What's your favourite game that you've never finished?

Darkest Dungeon is a game that I've put many, many hours into, so it is safe to say that I enjoy its stress-inducing turn-based gameplay very much, but confession time: I've never actually completed it. Whenever I get to the gates of the titular Darkest Dungeon, I just don't have the skill or patience to push through its daunting challenge. So instead I restart the game because like I said, I get a kick out of the turn-based combat and I want to play more of it. And for the record, I'm now currently on my fourth playthrough. Darkest Dungeon is a rare case of a game that I love but will likely never see the ending credits of.

And so I was wondering if anyone else has had that particular game that they enjoyed playing but (for whatever reason) remains unfinished?

Theme Hospital? That's one of those games that is a joy to boot up when you get the itch to play it, but after finishing 7-ish levels, that itch has been scratched properly and the difficulty gets quite high and suddenly it feels like you're fighting the underlying mechanics of the game itself to make sure that you can actually see the mouse-holes with your camera position or know the exact optimal sizes of each room and understand exactly how the pathing of the visitors will work out for you. At that point, i tend to tap out.

A game like Dungeon Keeper 2 is similar for me. Love playing it, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore to finish.

Black & White? Ditto.

Trails in the Sky, according to Steam i played it for 12 hours and was absolutely loving it, i'd even just encountered a new funny character i wanted to see more of before i stopped.

I went into it knowing JRPG's can be really long, but what shook me was after so many hours being confronted with "Chapter 1", apparently i was in chapter zero the entire time, i played for a few hours after that but dropped off, that was apparently 7 years ago and i really want to start it from the beginning and do the whole thing, but i haven't exactly gained more free time since then.

@cikame: Yeah that happened to me as well. I was annoyed by how easy it is to miss out on sidequests if you don't check after each story development and missed something. Then some characters were lame and i ended up doing a lot of meaningless filler 'kill this enemy' quests and fell like i had my fill of this game.

Also Darkest Dungeon. I put over 100 hours into that game and never cracked the code for that last dungeon. I could consistently keep my guys alive and level up fine and gear up and that whole process became smooth, but then the last dungeon kicked my ass every fucking time. I only got to the last fight maybe twice.

And I loved it. I loved losing my guys. I loved the panic of knowing you are a true badass but suddenly knowing you are out of your league. Even when I finally decided to move on and accept that I’ll never earn the ending, I didn’t mind.

@tartyron: My main issue with conquering the last dungeon is that the enemies have such a high dodge stat, not to mention all the de-buffs they inflict when they hit you.

Persona 5. I loved it so much when I started it up and played for about 30 hours, but, I didn't have the time to play, put it on the backburner, where it remains to this day, but I really liked it.

Every Forza Horizon game. I love them so much in the beginning, but again, I don't have the time, nor the patience to go all in, so they get left behind with love.

Minecraft is apperantly finishable now? I'll never finish it, because I am at a point where I played enough Minecraft to never want to touch it again, but it's still one of my favorite games.

I absolutely love Bloodborne and watching others play Bloodborne. But I've never beat it myself. I think I'd be able to at this point since I've beaten Sekiro & most of Elden Ring, but don't see the point since I've watched at least 4 full playthroughs.

Into the Breach is one of those games that I love playing in 30 minutes chunks, but I've never had a successful run.

Oxygen Not Included, hands down. My Steam says I have 340 hours in the game, never made it past mid-game. I dunno how many times I've spent a day re-building my starter base only to run into some issue with running out of water, or generating too much heat or whatever. The furthest I've ever gotten was to a point where I had a decent smelting set up, a fully automated hatch kill room and I had just finished building a steam power setup, only to realize the setup I was using was from a different patch and I had just spent a bunch of time building something that was completely useless.

Love the game though, both it's pure gameplay mechanics and all the underlying systems, but oh god does it suffer from being nearly impregnable.

Dang. Darkest Dungeon is a great choice but I think I’ve gotta go with Skyrim. I’ve poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into that game across multiple consoles and still haven’t beaten the main quest line.

Another front runner would be Divinity Original Sin 2. I absolutely adore this game yet never finished it. This one I do intend to finally beat one of these days. Now that I have a Steam Deck that’s much more likely to happen.

I was literally just talking about how I've never finished any tactics game I've started, with exception of Divinity Original Sin 2. I'd wager Advance Wars 1, 2 or Dual Strike all count as "Favourite game(s) I've never finished". I think I'm too stupid to be able to adequately determine what units I need to generate to counteract the opponent's force.

Final Fantasy 7. I was on the third disc and my save got corrupted (shitty 3rd party memory card). Couldn't bring myself to start it again.

Probably Bloodborne. I loved every second of it, but eventually had to put the controller down to focus on school. I never went back to it. Maybe if Sony invested in a PS5 update I'd go back.

Elden Ring. I feel like I have experienced enough of it to feel fulfilled by it. I am set on Souls games for a bit I think.

Cyberpunk 2077 due to my dumb OCD habit of playing the game for 10's of hours for a week or two before something else catching my attention and starting Cyberpunk again with a new character because I haven't played the game in months despite playing it again and pretty much making the same story decisions and picking the same skill trees.

Cyberpunk has become my new Fallout 4.

Fallout New Vegas.

I literally got to the last mission and burned out.

The new Hollow Knight: Silksong trailer that just dropped reminded me that I never finished the original Hollow Knight, despite loving it to pieces.

I actually remember why I stopped playing it, too. I was near the end (I think), but wanted to get a couple of "unbreakable" charms, earned by giving the breakable versions to an NPC and then paying her a whole crap ton of money. So it was going to be a real grind to do that. I thought, "Hmm, I want to get those charms, but I don't want to grind right now, maybe I'll play another game and come back to this later." Then I just... never went back to it.

Maybe I should fire it up and finish it now. I dunno. I'm a little worried that since it's been years, I'll simply get my ass handed to me, trying to pick things up right at the end of the game.

@purpleshyguy: Oh, hey, same. I also haven't finished Darkest Dungeon yet.

Other than that, I consider myself haven't finished up Skyrim and Fallout 4. I got the ending, but not yet 'finish' or 'complete' the game.

Because I'm me, I just have to name a handful.

Bloodborne is the big one. I like to say I've beaten it due to the amount of times I've watched others beat it but have never made it to the end myself. I've played it probably 5 times, getting further every time. I first killed the Cleric Beast on March 6th 2018, first beat Micolash July 6th 2020. Couldn't say why I put the game down again after that other than I did.

Disco Elysium is another. Love the music, the writing, the vibe, how variable your character is...but around the 3rd, 4th or 5th day I feel like the game loses a bit of momentum, or at least it always has for me. I say always have because I've played those first three days with five different characters and still think just as highly of it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown also stands out in my memory. I've played the first few hours many times, but whether it's losing a high value soldier or just feeling a little overwhelmed in general by one particular challenge or another, I wind up discouraged at some point and just want to start over.

I'll also raise my hand for Final Fantasy VII. For a long time I held a grudge against the game for being so much more popular than Final Fantasy VIII, but one summer in college I gave it one more shot and got absolutely hooked. Unfortunately, one of my common traits with Abby Russell is a tendency to keep a single save file which bit me in the ass when I wound up saved just before the JENOVA fight in the canyon without enough health items to either survive the fight or, more importantly, fight my way back out of the canyon to go grind some XP or hit up a shop. Sucked.

Lastly I'd like to mention Hotline Miami, which is cool as all hell and I still jump back to play the first two or three levels every couple years but that game just feels real impossible to play on a Playstation controller real quick.

Final Fantasy X. I think I got very close to the end of that game but never fully finished it. Lots of fond memories of playing it though.

Super Mario 3D World would probably be mine. That last challenge level is infuriatingly impossible, but I love that game from a level design standpoint. A more recent one would be Tunic. I liked what I played, but got to a point where I wasn't sure where to go next, and I don't really want to look it up because that contradicts the whole point of the game.

@atheistpreacher: That game has an interesting end structure.

Because the main objectives are all fairly easy, but there's a lot of challenge to be found if you stray from the main quests. That means that if you just want to finish the game without going for a 'true ending', that's a fairly do-able affair for someone that has dabbled with side-content here and there. But for the people that want to squeeze everything out of the game, it has one extremely difficult optional combat challenge and a very difficult optional platform challenge. After doing these, and some of the side bosses, the standard end-boss was quite easy, because the game doesn't seem interested in forcing it's players to seek out all the difficult bosses and challenges if they don't want to do that, but still be able to finish the game.

Mine has to be Dead Cells. I've put over a hundred hours in that game playing it on and off for the last 4 years. I've never made it past 2 Boss Cells. I love the game to pieces, and think it is one of the best controlling games of all time. But the hand of the king is a bastard, and he always puts an end to my runs no matter how well equipped I am.

I started playing Hitman (the new trilogy) and it seemed fun but I never got very far and kept getting bored...not sure why! This was a couple months ago. Any game that I like I finish, I can't remember a game except for that one

@onemanarmyy: Hmm, yeah, we'll see. I'm normally the obsessive sumbitch who wants to do all the things. But I loaded up the game and checked when I last played it, and it was three years, five months ago. I've completely lost the plot, so to speak. No earthly idea what I'm supposed to do next, or even which bosses I've even defeated, etc. But maybe I'll just wander around the world for a while and see what I run into. At this stage just seeing credits roll would be fine by me.

I haven’t finished these but I will at somepoint. In both cases I realized way too late I wasn’t in the mindset for a 100+ hour game atm. I did quite enjoy both.

Dragon Quest 8 and Breath of the Wild

Dead Cells is mine. I've talked before about how I seemed to prefer having less options because the drops worked in my favour. Unlocking more weapons just muddied that pool to the point where I couldn't get a run for that lass boss.

Add Salt & Sanctuary to this as well. Something about that last boss felt too tanky for my to persevere with it.