Three Fantastic Games I Didn’t Finish
I should’ve given up on Metal Gear Solid V.
Don’t get me wrong, Metal Gear Solid V is an astounding game in many regards. It offers the best overall gameplay of the series, both in terms of stealth and combat. While the story admittedly doesn’t build up to the most satisfying whole, I’d argue that it has some of the most memorable moments of the series. It has a great soundtrack, both in terms of the music composed for the game and the licensed music you can listen to as you board your helicopter or search for resources. The way it does episodic credits was a strange move, but it was one that allowed me to see the names of those who worked so hard on this game and appreciate them. Fultoning people never got old.
But at some point, I began to turn on it. While there are certainly those who can appreciate a game that lasts one hundred plus hours, I’m rarely one of them. Moreover, I was getting sick of certain aspects of the grind. I chose not to participate in the online aspects of the game, thus I didn’t have as much money as I could’ve, thus I couldn’t afford to upgrade or buy much of what I wanted, thus the final battle was a nightmare that took what felt like several trillion years to complete. (I also refused to have any part of the game’s microtransactions.) On top of all this, right as I was reaching the endgame, news broke out about Konami’s, shall we say, less than ideal treatment of Kojima and it became clear that a lot of what I didn’t like about the game could be laid at Konami’s feet.
All of this left a sour taste in my mouth, and when I think of Metal Gear Solid V, I have to go out of my way to remember that it’s, mostly, a fantastic game. But I saw it to the bitter end, and I think less of it as a result.
When I dislike a game, I want to dislike it for the right reasons. I loathed Watch Dogs because it has a boringly nihilistic view of humanity and I disliked Far Cry 5 because it’s a toothless game with corny contrived writing and plotting. I should’ve given up on these games. I saw both to completion, and I don’t have any particularly compelling reason why other than I have some bizarre distaste for throwing in the towel early.
I’ve talked about this impulse before in my television viewing, and it’s the same impulse I want to get rid of in my gaming habits. So once again, I would like to chronicle why I did give up on certain games. However, that previous article was about shows I thought started great and went south. I think all three of the games I’m going to talk about in this article are, to this day, brilliant.
Games, by their nature, have a more ambiguous line between “bad” and “not for me.” I’ve had plenty of fun playing games I couldn’t connect to emotionally and some of my favorite games of all time are severely lacking in the gameplay department. So in the interest of exploring this divide, let’s look at some examples!
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor’s praises have been sung by many, and for good reason. The nemesis system was an innovative concept that surprisingly hasn’t been stolen by every game to come out after it. The combat felt incredible, and one could spend way too much time simply building massive combos and chopping off orc heads instead of moving the story forward. It was fun to attack targets using multiple styles of approach and many of its systems felt, at the time, like the peak of many gaming concepts we’ve all learned to love over the years.
It’s also a game with some rather noted criticisms. Many pointed out how underwhelmed they were by the quality of the writing and the storytelling. Indeed, from my time with the game, I can attest that Talion, the protagonist, is as boring as they come, and the story seemed generally dull, with Lord of the Rings related nouns plugged into a fairly generic fantasy revenge/justice story. This same sense of overfamiliarity can also be pointed at the gameplay. Though a refinement of what we’ve seen before, it’s still just that: What we’ve seen before. Arkham combat, Assassin’s Creed parkour, and various other aspects of various other games.
Though the narrative qualities were rather subpar, it had little to do with why I eventually gave up on the game before barely making a dent in the overall story.
I gave up Shadow or Mordor for two reasons.
The first reason arguably isn’t the game’s fault. You see, I really liked the nemesis system. I may have liked it a little too much. I liked it so much, in fact, that I spent most of my time with the game caught in a cycle of taking out nemeses or getting killed by them and seeking revenge. The more I saw that grid in the menu, the more I wanted to see it empty, and that meant getting rid of all my nemeses as quickly as possible. After a while, I found the constant hunt for nemeses overwhelming. There was a constant throb that would make itself known when I tried to play the campaign, and if I didn’t attend to that throb, it would drive me insane.
I realize I should’ve been playing the campaign instead of screwing around with all the nemesis stuff. But nothing in the game communicated to me that I shouldn’t. Or the more likely scenario, which is that I should’ve made that realization myself and I was a victim of my own attention span.
However, even if I stayed on the critical path, I don’t think it would’ve mattered because of my second reason. At the end of the day, I just didn’t like being in that world.
I came of gaming age in the Call of Duty era. The Gears of War era. The era where all the big games where grey, brown, green, and silver. The era of mud. As a result, I’m overly sensitive and biased against this particular aesthetic, and while Shadow of Mordor has a bit more of a palette than a lot of those games, I don’t think it does enough to distinguish itself in this regard. To me, Shadow of Mordor looks like something from that era. Maybe with a little more green.
Moreover, I didn’t like the unrelenting hostility of the world. How everyone who walked the mapped was out to get me, and I didn’t have any allies. That meant that I was constantly on edge, for I didn’t always want to end up in a massive fight or draw attention to myself. I wanted an easing of tension other than climbing the towers, and Shadow of Mordor provided none. Of course, the game does a brilliant job making you feel like a powerful god, and everyone on the map will eventually become your toy. But you have to want to get there in the first place.
I’m assuming that this doesn’t always remain the case. Or at least I hope it doesn’t. But from what I played, everything about the world, from the way it looked to the way you’re forced to interact in it, made me feel unwelcome. I began to wonder whether or not I wanted to spend what could be many hours in this environment, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t. And the fact that I didn’t care about any of the characters didn’t help either.
So I went and found a game that I wanted to play, and one that seemingly wanted me in return.
Baba is You
Puzzle games might be the easiest genre of video game to give up on.
The lot of them aren’t story based, so there’s no emotional pull bringing you back in, and they’re often difficult in a non-technical gameplay sense, thus they may not hold the attention of those who prefer “challenge” in the Super Meat Boy sense of the word.
For me personally, which puzzle games stick and which don’t is a bit of a crapshoot. I love The Witness and Fez is one of my favorite games of all time. (I still have my original Fez notes I made from my first playthrough.) But I didn’t stick with The Swapper or Antichamber. Neither are bad games. Not by a long shot. But something about them just didn’t grab me, and I’ve never really been able to tell whether its the mechanics or the visual presentation or some combination of factors, and I wound up frustrated. But not frustrated in a fun challenging way. Frustrated in a “If I stare at this puzzle any further and yet another idea I have for a solution fails, I’m going to ram my head through my television” way.
In other words, I tend to have a love it or hate it relationship with puzzle games. Baba is You is the first puzzle game in a long time that has fallen into some sort of middle ground. Kind of.
Here’s the thing: The thing you do in Baba is You, pushing the literal words of the rules around in order to craft a solution, is so goddamn cool and special. I love the visual presentation, I love many aspects of the game’s sound design, and I love… just about everything else. In fact, there’s a very real possibility Baba is You might end up on my top ten list come the end of the year.
That said, I made it up to World 3, the temple ruins. Around this time, I hit a wall. Not a particularly special wall, mind you. Just a level I couldn’t figure out. (I was running out of room on my Switch, and sadly, Baba is You had to go to make room, so I couldn’t look up which specific level. It was either 3-4, 3-5, or 3-6. Something like that.)
One commonality in the puzzle games I do like is the ability to go do something else if I’m stuck. In The Witness, when I couldn’t find the solution to the final monastery puzzle, I went to the beach for a while and figured out some shadow puzzles. In Fez, I didn’t feel like going through the settings and fiddling around with my console’s clock to get the clocktower anti-cubes, so I warped over to the purple zone and goofed around there for a while.
Baba is You doesn’t limit you to one puzzle at a time, but the only other options you have are similar puzzles with similar rules. Though solving one can (and usually does) inform how to solve the other, it’s not particularly helpful if you can’t solve any.
At this point in the game, a number of mechanics and concepts are interlocking with another. Floating words. Boxes. Multiple moving characters. The individual concepts aren’t hard to grasp, but my brain started to hurt when they started interacting with another, like the puzzle I kept banging my head against. I kept trying and trying, and at a certain point, I realized I was feeling more anger and frustration than curiosity and intrigue. I was reaching the point where my anger was about to consume all my other feelings for the game. and Baba is You is a special enough game that I didn’t want that to happen. So I walked away before those feelings could fester.
Baba is You is a fantastic game, but yes, I found it too hard for me and it was making me mad. I wanted to keep my love of it alive, so I stopped playing it. See? Giving up on games can be a good thing!
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
That thing you do at the core of XCOM? The actual combat part? It gets no better.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown came out the same year as season one of Telltale’s (RIP) The Walking Dead, the game I would probably call my favorite game of all time. If you pay an unhealthy amount of time paying attention to various websites’ top ten lists (which we shouldn’t, unless we’re looking for game recommendations), you may remember a lot of websites came down to XCOM vs. The Walking Dead.
Though I’m definitely team Walking Dead, I genuinely understand going the other way. Despite the technical issues, it’s just so goddamn fun. Ordering your troops to take cover. Seeing the whole board and picking your shots. Save scumming after losing the sniper you’ve spent a whole bunch of time leveling up. It’s damn near perfect.
The combat core of XCOM is undeniable. The problem I had was with pretty much everything else.
I don’t like management. (Not in video games, at least.) Give me a little bit of responsibility, upgrades and inventory and the like, and I’m fine. However, go a few steps beyond that, like managing an entire base and its development in the midst of an alien invasion like you do in XCOM, and I become overwhelmed and stressed out.
It’s one thing to build a base. However, as I said XCOM is a fantastic game, and as fantastic games are want to do, the base management has a direct impact on the combat. Thus I spent too much time in my own head, worrying about potential outcomes if I build this instead of that or upgrading one weapon over another or upgrading nothing and saving my resources, but potentially paying when it comes time to fight.
The further you get into the game, the more difficult the combat scenarios and the base management become. The combat was fun for its own sake for a while, but then the anxiousness I felt began to amplify. I began save scumming more and more, and the fights shifted in my head from, “Holy shit, this is fun!” to “Why didn’t I upgrade my fucking grenades! I could’ve taken out that asshole who killed (my beloved sniper) Rah Digga!” (To a certain extent, she was the backbone of my team. I would never allow anything to happen to her.)
Chaos is part of the point of XCOM. You can prepare for the next fight as much as you can, and it might not matter because you never know what the next battle may bring. But at a certain point, it was more than I wanted to handle.
I don’t remember if XCOM had a multiplayer mode. If it did, maybe I should’ve tried it out. I don’t remember if it had a quickplay mode or something like that either. If XCOM was just the combat with a lot less on the management end, it probably would’ve been more my speed. And to be perfectly honest, when I say I want less management, I don’t really know what that specifically looks like or means other than a general sense of “less.”
I understand some people want control of everything, and if you’re that kind of person, I can’t imagine a better game for you than XCOM: Enemy Unknown. (Or you’ve already played it and you know how awesome it is.) But if the aliens do invade, I don’t want to be in charge.
