I have just finished The Dream Machine yesterday, and it truly was... something. I guess. Such a weird experience.

The game is divided into 6 chapters (or 7, the last one being short epilogue with basically no gameplay). Had the game ended with chapter 5, I would probably consider it one of the best point & click adventures I played, with a truly unique ar style, original story and puzzles that all hit that sweet spot where they are neither too easy nor either ever nonsensical moon logic and solving them feels very rewarding.

But the game kept going, and going and going past what felt like the climax both in terms of story and puzzles, into another long chapter that felt like boring slog, the story devolved into increasingly pretentious, disjointed nonsense, all the fun evaporated, and then the ending was one of the worst I ever experienced (without too much spoilers, all the time and effort of your adventure is invalidated, you only ever made things worse in the story, the villain wins, and the protagonists whole character arc is undone). The whole thing left me strangely deflated, really knocked the wind out of me.

Has this ever happened to you? You enjoyed, maybe loved a game up to a point but then it just kept going and going untill you just wanted it over, started hating it? I had a similar experience with Psychonauts before, one of my favorite games of all time, with a horrible last chapter, the infamous "Meat Circus" - a tediously difficult level that comes after what seemed to have been the final boss fight (though at least the story ending wasn't quite so bad, despite being a cliffhanger unresolved for years, and then only in VR game).

I love The Dream Machine, mostly for the aesthetics and many of the puzzles, but yes, the last chapter goes on too long and the only ending is too unhappy. The only other game that I recall had me searching online for a way to get any other ending was the Amiga cinematic platformer onEscapee.

Halo: Combat Evolved comes to mind. It definitely overstayed its welcome for me, in spite of nice combat mechanics. All those rooms and corridors that were exactly the same, copied and pasted over and over... I began to feel tired eventually. The story took a certain turn and became convoluted and uninteresting to me, as did the characters. More photocopied alien environments, and new enemies that were fatiguing to fight again and again. Only some fine outdoor sequences with vehicles helped relieve the monotony, and save the game as a whole.
One could also mention Half-Life and its infamous Xen final chapter.

I've tried to play through The Dream Machine a few times and always liked the first chapters but then I got stuck or bored in one of the later ones each time ...

Games overstaying their welcome and unnecessarily drawing out their final parts is such a common experience to me though that I can't think of any examples that really stood out in this regard. On the contrary, I find it rather refreshing when a game's second half is even more exciting than the first one and I actually end up a bit sad when it's over because I would have enjoyed to keep on playing. That doesn't happen all that often.

Super Mario Sunshine and Skyward Sword come to mind for different reasons.

Super Mario Sunshine was already suffering, but then comes the final level, where you have to carefully guide a Mud Boat[!] though a gauntlet, where if it so much as brushes an obstacle, it capsizes and sinks.
I should mention: The first half of this level doesn't have a checkpoint. This was before Nintendo thought to introduce visual checkpoints as well.

The final insult? You don't even fight Bowser directly; you just flip his hot tub. All this over a case of mistaken identity so bad that you'd have to wonder if the Piantas are colorblind like the humans in Sonic's world.


Skyward Sword: As if a game about predestination wasn't bad enough, the game has a bad habit of stretching the rule of three beyond any reasonable desire. You are without a doubt, the hero of Hyrule, created by the Goddesses, and yet you have to run around and do dumb fetch quests to "prove your worth", which involve such things as gathering sacred flames from the same three areas you already traversed before, not only do you have to TRAVERSE THOSE SAME THREE AREAS AGAIN to gather the "Song of the Hero", but before you can even do all that, you have to go gather tears in the Sacred Realms, which are joy of all joys, A ONE HIT KILL STEALTH SECTION.

I can''t seem to make it past the same point in Alan Wake ever. I have started it 2 or 3 times, really enjoy my time with it, but then get to about 2.5 hours in (roughly 3 or 4 episodes) and then I just stop. I can't quite understand it - the story seems cool, but I guess the overall gameplay loop really isn't a lot of fun for me. Run around, shine flashlight at enemy, shoot enemy, look for coffee thermoses (really don't have to do that part - could be why I end up so bored lol), rinse and repeat. But I'm sure it's a really great game, and probably has an epic story to finish, but I just can't do it.

I also agree with @cosevecchie who mentions Halo: Combat Evolved. Poster really hit the nail on the head on describing that one. Still a fan - but could definitely do without a few hours of gameplay on that.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_dream_machine

"The GOG version of The Dream Machine includes all 6 chapters in one package"

Soooooo... was this originally one of those "episodic games" which are released in parts? That would kinda explain it, they just wanted to release further episodes but ran out of ideas or enthusiasm or mojo. So that is why the last chapters are (allegedly) boring.

I guess that can happen with non-episodic games, but with them I'd expect the developers just stop making more levels to the game when they run of ideas, kinda "there I think we are done, at least I don't have any more ideas how to prolong this game".

Death Stranding. That game has the longest ending i have ever experienced. The ending is longer than some movies!

Also there's a page on TV Tropes about this :)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EndingFatigue

Not exactly the same feeling but...

... Dragon Age Inquisition...

... really took the life out of me.

For awhile I was ok exploring the world and doing fetch quests -- although I never really enjoyed the combat system -- but the sheer size of the world (with expansions) and the insane number of fetch quests made me hate the experience by game's end. I forced myself to play through everything, but can't in retrospect remember anything about the ending (and didn't care as I finished it).

At the same time I've somewhat softened to the game over time... even toying with the idea of another playthrough... but the grind of those last 20 hours has kept me away so far.

As far as a game I've gone from absolute love to deepest hate? I'll have to think on that some more. ;)

Individual, default-rules runs of Streets of Rogue generally took me anywhere from seven to ten hours, which I feel is much too long for anything Rogue-like-like.
Part of this is a "me" problem -- I tend to play as safely as the game will let me, while also wringing all the loot, money and experience I can out of a level without what I consider excessive danger or tedium. The game's chief failing is that it rarely incentivizes getting through levels more quickly. There are certain "disaster" levels where one of several wildcard events will be in play (e.g., random people will be secretly armed with shotguns and become instantly hostile upon seeing you; or there's a violent outbreak of zombiism going around; or bombs keep falling from the sky in your immediate vicinity) until you exit the level. But quite a number of the disasters are pretty manageable, depending on your chosen character and how far into the run you are, so many times these events don't so much encourage you to hurry up as just make you modify your modus operandi for that level. Considering that money, items (of which unwanted ones can often be sold for money, up to a point) and perks/traits & stat increases (which come from "XP" levels gained during each just-finished floor) can greatly improve survivability on later levels, and this lack of incentive to move on quickly, it can feel stupid to not loot everything you can.
Aside from the overall lack of urgency, there are frankly just too many levels -- five districts with three levels apiece, plus a final level that's kind of its own district. Given the fact that many floors easily take me a minimum of fifteen minutes to complete (considering the aforementioned milking of resources), and it can make what is otherwise a fun roguelite, with lots of cool interacting underlying systems, into something that starts to feel a little tedious overall by the later floors.
To be fair, there are a variety of mutators that you can enable to make a run harder, easier, or just different. And that's great. But I wish the dev had put more time into making the default experience have some overall sense of urgency, and letting people who didn't like that "mutate" it out, instead of just dumping out a toybox of mutators in front of people, and telling them, "Here! Balance the game yourself!"

So many games that overstay their welcome. In most cases, I never make the ending when I feel that way.

Most salient example: Doom 3. I played. And played. And played. And got to a big moment that changed things a lot and thought, "Surely this is starting the last sequence?" And I looked up a level list and... I was only getting to the half-way point!

Longer is not always better. (And shorter is not always better either.) I didn't even try that one. The shadow one before it also greatly overstayed its welcome. I get to the desert and... meh. "I've had enough."

The original Unreal is another oft-cited FPS example. I'm not a huge FPS fan, and have little nostalgia for that game (not having played it when it was recent), so I probably made it only a small percentage of the way through before drifting away from it after perhaps 15-20 hours of gameplay (which doesn't count the time I later spent messing around with offline, solo "multiplayer" matches against bots).

Commandos 1 is one that sticks out to me as overstaying its welcome. It's a good game, but there is just too much of it. The levels are very hard and unforgiving and there are 20 of them, which imo is too many. It's longer than the amount of content and variety justifies. Once you've done the first 12-13 levels, it seems like you've seen everything the game has to offer and I can't find the motivation to finish 7 more.

14 levels would have been ideal. That, or the game should have been more forgiving.

Twilight Princess, I at least could push myself to the Palace of Twilight (Penultimate) before going, "eeeh, I've had my fill.", though it also qualifies as overstaying, due to having an overworld that in spite of barely being 5 km total, still felt like too much world with nothing in it.