp and it's basically bumping into each other until one dies. I think there were power ups, and spikes you could fall on to deal damage. The controls are absolute hell, I can't describe them in any other way than flash-game-like. You drag an arrow from the center of Bob and it goes flying in the opposite direction. There's different scenarios and stuff but that's basically it. Everything is very broken and we would regularly clip into the floor lol

[sig]

The new Gollum game looks like a genuinely miserable experience (and not just because of the setting), how the hell did that game get released in the Current Year of 2023??

[starbreaker]

I've got three words for you all: Clive Barker's Jericho. There's a lot I could say about this supermassive corn turd despite being a Clive Barker fan, but I think this Zero Punctuation review says everything that need be said.

CW because it's Yahtzee Crowshaw so there's plenty of profanity and other rude/insensitive speech.

This is probably the worst shooter I've ever played, and the only major shooter franchises of which I haven't played  at least one title are Halo and Call of Duty (because if I wanted a video game that served as pro-military propaganda I'd just play America's Army and have done with it).

If anything, Clive Barker's Jericho almost makes Duke Nukem Forever seem appealing.

[milkywaytrain]

i have to clarify that i LOVE this game. it has a brilliant story and characters, i love the setting, and the story pacing by itself feels very good.

but as a game, monark SUCKS. it's AWFUL. i got so tired of the grinding that i had to just read a plot summary so i knew how it ended without having to force myself through it.
the battle mechanics are infuriating, since if the main character dies, you have to restart the fight - he's one of the more consistently powerful units too, and ends up being the target of a lot of attacks. some characters have an absolutely pitiful movement range which makes it difficult to get through the giant maps.
the leveling system makes me nauseous to think about. you have to individually level each character - five human units and seven fiends - to level 99 to unlock the true final boss. you earn the points to level up characters through battling, where enemies drop spirit points to level up skills on the skill tree. the sum of every skill = the character's level. the problem is, at high levels skills start taking 10k+ spirit to level up once, and even the battlefield SPECIFICALLY MEANT for grinding gives like... 20k on average, iirc? you have THIRTEEN characters to level up to level 99 on this slow and painful battling and leveling system.
the actual gameplay outside of combat is just a lot of running around a confusingly-laid-out school. the concept with the mist was cool, i like the HUD glitching when you get to high madness levels, but the movement speed is really slow and irritating.

please watch a playthrough of this game if you want to experience it. do NOT spend 60 USD on it. i didn't spend money on it either.

[fatgrrlz]

Enclave - a multiplayer Team Fortress 2-esque shooter hastily retrofitted into a mid as hell third person generic fantasy adventure game made by the people that would go on to make Payday 2. It has a place in my heart for being somewhat obscure and having every map in the game be a crunchy liminal space, but I can’t deny that the controls are jank and SO many aspects of the game aging like milk. Apparently it recently had a Switch port remaster with Limited Run Games.

Holding out for Matt McMuscles to one day make a What Happened? of the game. Between the messy legal and financial situation and what the game ended up being, I’d love to explore what could’ve been with that game.

[BlazingCobaltX]

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are universally regarded as the worst remakes. They're unoptimised, tasteless, and a shocking drop in quality unlike anything else. They've caused me to stray away from future Pokémon releases unless they fix something about their production cycle (spoiler: they won't).

[dirtnap]

I've got three words for you all: Clive Barker's Jericho. There's a lot I could say about this supermassive corn turd despite being a Clive Barker fan, but I think this Zero Punctuation review says everything that need be said.

CW because it's Yahtzee Crowshaw so there's plenty of profanity and other rude/insensitive speech.

This is probably the worst shooter I've ever played, and the only major shooter franchises of which I haven't played  at least one title are Halo and Call of Duty (because if I wanted a video game that served as pro-military propaganda I'd just play America's Army and have done with it).

If anything, Clive Barker's Jericho almost makes Duke Nukem Forever seem appealing.

oh wow, i played this! i found it the bargain bin at a game shop and, as i so often did, bought it purely on the basis that it was in the bargain bin. i've found a lot of great games in there. i've also found total disasters.

i did not and still do not know who clive barker is and have never played any of his other games, but i'm in complete agreement with yahtzee here. this was Not a good game.

even though the video only contains a description of the game, it still brought back enough memories to make me, perhaps masochistically, want to replay it to experience again just how awful it is. i know i have the cd around here somewhere...

i wouldn't say it's the worst game ever, but it definitely belongs on the awful games leaderboard.

jericho's sheer badness left such an impression on me that i named a chaotic disaster of a character after it.

______

for my nomination may i bring up ADR1FT. it's a walking simulator, which i don't normally play, but i do someitmes want to just wander around an alien landscape and enjoy the scenery. i think i got this in a humblebundle or something? or maybe it was a gift? i definitely didn't make the deliberate choice to buy it.

the control scheme is horrendous. i don't remember the specifics any more but i recall an early part of the tutorial wanting me to press [SPACEBAR] to do something, and as much as i pressed [SPACEBAR] that something simply was not happening. i looked it up and found this was a common issue in the game because [SPACEBAR] was also bound to some other control and no, you can't rebind them, and no you can't split them up, they're inherently connected within the engine. it's so stupid that this one fact singlehandedly convinced me they didn't playtest this game at all.

that aside, if you manage to get past the tutorial, the gameplay is non-existant. i'm not convinced there's a story.

i'd say the only part of the "about this game" that's true is "The player fights to stay alive by exploring the wreckage for precious resources"

those "precious resources" are oxygen canisters, and yes, that's basically all you do. hurry from area to area to get the next oxygen canister asap so you don't die have to do the section again.

it's not fun, and there's nothing else to do except get oxygen. the amount you have is barely enough to make it to the next can, there's not really enough time to admire the scenery (which, in a walking simulator, a significant attraction is usually being able to slow down and admire the scenery)

also, despite being a first-person game, you don't have full control of the camera, and the game will just turn you to face whatever direction it wants. i don't mean you spin in an out-of-control way (such as might happen if you move the wrong way in an environment with no air resistance and no gravity). the game moves the camera for you to force you to look a certain way. i think it was supposed to be a hint system but it was just a huge hinderance that made it extremely difficult to move through certain sections because i literally had to move in a direction i could not look.

ADR1FT is also just deeply unstable. it crashes frequently and randomly, on any system.

terrible, and entirely in ways that aren't fun.

______

i say "terrible in ways that aren't fun" because i kind of have a love for terrible games. i'm not sure if it falls under "so bad it's good", but i genuinely enjoy going through a game that is just an absolute mess.

it has to be the right amount of bad, though. i won't take a merely imperfect game, or a game that's overall decent but has some problems. it has to be terrible from beginning to end, at every level of the cakeslice.

the majority of the mess should ideally be in the gameplay or the level design. if there are too many issues with the ui, or the controls, i'm out of there, unless the ui is so comically bad that getting it to behave is in itself a game. i will also not enjoy myself if the game is bad simply because it is slow, grindy, or boring. i want a game to be bad because it's broken or badly designed, i want to have fun enduring the broken-ness, rather than have to wait it out.

i will complain about bad features and bad choices in otherwise good games, but if a game has no good choices i will instead enjoy its cacophany of bad choices. i like seeing how bad a game can be. i want to know what the worst possible experience games have to offer feels like. i'm also fascinated by just...how shit a game can be and still launch.

i also wouldn't generally count shovelware. i seek out a game that is bad DESPITE the fact that the devs were trying to make something good, rather than because the devs didn't care and just wanted to cash in asap.

sadly, such games are few and far between, so if anyone has any recommendations...hmu

[MrsMoe]

I struggle to call any of the games I grew up with "awful" per say, but Sonic in the Secret Rings is a special case where it was definitely bad in hindsight, but I was clearly pretending to like it as a kid. I was a massive Sonic fan as a kid, so I thought truly loving meant I had to defend and enjoy every single thing associated with it. I lacked any critical feelings towards any of the bad games (not even Sonic 06....which I didn't even play lol). When my parents bought me Secret Rings for my birthday, it definitely was tedious and clunky to play and I absolutely knew it deep down, but I'd never admit it. I just kept playing it and tolerating the awkward gameplay and told everyone I knew that I loved it.

[Snow]

M&Ms Kart Racing, for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii. And to a further extent, almost all M&M video games are horrendous. What a broken mess the Kart Racing game is. You can barely control your kart, the courses are woefully boring, and you will inevitably crash into almost everything, making the game almost unplayable. I don't have much else to say about it, it's just shockingly bad and I can't believe it was released to stores. Also expect to hear someone yell "Approaching sound barrier!!" every ten seconds. It's super annoying.

[Thorn]

There's two games I have in mind for this, but both of them are 15 years old and I played them as a kid.

The first is the Over the Hedge DS game, which was a piece of shovelware that was made to cash in on Dreamwork's popularity that I got as a present from family when I was 8 (because said family member didn't know anything about games and just picked up one associated with a kids movie I liked). The story was okay, and the graphics were actually pretty good, but in the cons:

• the map layouts of the levels were pretty janky and repetitive
• the audio quality was trash even for the technology at the time
• there were tons of ways to accidentally crash the game to where you had to wipe the save files and reset it just by having a character standing in the wrong spot
• the hitboxes of the NPC's vision during stealth missions was completely broken to where half the time you could stand right 3 feet in front of them in clear view and not be noticed and the other half of the time they could see through the corners of walls you've hidden behind
• the physics when throwing items and jumping were so inconsistent as to screw with gameplay
• and the points system to buy powerups was barely functional when it did work and kept crashing.

The second game was a PC game on a disc I got when I was 9 and I actually can't remember the full name of it and when I try to look it up online I can't find anything about it, so I'm half convinced I hallucinated the whole experience. It was a 2008 game that I got in Best Buy for $10 that was named something like "Global Tycoon" or "World Leader Tycoon" or something along those lines. The idea of the game was that you were a world leader in charge of a continent and you had to manage the economic affairs and urbanization of the area. The graphics were terrible and colored every landmass a uniform matte carpet texture green, there was no possible combination of decisions and continents that resulted in you not losing money, the game crashed and froze every 20-30 minutes, the interactions with other NPC world leaders literally didn't work or respond when you pressed response dialogue options, and it was impossible to do a full five year playthrough without either going bankrupt, being deposed from within your own continent, or having a randomly generated natural disaster somehow devastate your entire continent so thoroughly that your entire social order fell apart.

[SleepyCalaban]

One of my "personal favorites" is this mobile port (i think) of a game called Horse Stable: Herd Care Simulator because it looked okay and it was only $2 on sale on the switch. I regret those $2 it's very glitchy, everything just looks kinda bad, and the horse is unreasonably slow?? It was really funny playing it though and trying to figure out what in the world was happening. Still have yet to figure it out.