Worst Game You Played This Year - 2023 Edition

Voodoo Vince. Deadlink. CONTROL. don't@me

My life! Every year it wins the title of the worst game I have to play. Although, it is worth noting the graphics, realism and level of elaboration are simply amazing
I apologize for my English. I use an auto-translator

Sure, I will bite: here is my 2023 Bottom10 list, from #1-not-so-bottom to #10-bottom-of-the-bottom, with precisely objective scores to support my ordering... To be honest, most aren't too bad, just not as good as other things I played.

Also, many of these scores are very unfair, because some of these games are very old and hard to play these days. But whatever, my list, my scores. :D :D

1. Atlantis 2: Beyond Atlantis: 58/100. Meh.
2. Daikatana: 58/100. Not as bad as I thought it would be.
3. Atlantis: The Lost Tales: 57/100. Liked the music anyway.
4. Silent Hill: Homecoming: 55/100. Too many bugs, check my review at SGMonthly.
5. Atlantis 3: The New World: 54/100. Why did I decide to play the whole series anyway?
6. Red Bow: 51/100. One creepy monster. Kind of enjoyable, but mostly "meh".
7. Cyber West: Hidden Objects: 50/100. Ok, now getting into "this is bad" territory.
8. Angvik: 49/100. Some neat ideas, but short and irritatingly hard.
9. Sonic Adventure 2: 48/100. I can see why so many people loved it... but the controls were really really off for me.
10. Jack Orlando: A Cinematic Adventure: 31/100. I do not remember why I hated it so much. Nor do I want to remember.

The Assailant's Artival

This one came through my curator and it was easily the worst game I tried out this year.

Dark Envoy

Was the most disappointing due to rampant bug/crashing issues. Watching the patch releases on this one.

Rocket Racing

Ok, that a free game, but big deception, need to full download Fortnite to play it (58 Go of Download), 80% of the tracks are on the same desert theme, only 2 theme (Desert & Forest), and nothing to unlock for free (all others skins only cost money, and that minimum 15 € for a skin)

Oh, oof. I got Alchemy Garden from Fanatical, thought I'd play it one day... Guess I'll just get the cards and forget about it. :')

About my worst games, I dunno, I'll think about it and make another post later.

Fortunately, I didn't come across any real duds this year. I enjoyed every game that I played but these were the three that I was least impressed with:

1. Haimrik - The core concept is solid but the execution falls flat. Gameplay felt like a chore. It's too repetitive and monotonous. The jarring music and dull backgrounds didn't help.

2. Panzer Paladin - Most of the game's levels feel like a copy-paste of the same design but with a different coat of paint; you're essentially fighting the same basic grunts across nearly identical hallways. The game also lacks any real challenge. The only real difficulty is from insta-death pits/spikes that force you back to distant checkpoints. The game's most unique feature is its weapons system but it feels like a gimmick more than anything. Too many weapons with only minor or cosmetic differences.

3. Hacky Zack - Fun idea and many of the levels are well-designed but most of the enjoyment is marred by the clunky controls; the aiming is too imprecise and stiff so most of the time it boils down to replaying a level over and over again until you develop muscle memory for it or get lucky. I'd love to see the same idea but with smooth, intuitive controls. I hate not recommending this game because it's clearly a labor of love and it does a lot of things right but it underdelivers at the most basic controls level.

Dishonorable mention goes to Neighbours back From Hell

1) Gris - It's an excellent piece of art with a story to read between the lines, but a boring game with primitive mechanics. I had to force myself to play.

2) Omno I went into the game for the beautiful views, like in the screenshots, and the adventure. In general, almost all the beautiful views are shown in the screenshots. Zero action. There is almost no adventure. The gameplay is primitive. Only the last level is of any interest, where the main character can fly//levitate, but the game caught a bug and deleted all my saves when I reached this level. The game can still be enjoyed if you know what to expect. It's quite ironic that the game sounds almost like the Russian word "gomno", which literally means shit.

Probably Knock-knock. I am a huge fan of horror and 2D games, but this was one of the only games I will never finish.

Didn't play many games and generally try to avoid bad ones, but one that left a sour taste was Necromunda Hired Gun. So clunky and janky for an AA title that it was unbelievable.

For me it was biomutant, such a disappointment...

Huh, looking back at the games I played this year, despite me managing to play much less than usual, two actually managed to be huge disappointments:
1) Final Dusk - Looks like a cute platformer, right? And it's tagged on its store page as Platformer. It is not a Platformer. It's a boring auto-runner-style puzzle game where you do the exact same solution over and over and over again. Despite it only taking me 6.5 hours to beat it, I was SUPER bored. And while it's cute, there is very little story and jokes between the repetitive boring levels. Going by how the level select UI looks (and is conveniently not show in any of the screenshots), this was definitely intended to be a mobile game. So, yeah, I have this one tagged as "false advertisement" in my head.
2) Gal*Gun 2 - Meanwhile, here's a game which wears what it is on its sleeves- aka, a crappy VR game. Ok, ok, that might be a bit too harsh. And it lets you play it without VR (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to play it). Buuuut, well, let's just say that I did read the negative Steam reviews which mentioned how it's a dumbed down version of the previous game, thought to myself "eh, I'm sure I'd still like it" and I was wrong. Basically, to shove the VR option into it, the entire structure of the rail-shooter gameplay has been reworked from the ground up and the result is a very boring slow repetitive game with what I'd call "VR game gameplay". I wouldn't really call this a rail shooter anymore since you character doesn't actually move around on a set path like in the previous game. Nope, you get a (blatantly easy) "encounter", then 1-2 silhouettes of your (generic faceless nameless) protagonist appear and shoot one of them to make the game do a quick fade to black and teleport you there for another "encounter"; repeat the process until the level ends. Can't have your character actually moving so as to not give people in VR motion sickness. This mechanic murders the pace. Levels don't flow seamlessly anymore like in the old rail-shooter style. Also all the collectibles and information to hunt down in the previous game are gone. Story is... ok, I guess. Feels a bit pointless though. In Gal*Gun: Double Peace the story had actual stakes for the protagonist (who at least had a name and personality), in this one it feels like the protag can do absolutely nothing and the only consequence would be that Risu, the brainless angel girl who forces herself into his life, will get fired from a job which she's clearly too incompetent to handle. Oh, yeah, and the dialogue choices don't matter anymore. So, to sum it up, the game is an attempt to jump on the VR train while compromising... everything else. The physics engine which probably ate most of the budged was not worth it. <.<

I was very disappointed in Stone.
I had it wishlisted and won it so it was a cool win but the game itself was meh. You would expect a game about a stoner koala to be a little funny, no? Oh well.
There barely was any game to even speak of. You just go from one location to the next (out of a total of 5 very basic locations) and speak with the same 5 characters over and over. No puzzle. No gameplay.

Starfield could have been amazing but it was just meh. It's not horrible, it's just not what it should have been or could have been and it's ridiculously overpriced for what it is.

Personally I think Star Citizen (yes a buggy incomplete mess that probably won't release for another 10 years if at all) and Elite Dangerous are much better games. I have not yet played No Man's Sky, but I'm sure that is also a better choice as well.

ok for me here are 2 games
1-we happy few : games looks fun but damn its boring as hell ,too bad cause the game really look like it has a potential
2-the avengers : game gave me PTSD cause my cpu died when i was playing it so each time i hear or see it i get flashback lol

Nightmare Creatures on the N64, in which you button mash your way through a few types of enemies with a terrible camera to throw you off and what might be one of the most obnoxious plots in any media (you're chasing some dude. You get scrolling text telling you he escapes at the end of every level. Repeat that for 10+ levels).

Golden Light. It's a first person game where you can't tell what the hell is going on on the screen half the time. There's also a fairly expansive hub world that's a pain in the ass to explore as it's very easy to get lost in it and the map you get is absolutely fucking terrible.

Spooky Station. 9 game package. 8 of them are either extremely basic or broken in some way. The one good one is pretty cool, but doesn't justify the rest of this wreck (it's Spookids, go check it out).

I took a look at my Steam year in review page and I remember now. The absolute worst game I played this year was Emily is Away.
I have never seen a game work so hard at trying to give you the illusion of choice while being so contrived and pre-ordained.
It felt more like a revenge game by someone who got dumped than like a real game.

I've not played a truly terrible game this year, but the combat in Lust from Beyond: M Edition irked me pretty bad during the first handful of reloads. I know it's an adventure/survival horror game, and fighting isn't supposed to be good in those, but only a nincompoop removes all of the bullets from a revolver before they reload. Of course you can at least run while adding bullets back to your gun.

The stealth was also garbage. I got spotted in one area, and all I could do is run until the enemy lost interest in me.

Regarding Saints Row 2 stability: I've beaten it on Steam Deck this year. It worked very well without any patches, I don't remember any crashes.

Taking a look at my Replay, I come to realize that this was rather pleasant gaming year for me overall. I had a handful of disappointments because I expected the games to be better, either because of personal expectations (Forgotten Fields, The Low Road) or the hype built around them (Dying Light, Journey), but none of those were entirely unpleasant experiences.

There really is no contest for the worst game I played this year and it was:
The Dark Side of the Moon
The plot was just awfully stupid and the acting was abysmal. It was apparently a passion project by the family who were playing the leads (they were an actual family), and even though it feels a bit mean to say so, knowing that made it even worse. Hard to believe they couldn't have done better!

CS2 💔 Valve wasn't ready for the launch the game is full of bugs cheaters and without any content and no left hand settings it gaves me a headache eveytime when i play it

Amnesia Rebirth and Outlast 2. They had certain things that kinda ruined my horror boner. Oh, and also the Resi 8 DLC. Don't want to spoil stuff, but it did a Star Wars (new trilogy) and kinda felt like it shat bricks on the base game's ending.

Looking at my year in review, nothing stands out as being memorably bad. Some games I didn't like, but I wouldn't call them bad. Also some I don't remember playing.