I play so many bad games, but the sins of the bad games I’ve played over the past 6 months are largely of the boring and bland variety and don’t seem any more interesting to review than they were to play. Nonetheless, here they are with a sentence or two about why I disliked them.

I originally thought this post would be far longer but it turns out there’s a good deal of games I marked as disliked that I just straight up don’t remember.

Inside: Little Wings Deliveries, Newt One, Planet of Lana, Bugtopia, Grapple Dog, Spells and Secrets, Flooded, Jusant, Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, One Lonely Outpost, Kamaeru: Frog Refuge

Little Wings Deliveries
Adventure

An A Short Hike knockoff. Insane camera and control scheme made me insanely motion sick; game was about an hour and nowhere near good enough to justify it. Tries to be goofy but isn’t near clever enough to make it work; tone just feels flippant. It’s interesting to see all the Short Hike clones with no idea what made that game work.

Newt One
3D Platfomer

I have no idea who this game was for. The writing is quite literally incomprehensible and I thought it may have been a Russian or Chinese assetflip, but it seems too involved for that. I think it’s just bad. It’s hard to even recommend it for children because it was so nonsensical, and the platforming was too fiddly for a kids’ game. It’s also bizarrely ugly, and I say that as someone who loves brightly colored things — this was less rainbows and unicorns and more “Let’s all pour our paints into the same bucket and see what color it turns” — the tones were subtlely off in ways that made everything clash. For my part, I quit after realizing that all the upgrades I’d gotten in the first world, which made the game playable, were taken away when I started the second world.

Planet of Lana
2D Puzzle Platformer

One of those “should have been a short film and not a game” types. Good looking with competent storytelling, but puzzles were samey and boring, and very fiddly. I got bored about two hours in and just never went back to it.

Bugtopia
Idler

Terribly balanced, unfortunately. To progress at all could have realistically taken weeks — I use these games as work tools, so need games that progress meaningfully over the course of hours. For some reason buying and selling bugs gave razor-thin profits, to the tune of fractions of pennies — the only bug you start with gives you a $0.001 profit to sell. Really bizarre choice. Compare to something like Chillquarium where you’re guarunteed to double your money on packs of four fish and can progress at a steady clip either by idling or manually feeding fish.

Grapple Dog
2D Platformer

Clunky, boring, and collectibles for the sake of boosting playtime — the three deadly sins of 2D platformers. The character was weirdly heavy, making the controls feel bad, and the promised grappling was disappointing — you could only grapple at small designated spots, instead of using the swinging to traverse the level, which was a letdown, and level design was uninspired. And god, I’m so sick of the “find all 10,000 items to complete the game!!” method of artificially inflating playtime.

Spells and Secrets
Roguelike

A really disappointing roguelike. I’d really liked this developers’ other game so I was looking forward to this, and it was just bad. Not much else to say — just not good at being a roguelike. Tiny, same, stupidly easy, and nonsensical plotting.

Flooded
Citybuilder

This was a weird one. Pitched itself as a global-warming citybuilder where you lose land to water as time goes on, which sounded cool. In practice… you can only build iron mills? You can build wells to collect water, power planets, and mines. And that’s it. It’s deeply weird — I’ve played a good deal of minimalist citybuilders and have never seen one with so little to actually do. It makes all the levels stupidly easy because you never have to make choices, and for some reason your meeples don’t have any needs besides water… plus you can build artificial land easily, so the promised space limitations never really materialize. Also the writing was bad. Just a bizarre game all around.

Jusant
Idk, tbh

I am so, so sick of the “the only way to find out anything about the plot of this game is to methodically scour every corner of the map for hidden notes that will kind of telling you what’s going on” genre. I don’t have any fundamental interest in a realistic climbing simulator — I found it fiddly and unfun — so the only thing that could possibly have drawn me to this game was the plot. Why are you hiding it from me?? Tell me it! Tell me the plot!

Astrea: Six-Siding Oracles
Roguelike Deckbuilder

So derivative of Slay the Spire that it offers nothing new, and the mechanics aren’t nearly as good, so it was just incredibly easy and thus boring and uninteresting to me. Story was weirdly convoluted, too — starts with a dense loredump that I could not follow. Makes the odd decision to randomize the effects of your cards based on dice rolls, which doesn’t really add anything meaningful to the experience. Also, needed better art direction. The colors were so samey I found the UI difficult to navigate — there’s a reason cards are designs with clear, contrasting colors.

One Lonely Outpost
Farm Sim

I wanted to like this one! Unfortunately there’s just very little gameplay. I initially saw complaints about there being nothing to do and was like, well, it’s called “One Lonely Outpost” and the genre is pretty boring by nature, but no, there’s just literally nothing to do. I stuck with it for nearly 10 hours hoping it would pick up, but it never did. It’s a shame, the premise was pretty fun.

Kamaeru: Frog Refuge
Farm Sim… ish?

Another one I’m sad to dislike! I followed this game for a long time but the result is just… not fun. It’s such a shame, the art is lovely and frogs are cute. But the level of sameyness to all of the gameplay and the sheer about of RNG grinding you have to do to breed all the frogs sucked. I 100%ed it mostly powered by sheer disappointment that it wasn’t better. Also, the three areas are all the same, with the same hyper-simplistic gameplay and motions to go through. There’s just so little meat. More money spent on art than design, I’d guess. Oh well. I’ll look forward to Mudborne for my frog needs.