Me, I never gotten into old-school roguelike. You known, those ASCII-art turnbased things. I tried the original Rogue, but before I had gotten it to work with a danish keyboard, I lost interest. Also tried Swords of The Stars: The Pit, but got annoyed by the zoom function which forces me to choose between great-looking sprites or better overview. I tried Tales of Maj'Eyal where I created a character which imedially got killed by some creature. Tried
Bionic Dues, but failed to grasp the fun. Tangledeep had a cute art style, but it just felt cheap and low-stake, moving about constantly to avoid loosing a few life point.

I had high hopes for Caves of Qud. It just looked so deep and inspired. Alas, there were a massive learning curve with tons of lore, and it was really hard getting drawn into the world with no visuals to guide me; With Rogue you just were in a dungeon, so you sorta knew how it was supposed to look, but it's harder with this scifi-fantasy thing. One thing I noticed was that I felt the game was much more engaging when I picked a perk making me halfway blind, so that I could only see a few blocks away.

Jupiter Hell was fun, though. The solid production value really helped.

Thea - The Awakening is a game that I had been lurking around for a good while before I finally bought it. But I have a bit of trouble "getting" it. I have some people in my village slowly producing stuff, and some adventures going back and forth between discovering stuff and travelling home again ... but I'm clueless if what I do makes any sense.

Too many to list. I'll try to stick to some notable titles:

Dark Souls
I can't stand anything about these games. The fandom doesn't help either. Curiously, I do have an interest in quite a few souls-like games.

Max Payne 3
Loved the first two. Hated this one from beginning to end.

Torchlight
I'd heard nothing but praise, but it bored me to tears. Maybe I just don't like action RPGs.

Bastion
and Transistor
I started playing but lost interest. The artwork is beautiful enough that I'm sure I'll reinstall and finish them eventually. But the story and the gameplay didn't appeal to me, so it's more like a chore that I'm putting off.

Curiously, I have purchased Dark Souls 2 twice, I have Demon's Souls, and I have Dark Souls but aside from Nioh I cannot get into this style of game. In personal discussions my complaints have been levelled away with "git gud" but I am pretty sure that cannot be it. I want to like these games but it has not happened just yet.

With regards to Max Payne 3, I actually played the games over the course of January. I liked Max Payne and wanted very much to be one of those people who loves 2 and disliked 3 but after playing them I have to report that I thought 2 was fine but not anything in the realm of great. I thought it was not quite where the first game was (barring the awful nightmare stages where I suffered the majority of my in game deaths) and actually had a really good time with Max Payne 3. It is a cover based TPS but that never bothered me in the first place. I'll probably go on about it in the Games Finished thread.

I love Torchlight but I also love Diablo III, Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, and Van Helsing so that answers that.


Games I could personally not get into include:

Final Fantasy XV: I doubt this one is too surprising but this game is boring when I'm getting it and annoying when I am not.

The Last of Us: Same reasons but different game. When the game feels like it's making sense I am bored, when it does not I find it annoying. Also, I am not fond of the narrative so a game this oriented around the story is probably not going to go anywhere.

Dragon Age Inquisition: I love the first game. I played the second actually a little bit ago on Xbox back compat and while it was not brilliant I did have fun (it is basically inferior to the first in every way and then it changed things so it sucks) fair warning I did play it on training wheels difficulty since it was not a game I was valuing for the gameplay as much as the conversations and plot (which was mixed but not bad). However, the third game has fewer occasions to even speak with your companions, the main point of interest in these games. The quests are weak and do not really contribute to the world building, the combat is filled with problems, and the graphics are a lot of wow mixed with ugh. It's main crime is unfortunately that the game is boring. I feel like it was trying to compete with Red Dead Redemption and Ubisoft games and filled the map with unfun garbage that, in an RPG, leaves one anxious to leave behind so you run around doing these boring quests and then remember that you did not replenish your potions so when you stumble across either a rift or the thousandth skirmish between Templars and mages you have to constantly revive your party members who, once more, do not even have much to say so far.

I might think of more but that is good for now.

Baldur's Gate:
* Real time with pause combat doesn't work for me. (It combines the worst parts of turn based and real time combat, while lacking the rhythm of turn based and the fluidity of real time.)
* Low level D&D is not fun, and it takes too long to level up.
* Then the game threw an enemy that cast Improved Invisibility, which my level 1 party had no way to counter. At this point I rage quit.

I did give Baldur's Gate 2 more of a chance, but even then I didn't enjoy actually playing that much; I probably spent more time experimenting than actually playing through the game. (I did get to Chapter 5, however.)

Speaking of ascii art, check this one out: Stone Story rpg.

Factorio
Turns out being asked to create an industrial hellscape just isn't my thing, especially given the overwraught crafting trees. It has that problem that not enough gets automated until the very late game, and then by that point it becomes a dull grind while you wait for research to painstakingly inch across. The devs are such fine fellows as to not even let you enqueue projects until after you've beat the main scenario once.

Most JRPGs.
This is largely a taste thing, but I do prefer the simpler progression of things like Terranigma or Soul Blazer, where the game doesn't strictly gate you by forcing 6-8 hours of grind. Opinions as they may be, but Final Fantasy 7 Remake does appear to be the logical evolution of the genre instead of rote unit pushing.

Civilization III, specifically.
I've gotten on, or at the least, understand enough about Civ I, II, SMAX, and Civ IV to understand what makes them tick. Civ 3 introduced strategic resources which are basically resource gates for certain advancements. Problem is, the map only spawns one per map. Meaning if your coal ends up on an island somewhere, sucks to be you, as you cannot make a ship that leaves the coast without it until very late game. But that's not all.
There's also the non-zero chance that a resource in use will just up and migrate elsewhere.

Most JRPGs don't force that; that sort of balance was largely abandoned in the SFC/SNES era. Final Fantasy 4, for example, can be played straight through, fighting battles as they come, exploring the game (in particular, getting all the summons as well as all of the final dungeon treasures), without having to mindlessly fight enemies for XP. Later games, with only a few exceptions, tend to follow this approach.

There's also the problem of navigating the games. I prefer self contained levels over sprawling dungeons.

I'll have to second the Baldur's Gate series. Real time with pause is an abomination IMO.

My gamer friends are always shocked to discover that I couldn't get into Chrono Trigger. Everything about the look and feel of the game just grated on me, and I never went back to it after a few attempts.

Apart from almost all strategy, simulation and sports games I tried, if I only look at popular games in genres I'm usually drawn to, then maybe ...

Deus Ex series - not really sure why, I guess I'm just not that interested in their setting or I think it's presented in kind of a bland way? Tried the first several times (starting with the long tutorial every time, so that I was already exhausted when the actual game started - voiceovers are rather boring in this, too), then Human Revolution, then even the unpopular Invisible War, all different from each other, all kind of okayish to me but never interesting enough to keep me hooked for a long time.

Thief series - I probably lack the patience for the slow gameplay of sneaking around, waiting and observing patterns all the time; I generally don't seem to get along with stealth games that well. I stil haven't given up on the thought of playing through the Dishonored games some day, but I don't think I will warm up to Thief anymore.

The Witcher series - three different games (if you don't count the board game and that other tactical title), could not really get into any of them (although admittedly with the third one it's mostly system requirements that hindered me to even give it a fair try). The second one I only played for a few minutes before quitting, the first one I played for hours (up to the second chapter or so? where you're in the city). There were parts I liked about it, but I hated how much time is wasted on backtracking (what's the deal with these huge fenced off pastures in the first chapter that you have to run around every time, no shortcuts for you?), how pointless the loot system is, and the first boss fight was one of the most terrible I've seen in an RPG (didn't help that it was precluded by a looong conversation that you have to repeat every time after you die within seconds). I ultimately abandoned it because I took a break in the city part and when I tried to get back into it, the journal was no help at all (new stages in a quest had overwritten crucial information concerning what the quest was even about). I also tried to read Sapkowski's stories, but either the German translation is bad or the writing doesn't really appeal to me.

Dark Souls - I guess this is the most predictable of my entries; I just don't get along with the idea of bonfires instead of manual saving or fair checkpoints and I hate battles with big ass bosses while being locked into tight spaces. I never got past the first boss outside of the Asylum; the boss battle would have been frustrating enough on its own, but being set back that much before I could retry it was just too much to bear (I don't even like having to watch the cutscene that comes before it, letalone run the whole way back to the boss while avoiding minor enemies). I do like the exploration aspect of it, the atmospheric part that reminds me of games like Arx Fatalis or Severance / Blade of Darkness, carefully roaming around in creepy ruins and stuff, but the "git gud" part of it does not appeal to me at all. (A pity that "souls-like" often means the latter and not the former, so most of them are not my cup of tea either.)

Assassin's Creed series - dunno, I think in this case it might be that I perceive the games as too formulaic; it's not very immersive if I think "okay, this is one of these missions again, where you have to do this and that for a given time (yawn)" instead of getting into the setting, or if enemies respawn right in front of my eyes, freed slaves are back in captivity after the mission - okay, the last two happened in Freedom Cry, which is just a glorified DLC, so maybe not fair, but it expresses how I feel about all the games I've tried - they are a bit too game-y, I get the impression that they just try to keep me occupied with the same things over and over again, without it really meaning much in the end, and I know that this is true for games in general, especially open world games, but others seem to be doing a better job of hiding it from me and keeping me immersed and entertained.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw was pretty and seems entertaining. Music is fitting. The controls however are such a dumpster fire as to make the game unplayable. Everything over takes you. So if the difficulty were lowered it becomes unrealistic. The problem is that it doesnt allow missions to let the player do something besides fighting to earn cash, in order to buy upgrades. Freelancer did this and you had to grind over and over and reload areas a gazillian times or just stop playing.

Freelancer did kind of allow missions and trade routes enough to not force the player into rage quitting. But it was random encounters that always made you feel like a trader could be jumped any time. Such games should have allowed for optional paid and similar travel route companions. That would have made playing so much better.

Oh yeah, that too. The traditional combat system in many of them just bores me and it doesn't help that combat is frequent and often with minor enemies (auto win). Of course, WRPGs have easy and repetitive combat encounters, too, but at least the context (e.g. terrain, positioning etc.) is a little bit different every time, which helps to make them more memorable. I don't like the style of JRPG where "tactics" just means going through menus, selecting the same options over and over again, while looking at a very static battle scene outside of the game world. No flanking enemies, no shooting from higher positions, no taking cover, no luring opponents into traps etc., just the same slow Attack/Heal/Special Attack or Magic routine every round. And yes, I'm prejudiced, but so far most JRPGs I've tried confirmed the prejudices. I'd like to see JRPGs that differ fromt he formula, but would they still be JRPGs then? I had fun with Fortune Summoners, for example, but I guess it's more of a platformer with JRPG elements.

Since this is something that comes up every now and then: you can read all quest entries in The Witcher 1, even from completed phases. They are hidden by default but you can toggle them on.

Well, the thing is, there are tactical RPGs, and about the only one I could get on with was Live-a-Live because you're never commanding more than a few units, instead of playing a turn based strategy. People seem fond of Ogre Battle, as I recall.