LogFAQs > #968115299

Here's a quick list of games that I went into really wanting to/expecting to like that just didn't quite pan out and ended up missing the cut for this list. They'd probably be the next five games on the list - all have redeeming qualities but none of them were quite good enough for me to be excited about.

5 Games that were disappointing, but still had enough going for them that they were worth talking about:

Metroid Dread

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/1/9/AAA-H0AADr5L.jpg

People keep guessing that this will show up on my list, so let me help you out here. My last draft before my final list had this game at like #46 or #47, but I realized I didn't really have a lot of good things to say about it, and after I added one more game in the 11th hour it was the last game to slip off the list. Look, I really wanted to love Metroid Dread, and I still sort of hope that I'm wrong about the game somehow, but I didn't see what everyone saw in it. The positives: Samus feels great to control and has a really cool suite of abilities, and I'm sure that this game is a really interesting speedgame - I haven't seen any speedruns of it, but I think I'm mostly happy this game exists just to add to the legacy of Metroid speedrunning.

But as a casual game, I found it far too annoying. I found the level design terrible. There's almost always only one path the game wants you to take, and if you try to stray from it you just keep finding extremely contrived dead ends everywhere, the devs' invisible hand trying to keep you away but without effectively guiding you where you need to go, so you can easily wander into a redunant area and get stuck without good pathways leading you back to the correct route. You don't even find a lot of upgrades for exploring! It just has way too much Metroid Fusion in it. Combine that with some really repetitive boss fights and boring environments, and this wasn't the Metroid revival I was hoping for, sorry. I really wanted to like it - I still want more Metroid games, so I'm glad that this one was well received.

Wildermyth

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/2/0/AAA-H0AADr5M.jpg

This game got a lot of hype - Polygon put it as their #8 game of the year - so I had high hopes for it. It's... very close to being a good game, but it's just not quite there for me. I like the idea of a procedurally generated tabletop-ish RPG adventure where you control a party of characters, but there isn't enough depth in the abilities, items, or game mechanics in general to keep this one fresh as every character you build feels kinda the game and battles are also pretty samey. The webcomic-style story interludes have a cute style, but the stories themselves are entirely unmemorable bog-standard D&D plots with characters who only have one type of personality (snarky). There is a lot of content here, and I appreciate all of the settings and modes, and I think it might be fun to play with another person online. It's not a terrible game, but I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to get excited over, either. This did almost make my list as the #49 game but it got dropped, which I'm relieved about because I'd strain a bit to say good things about it. Not a waste of my time, probably my fave of the games in this section, but not the #8 game of 2021.

Loop Hero

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/2/1/AAA-H0AADr5N.jpg

This game was recommended to me by like four different people independently and sadly, they were all wrong. I wasn't expecting them to be! In theory, this should be another roguelikey thing that should've been right up my alley. I already kinda did my venty piece about this one a while back, but long story short, this game can't decide if it wants to be an idle game or not. For a game where you just let your hero go around in a loop and autobattle things, there's way too much constant micromanaging you have to do, constantly putting down tiles and managing item, but it's all really boring micromanagement as the actual choices you get don't feel like they matter all that much. I hate scanning all the equipment that piles up in your inventory looking for the best marginal improvements, and I don't have a lot of fun placing down tiles when upgrades feel mostly arbitrary and marginal. It feels like there should be a lot more tactics involved with where you put tiles, but it mostly just doesn't matter that much.

The game starts simple, and I kept expecting it to get more complex, but it never really does, it's just kinda what you see is what you get. Cool artstyle and premise and all that, but the game just isn't fun. It badly fails the "50 hour" test for roguelikes, where it fails to continue to be interesting long before reaching that point, and honestly I don't even think it stayed interesting past 5 hours - it was already starting to how its limitations at that point.