In honor of No Man's Sky, a game I love to death in theory but have found myself fading from rapidly after its second week on my system, I've been thinking about other games I can recall being very very excited for that I ended up almost immediately discarding for one reason or another.
The first that springs to mind is The Witness. Turned out, my brain is not built for solving puzzles in three dimensional space. The first time I was presented with a puzzle that involved the trees in the environment, it took me four days to figure it out. Several times I came upon a puzzle set that I would breeze through two or three examples before hitting an insurmountable road block further down the chain. I scoured most of the island and, at some point, found no more "easy" level puzzles and just deleted the game from my hard drive.
Another is Tropico 5. I really had no idea what the game was but when it became a free PS+ game I was intrigued by the idea of a city/resort builder on PS4. So was my girlfriend. Unfortunately, we found the tutorial impenetrable and deleted the game within ten minutes.
Day of the Tentacle / Grim Fandango Remastered are a pair of games I had ultimate hype for, being that I'd played the DotT demo included with the Mac version of Full Throttle dozens of times and never owned a PC to play Grim Fandango on, but after an hour or two with both I felt equally satisfied with the experience and broken by the old adventure game logic. I've played a good number of adventure games but it's been a while since it was en vogue and, unless it's games I have completely memorized (probably just Full Throttle, The Dig and Monkey Island 3) I just don't think I can play them anymore. Some day when there isn't much else I'm interested in playing I'll definitely boot these up with a guide and play along to it with the commentary running. Which reminds me, I also thought I'd be really into Broken Age until, after a couple hours, I just wasn't.
Lastly, I'll mention Bioshock on PS3. Granted, by the time I'd come to it I knew all the twists and turns, themes and had seen a lot of the art in screenshots, so for me it was more of an exercise in experiencing something held to such high praise by others while knowing it wouldn't be such a revelation for me. What I didn't expect was the odd control scheme, or the weirdly difficult normal combat, or the brutal Big Daddy encounters. In two or three hours I likely died over 20 times, and resigned myself to the fact this was a game I'd likely never complete and that, for all its minor flaws, Bioshock Infinite was my preferred mode of Bioshock.
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