Starfield. I love some Bethesda games, and I don't hate the game, it's just not worth the price. It would be way more tolerable at $40. I got about 40-45 hours into it, and I don't know if I'm ever going to complete it. I feel like I've seen everything the game offers and there doesn't seem to be anything new coming along in terms of mechanics or story.

Diablo IV. What a disappointment that turned out to be.

Diablo 4.

I played like 10 hours, then realized it was really fucking boring. It felt soulless. Uninteresting.

Baldurs Gate 3

There’s nothing wrong with the game, I just don’t find it fun to play. Somehow got 48 hours out of it, but never made it to the end of act one. The gameplay just wasn’t something I terribly enjoyed.

I don’t necessarily regret the purchase as supporting smaller, decent studios is a good plan, but it’s still a game I’m not going to get a lot of use out of

Elden Ring.

Waited all year until it was on sale as I thought it might not be my cup of tea, tried not to let my prejudice get the better of me but felt it was such a drag I had to put it down.

It was recommended to me as I like Zelda but it couldn't be further from the things I like about it: innovation, fluid gameplay, freedom, puzzles, multiple ways to tackle enemies.

I don't think it's the difficulty as I play lots of roguelike and bullet hell games. My main gripe is the clunkiness of the combat to the point it's unfair. Like you don't really stand a chance through reactions alone, you have to learn the patterns and hitboxes of enemies so that you know in advance when to react.

Also I kept hearing how good the graphics are but I think they're kinda average although the actual art style is quite nice.

Any suggestions on how I might enjoy it would be much appreciated as I haven't got very far.

Starfield was definitely one of my worst purchases in a long, long time. Full price for nothing.

I bought Lethal Company because it looked like fun. Then realized I don't have enough friends to play it with.

Palworld

I was expecting factorio but with union busting knock-off Pokemon . I got a really generic open-world survival craft with normal knock-off Pokemon.

Temtem.

Had the potential to be the RPG Pokemon could be if it just entered this generation's technical level. Instead, it became a shitty grindy money-grab that has been killed by the devs.

Humble bundle had a bundle of all the Mega Man games for 20 bucks.

I instantly regretted it once I loaded it up and I thought to myself, I could've just got roms for these and a better emulator than the one it came with... The emulator doesn't even let you fuckin adjust the audio levels.

I don't really have any recent ones, but I think my most recent one would be Doom Eternal. That's not saying that it's a bad game, I can understand why people like it. I'm just not a fan of how it plays compared to the original Dooms or even Doom 2016. My biggest complaint is really about how little ammo you can carry for each weapon. I don't like being forced to switch weapons all the time or else glory kill every other enemy. I wasn't a fan of glory kills in Doom 2016 because I felt like they interrupted the pacing in an otherwise fast-paced game, but I put up with them because you could ignore them if you wanted to. You can't really ignore them (or the chainsaw kills) in Doom Eternal though, otherwise you'll find yourself regularly running low on ammo. I guess at least the chainsaw has more utility in Doom Eternal than it did in the original games (on harder difficulties it's hard to justify the chainsaw on anything except low-tier enemies), but I never finished the game because of the ammo restrictions.

Another game I have regrets about is The Sims 4. I knew I was getting into a dlc-pit but it didn't bother me too much because I tend to subscribe to the "Paradox Method" - buy what you like, pirate the rest - when it comes to games with lots of DLC. Additionally, when I pick up a game and really enjoy it, I don't have problems dropping money on dlc because I tend to play it for hundreds or even thousands of hours. However what I wasn't expecting was that I'd end up pirating the entire game anyway because updates almost always break mods and there's no way to disable updates (Origin let you do it, but neither steam nor the new EA games app lets you disable updates). So what was the point of buying anything if I was going to have to pirate the game to stop updates from randomly breaking shit?

Edit: some games I don't have buyer's remorse for are Cruelty Squad, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, and Factorio. Those could easily be 2x the price and still be worth it imo.

Starfield. I want to like it - and there are some things I really do like about it - but it’s just not a very good game. The menus and inventory management is atrocious, which is unforgivable when you have to spend so much time on those screens. The enemies are bullet sponges. It’s not fun dumping a magazine into a guy, reloading and doing it again while the guy just walks right into it like you’re spraying him with a garden hose. I’m ok with there not being a map on remote planets, but it makes no sense that there wouldn’t be one in a city. It’s the kind of stuff you’d overlook if it was an indie early access game, but it doesn’t fly when it’s a $70 game from a major studio. I can’t imagine what they were doing all those years the game was in development because it’s not reflected in the product.

Diablo 4, hands down. My best friend and I have been playing co-op games together for many years, and we were convinced that D4 would be the next 200+ hour co-op event of the year. So I bought myself the 100 dollar collectors edition and he, the same one since his birthday was near launch.

Yep, after 2 weeks we both admitted it just wasn't a good game, and neither of us wanted to play anymore. What a massive disappointment.

Firewatch was a recent purchase for me which I mildly regret.

As a walking simulator it's wholly dependent on the quality of its story, and the quality just isn't there. It starts strong but the ending is rushed and without a coherent resolution. It does so much work to set up multiple dramatic mysteries and then haphazardly solves half of them out of nowhere and forgets the rest in the final scramble to finish.

Nice graphics. Great voice acting. Neat concept. Needed more time to cook and left me feeling like I wasted my time getting invested in the story.

A recent release? Diablo 4 I guess. I don't really regret it since I knew what I was in for. I bought it to play with my best friend, and we had fun together until he got bored and frustrated. My hopes were high but my expectations were minimal and it still barely managed to meet them.

Punch me, but: "Doom Eternal."

I thought it was a guaranteed hit, but it turned out to be a really bad arena shooter where you make colorful resources shoot out of enemies and are forced to run into the middle of enemy groups, exposing yourself to attacks from all sides that don't count because you're repeating 5 kill QTEs ad nauseam - the only tactic the game allows.

Insurgency: Sandstorm. Because I've wasted 600+ hours on it and still going strong. I'm literally not getting anything from the game but I still have to play it. It's like what I assume being hooked on meth would be. And Steam doesn't even allow me in my moments of lucidity to remove the game permanently. Their "permanently remove game from my account" option can be rolled back with about 3 clicks from the support page. I feel like I need to throw away my whole Steam account that I've been accumulating since 200x just to get rid of that one game.

Then sometimes I see other players whose levels are double or triple my level. Which means they have to be playing 4-8 hours every single day. It's like having a bit of trouble with meth yourself and then wandering into a full-ass crackhouse.

Many other games have been a waste of money, but Insurgency is a huge waste of time and mental resources. Which is money.

The last game I had buyer's remorse for was Mass Effect Andromeda. It just didn't feel like a Mass Effect game.

Latest one for me is Disco Elysium. Didn’t really like its form of story telling. Played it for about 6-8 hours without feeling that the plot had made any meaningful progression.

The trailer was also misleading, selling it more as some form of detective thriller. Most of the dialogue is about stuff unrelated to the ongoing investigation.

I also didn’t like how some actions could randomly kill you. Oh, got a bad dice roll? Too bad, you must reread the dialogue of the past few minutes again. In the end I actively saved the game over and over again to avoid losing any progress.

Command Modern Operations.

I love EVE for being spreadsheets in space. I love Masters of Orion. I loved Harpoon. I thought I knew a lot about military hardware (certainly more than my friends, and enough to be annoying at parties). I have a PhD, so I'd like to think I'm pretty smart...

But this game broke me. The 450page manual destroyed me. I have 120 hours in this game, 3 whole working weeks and at least as twice as much reading guides and watching letsplays, and I understand absolutely fuck all about it. I feel like retard every time I start it and didn't take into account some insanely niche details about missile turning rates or how I should just know the radar crosssection of an F15 increases threefold when it climbs and turns right.

This game has won. I give up.

Palworld, I played an hour or two and thought it was fun at the time. But just haven't gone back, leveling felt like a chore instead of a grind

This one might controversial, but Baldur’s Gate 3 for ps5.

• I had plenty of technical issues, like my Karlach questline being glitched out because of some of mission, which was the worst since she was my main companion. I also had to start over earlier as well when I didn’t know that I would get locked out of quests for simply going to a the next area, I didn’t know that was “act 2”.
• I finished divinity os 2 in august and I didn’t really find this game all different other than the crazy production value jump. Which I don’t want to underplay, it’s much much better and ver very good for a crpg.
• the community is very circlejerk-y, when I mentioned in one of the threads about being locked out from doing other act 1 quests because I jumped to act 2 accidentally, they just said that it’s a “skill issue”. Also, the big reason I bought this game was because I kept hearing “I don’t usually like crpgs, but this game is a must play” so I was a victim of hype, that’s on me.

Edit: to add, I rarely ever buy new games. I just buy my Monster Hunter, some Nintendo games and From Software games.

Starfield.

Elden Ring. The game is just too obnoxiously hard. I don't mind difficulty, I finished Doom Eternal and all its DLC on nightmare. But Elden Ring seemingly makes very little effort to teach me its mechanics, whereas Doom Eternal's mechanics felt pretty intuitive after just a little bit of trial and error.

As far as FromSoft games go, I had a much better time with Sekrio. That game had a good tutorial, and that ghost dude who would help you practice the more difficult aspects of the combat.

Diablo 4

"Mario is Missing" for the SNES.

I remember opening the Sears catalog and seeing what must be the sequel to Super Mario World. I shovelled driveways and busted open my piggy bank - it was a full price Nintendo game and I had to have it.

I started my subscription to Nintendo Power after that...

Squid 44, I bought it before the name change and easy anti cheat. I now can't play on Linux 😕 not a recent purchase but recently went to try it out

D4, Starfield, Cities Skylines 2, and Mortal Combat 1. D4 and Starfield are self explanatory. CS2 is my biggest disappointment in years. Paradox killed whatever good will it had left by forcing the demise of CO. Under no circumstances should CS2 released this year. There's no mods. It doesn't function in any meaningful way. It's a performance nightmare. CS1 danced on the grave of SimCity and committed all the same sins a decade later. Don't listen to anybody that says the game has potential. They're sitting on 2000+ assets they can't release because they can't import buildings into their own city building game post release. That's how bad it is. Cities Skylines 2 was dead on arrival and it took the community 4 months to realize it.

MC1 isn't worthy of the K. It's just a slog. I don't know how much they fixed it but that doesn't break the fact that cameos are a major turnoff. Or that it has the worse progression system of recent MK games. Or that it's sitting on potentially one of the biggest rosters MK ever had but culled itself in half by reserving half the characters for cameos. Tekken 8 and SF6 have lapped MK hard this generation. Hell even Strive and DBFZ have taken steps to stay more relevant than MK1.

And you know what the kicker is? I bought all these games at the same time. I've been playing the clip of Totalbicsuit singing we don't pre-order games a lot lately.

Dwarf fortress. It makes me want to forgo sleep in favor of weed lol

Diablo 4. No doubt Diablo 4. Guess I never hated something as much as I hate buying Diablo 4

Balders Gate 3.

I really hate conversation trees. In a TTRPG you come up with any solution, and the GM will adjudicate it. In BG3, you have a couple of options in each scene. Not at all surprising, given that it's just a fancy choose your own adventure, but still, I'd forgotten how confining it feels.

I tried to return it, but I'd started the game and then gone off to do something else, which had pushed me an hour or two out of the return window.

I got Super Mario Bros. Wonder day one and it made me realize I don't like Mario nearly as much as I thought I did. And I already knew I liked Mario less than most people. It kinda made me realize the only games in the series I truly loved were Super Mario World and Bowser's Fury. If you include the alternate character spinoffs you can add Yoshi's Island to the list.

It's definitely the best 2D Mario since NSMB DS, there's nothing wrong with it and it's the most creative 2D Mario since World...but it still fails to stick in my mind the way Kirby games, Sonic games, Mega Man games, and more do. It was fun but it didn't wow me and I thought it was too easy (am I crazy or are 2D Mario games easier than Kirby games?) I'm glad I played it but I wish I picked it up sometime in the upcoming period when the Switch is completely removed from being current but not old enough to be retro.

What I've noticed about myself is that I'd pick a Sonic game that's considered "decent" or "debatable" over a comparable Mario game that people consider a GOTY candidate easily. with very few exceptions. And while Wonder vs. Superstars is an exception, it's only because of how godawful Superstars' bosses are.