Many. I don't tend to remember those. Artsy, pretentious point and clicks, clunky garbage platformers, completely unoriginal grindfest (J)RPG and great/cold war actions. For every game of those that's great, it feels like there are twenty that are absolutely worthless.

I bailed on Dark Souls because the saving mechanic annoyed me so much. As an old PC gamer anything without quicksave annoys me, let alone the way that game works. Everything else is so good about it though I plan to try again someday.

I have bounced off pretty much every rogue-like I ever played, because I just don't enjoy the basic repetition mechanics of them. This sadly includes Deathloop, which was made by one of my favorite studios. I rushed to beat it ASAP but didn't enjoy it much.

The Final Fantasy 9 thing reminds me a bit of Star Ocean: The Second Story, which had Private Actions. The party breaks up when vising towns with everyone going about their own business. During these private actions, the player character can spend time with other party members. Spending times with party members allows you to become friends with them, which impacts ending scenes.

I don't mind only being able to save at certain points, as I am used to it having grown up primarily on console games. (This comes with the condition that save opportunities come up reasonably often; a few games, like Megaman 4-6 and Final Fantasy 3, end with segments that are too long and don't allow saves.)

What I *do* mind, on the other hand, is when games don't allow me to reset and go back to a previous save if something bad happens. If there's going to be a penalty for death, I want the option of reloading and losing everything since the save instead of taking the penalty. (Also, I'm of the opinion that there *shouldn't* be penalties for death.)

Lol same. I managed to beat the Asylum Demon after lots of frustrating trial and error, but not long later I realized this game is just fundamentallly not fun for me.

The Witcher, the gameplay just isn't very engaging.

Thief: The Dark Project, I loved the first level but then you got thrown into a mine with zombies sucked all the fun out of it and after that the gameplay more becomes a hoops course than a stealth game, still the game has a good setting and atmosphere.
In contrary to most people here I prefer the stealth of the Hitman games.

Deus Ex: Invisible War, broken gameplay mechanics destoyed the fun I had, along with the constrained levels.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, lacks the atmosphere of the original, didn't enjoy the heavily filtered graphics and just couldn't get interested into the boring story and dialogs
Looking back I wasn't the greatest fan of the original Deus Ex but at least it got a great atmosphere, quirky but fun dialogs and I think the minimalist artstyle, forced by limited computational power, worked in its favour.

Commandos, I would have liked it a lot more if all characters could perform basic tasks like climbing over walls and driving vehicles instead of heavily limiting the way you can complete a level.

GTA IV, apart from it being a crap running pc port, again stupid visual filtering which makes Liberty City (aka. New York) look like a desert city, it just showed the pointlessness of playing anything besides the main story missions and I didn't find these a lot of fun to play.
Personally I prefer openworld games like Just Cause 2 or Crackdown, which have a lot more destruction going for it and a more focused gameplay loop.

Hey, you made it further in than I did! I hated the design of that first boss so much that I didn't bother.
I liked the first game a whole lot, and loved the second. So I'm wondering if you played the games back in their heyday circa 1999 or more recently.

I can't seem to get into any citybuider. In theory buidling a huge settlement sounds fun but I just get quickly bored when there's no challenge or ultimate goal to achieve.

Tropico 4 was too easy, Caesar 3/Pharaoh are glorified puzzle games with a citybuilder setting, Simcity 3000/4 were boring...I can see how good these games are but they do nothing for me.

I did enjoy Constructor a lot as a kid but that was ruined when I learned how much the AI cheats. Factorio was also very engaging but lost all interest after I launched the rocket.

I plan to buy Oxygen Not Included when I get a better videocard. But if that doesn't appeal to me as well then I'll give up on this genre altogether.

If a game has too many cutscenes that are not skippable, I will not want to play it.

I feel this way with the Witcher 3. While I can objectively see that a lot of care and artistry were taken in making the game, I just can't get engaged and immersed... and I've easily played over 100 hours trying to find that experience.

Looking at this thread I keep thinking of more games that I "couldn't get into," and that has started me thinking that... the majority of games I play I just don't "get into." Still, for me, there was a "sweet spot" during the PS3/X360 generation where I found many titles extremely engaging and "got into" a lot of them.

Both, and actually a bit more back in the days, but never really far. Not quite when it came out though, maybe 2 or 3 years after. I think it's just the whole genre in my case. I like being sneaky in RPGs, just for the fun of it, but I don't like it if my character's life depends on it and being discovered is as good as game over. Though tbh at this point I don't really know how the first Thief plays anymore and whether that even applies to it, it's more spoken in general, about other games in the genre.

I confined myself to popular series, because otherwise there would be no end to my lists, heh. I guess for every game I get drawn into, there are, like, ten I've tried that left me cold. Many aren't even all that bad, just not exciting enough that I feel I have to play them either. And there are many that I enjoy for a little while but never finish (including almost all rogue-likes and -lites I tried).

I can relate to most of the games you pointed out, although I haven't played all of them. I have to be honest, I didn't like the Witcher 3 at first and I still think the Witcher 1 and 2 are pretty overrated.

The "tutorial" area in W3, White Orchard, is just so boring and bland. The quests are, for the most part, generic and dull. But I kept playing because I heard so many good things about it. At the end of the White Orchard part the game really picks up and once you reach the "free" roam kind of gameplay it quickly became one of my most memorable and favorite games. CDPR finally fixed the pacing, which was lacking in the previous Witcher games, loot is suddenly interesting, the minigames are worthwhile, the open world feels alive, etc.

If you can get a decent computer or console you can have a lot of fun, and more importantly, good memories about the Witcher 3!

Around 2004 I think, so the game was a couple of years old by then.