Anything made by guerrilla. Beautiful, boring tech demos

anything with turn-based combat as a core mechanic is an instant skip, nothing else about the game matters

I want to go back to RDR2 but I'm not a fan of how slow moving the intro is and I don't want to do loads of bullshit before having fun.

For my answer.

Super Mario Bros Wonder... I'm playing through it now. It's a bit shit. They've definitely tried some stuff here which isn't bad but very little is landing for me. I don't like the new kingdom, I don't like the map experience or aesthetic and I dislike some of the level building.

When I played Mario Maker 2 I saw the reason behind the success for the franchise in that there was a secret sauce to how a level is made and it is apparently missing from a lot of these. On top of that the castle battles are fairly lackluster with no sign of Bowser.

I'll finish it but it's miles behind the previous entries, all of them I think

Undertale and For Honor

Undertale is a decent enough game, I guess, but whenever I think about it, I think about all the crazies that call themselves fans of it. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

For Honor got me interested, but it made a few very bad choices. Magnet hands and slow attacks meant that you could react to attacks, and never had to worry about whiffing. It's so dull to have basically no concept of interesting movement play in a game about fighting.

The Tomb Raider remake series.

At their best, the originals were about a hyper-competent adventurer who always had a plan and was unapologetically confident. She was like Xena and Indiana Jones combined.

It was already a pretty tired cliche at the time to make a gritty origin story when the first game came out. We got an uncertain, untrained, and unprepared Lara with a whimpering attitude.

By the third game they tried to act on the feedback about this, but instead of something closer to the original, she became Rambo, covering herself in mud, hiding in the shadows, stealth killing hordes of enemy soldiers.

I think the Uncharted series did what Tomb Raider remake series should have done.

The Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).

Some of the worst villains ever, and you're constantly getting blue balled. The series keeps introducing new characters, that don't matter, and just drag things out for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

Zero and Azure are great though, until they connect back to the main story at the end.

Legend of Dragoon. The game where a main character dies and is immediately replaced with an off brand of himself, and that includes a boss rush mid game that is unavoidable and punishes you for trying to use the game's signature mechanic.