I haven't quit any games yet myself this year, but here's the place to post if you have :)!

Blood 2. Blood in 3D is a messy ol boy.

Not voluntarily, but Lands Of Lore - The Throne of Chaos when I find out, that I am not able lockpick lock before room with unicorn statue.

**RANT WARNING**

Fate/Grand Order


Start: 2018, just before a December event that I failed to cash in on.
Quit: Not long ago from this posting.

For the uninitiated, I would best describe F/GO as a gatchapon game (capsule toy) that is basically like pokemon with all the fun bits taken out, leaving you with just the battles.

I've had a friend trying to get me into the Fate/Subtitle universe for a while yet, but while many of the background concepts and ideas interest me, the simple fact is, the presentation is utter bollocks. In no uncertain terms, it started as a visual novel, the same year Phoenix Wright premiered in Japan. The problem is, my first visual novel was Phoenix Wright which just whips most visual novels in terms of presentation alone, and then kicks them while they're down by having a layer of interactivity aside from "Do you want girl A or B" or "Pick this one if you're an idiot."

The visual novel also takes the player aside to explain the concept of Mana. Which would be fine if the demographic was around the age of 10, but the thing is, the VN is clearly made for mature audiences. This is a minor issue but is still sightly insulting. (And baffling that it didn't ask if the player understood.) The bigger issue is a matter of text pacing, or rather the amount of tweaking expected of a reader to find a reasonable pace, when there isn't a proper preview option. The sliders were absolutely granular, meaning there were no presets or clicks. (In a range of digits well over 1000, if I recall.)

There's the anime. It's boring. The prologue is an hour and a half slog split into two episodes where it explains everything to death. I don't need constant action, suspense or a 50 arc mystery. It just failed completely to engage me. Much like the visual novel, it was far too slow to get to anything resembling a reasonable pace. (I've watched a variety of anime; Mushi-Shi, Ace Attorney, Cute Earth Defense Force, Toradora, and How to Keep a Mummy, etc.) I've watched Doctor Who's entire War Games serial in one sitting.

So then there's the mobile game. Rather insidiously, the balance is at first favorable as to bait players along. There's the occasional roadblock, but the player is empowered with abilities such as total party revival with limit breaks ready. (Training facilities help reduce the initial grind.) So you progress normally, and then right around the 4th World, it becomes suspect the game is no longer respecting your time as a player. By the 5th, blatantly obvious, with most battles reaching the lofty realms of damage sponges for no good reason, and what feels like a universal damage reduction on the opponent side. At my breaking point, at the start of the 6th world, it was a 19 turn slog though several 100,000+HP flunkies. Which reminded me just a little too much why I retired from Pokemon.

Many times I've entered a battle expecting one class to be the major threat, only to have some other class be the leading threat and thus soak though two servants before I reach the actual threat, by which point my intended unit is KO'd.

Thus, my quitting.

Dungeon Keeper Gold. I strained myself to reach stage 13 (or 14?)... But poor level design and strange difficulty curves, really shocked me. 2 was much better for me in many aspects, gameplay included, which i completed back in the day. While i liked it a lot and i also enjoyed the different creatures, i really think it is lacking in a sense... Or something like incomplete? I had high expectations and i first played 2... Maybe that's why i couldn't be better "friends" with it, i don't know. I quit.

Assassins Creed: Syndicate (PS4) (<--- GOG forum won't let me put an apostrophe inside the title...)

This was the second AC game I’ve played (the first being Black Flag, which I played almost 2 years ago). I thought Black Flag was an OK game (good in portions but with some flaws), and I thought the Victorian setting of Syndicate sounded fun, so I gave it a try.

They attempting to improve the controls in this game by adding different keys for “free run up” and “free run down” but I *still* ended up with my character not going where I wanted half of the time, so in practice it wasn’t a big improvement.

There are two characters in the game, in the open-world section you can choose to play whichever you want, but for the story missions the game forces one or the other upon you depending on the mission (which sucks, because I only wanted to play as Evie and not as Jacob).

Syndicate was fun at the start for the first several hours, but eventually it just got too repetitive and same-y. It’s entirely set in city of London, and there’s nothing different to do (unlike Black Flag which had a sailing/pirating/swimming in addition to the land-based activities). All the “different” activities in Syndicate are simply small variations with very few substantial differences. The historical characters you meet (eg Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell) are very unconvincing in my opinion, and didn’t entice me to care more about their missions.

I don't think I'll be trying another AC game in the near future, if I ever feel the urge I'll just go back and replay Black Flag.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong

I enjoyed the first two games in this series, so I thought naturally I would also enjoy the 3rd!

However, I found the writing in this game to be just too much for me, the conversations were just so long and boring that it simply felt like a slog and I couldn’t bear it. I even took a break from this game a couple of months ago and just came back to it now hoping that I could enjoy it again, maybe I was just feeling burnt out or something back then, but nope. I don’t know if it’s objectively worse than the previous games, or if I’m just getting bored of it.

I only got about 6 hours in, so I didn’t have a chance to encounter the “real time” matrix, but I honestly wasn’t looking forward to that (I always prefer turn-based combat), so it just gave me more motivation to quit.

Anoxemia

The game starts off as promising and mysterious but ends up dull and even more mysterious with many questions unanswered.
Plus the game is way too dark.
After playing the game for 30 minutes or so, I called it quits. Checked the dumb ending on youtube and did not regret quitting the game.

IIRC, the matrix is only real time as long you are not discovered by the bots. If you get near one and it spots you, the ensuing combat is turn-based again.

I haven't managed to play through Hong Kong so far either though, despite at least two attempts. I don't quite know why, and haven't completely given up on it yet, but still ...

EDIT:
Nevermind, I spoke too soon. Despite better judgement I actually finished the game.

These both come with a caveat since I'm quitting only in the sense that they're being removed from my library:

Darkstone

Some GOG forum regular had pitched this in one of the ARPG threads, so I put it on my WL here and at steam, and voila, it came up on Steam sale for $0.99. Sold!

On the whole I think it's pretty good (and kinda crying out for a low budget independent dev remake/clone, frankly). The issue really came down to the game really having little/no in-game info like tooltips, online references being slim/none, and the Steam version not coming with a manual.

A lot of the game is reasonably intuitive for anyone who has played arpgs generally, but it's pretty old school and a few systems are not obvious at all - esp. skills and to a lesser extent spells. So I returned it and got my $0.99 back. Perhaps should have just held onto it in the slim chance it comes up on GOG connect. Anyway.

Will definitely look to pick it up again next time it's discounted into my price range here on GOG, which does come with the manual PDF.

Civ VI
I only accessed this as a temporarily free to play game on Steam after returning Darkstone.

On the whole, I'm not sure what to think. Some of the changes I definitely did like (the expansion of the civics/government systems), others are creative but seem potentially unbalanced or off-putting at first blush (the "boost" feature for research led to some suboptimal gameplay decisions to get said boost), and the biggest core change - city "districting" I'd probably have to play a lot more to have an informed opinion, but on the whole I wasn't in love with.

Aside from the fact you'd probably have to play through a half-dozen times BEFORE really learning to use it well, I think my bigger objection is that (it may not, but my perception was) that it seems to force you towards mid- to large- sized civs, whereas particularly Civ V made winning with 1-2 city civs both interesting and viable. Plus it requires some significant planning ahead to long-term land-use decisions in a game where some key resources aren't even revealed until late game.

Also, probably is adjustable in the settings, but at least on the default, the game speed seems really slow, even by Civ standards. In 5 hours on a small map (4 civs), on a relatively easy setting (Warlord, so it's not like I was using time researching how to play, just learning on the fly), with only a few cities and units to manage I'd barely made it out of the medieval era.

I think I probably will play it again someday, but probably not until it's deeply discounted. Ultimately an interesting iteration, but not compelling enough to drop big money when I already have Civ 3-5 + Alpha Centauri to scratch that itch with.

There do seem to be concerns in other reviews about the game running background "spyware" but nothing pinged for me and I didn't look into it too deeply since I was only going to have it installed a few days.

Spelunky

Yeah, after what I put myself through to finish Rogue Legacy, I think I'd rather quit while I'm ahead. Had fun, made it to the ice caverns, but I just don't feel like putting in the couple dozen more hours to hopefully come close to beating the game. And all the while hoping the random level generation doesn't screw me over at some point :P

So far, it looks like

* Doom 3: BFG Edition - Bored, really. Am on Underground 1, really can't be arsed to go further.
* Wasteland 2 - Really disappointed with the frequent need to replay 2 to 3 hours to get the desired effect, and the story itself isn't worth continuing to its conclusion. Still have it installed in case I change my mind, but... meh.
* Slime Rancher - Made the mistake of breeding phase slime with crystal slime. Now I have massive teleporting spikeballs that leave trails of destruction behind them wandering through my ranch. Haven't been able to bring myself to open the save file since then. (The fact that it sometimes lags even on minimum settings because of my low-end video card just exacerbates the matter).
* Lego Indiana Jones - We'll see. I just did two more levels after almost 4 months of inactivity... might not end up quit yet.

It's always difficult to keep oneself from that when reading about how someone gives up on a beloved game :)

Though the generator can screw you over in some cases, rarely, granted, it's more that it can generate both easy and more difficult levels. And my skill level is just not good enough to repeatedly deal with difficult levels :P
I think it's just not my type of game - I get way too frustrated getting my skill to the required level. Weirdly I didn't have this problem with super meatboy, but I definitely had it with rogue legacy. Eh, perhaps I'll try again one evening - see if I can get the jetpack + shotgun combo. Do you like to kill the shopkeepers?