For me, 2 things come to mind; Berserk & the Long Walk
Berserk may sound controversial, but I just didn’t have a good time watching the 90’s anime. I felt angry while watching it. I just didn’t like the characters for how dickish they were (especially Guts & Casica) and the setting was too miserable for me. And some of you may go, “but the comic is 10x better” (I know it’s manga, I’m just calling a comic to piss of people) I also just don’t like dark fantasy in general, since they’re edgy, pretentious, and worst of all… they’re ugly. There’s a reason why I never played the Dark Souls games, outside of the difficulty
The Long Walk movie is really well made movie with amazing acting. But man was it a miserable movie to go through. Seeing all those kids getting shot by soldiers for being slower was painful to watch.
Side note: there’s a lot of critically acclaimed stuff I like (Cowboy Bebop & the Dark Knight). It’s just that entertainment is so subjective that it’s not mutually exclusive to writing.
I tried very hard, but I did not enjoy The Outer Wilds.
For those who don’t know, it is a first person exploration game over ~12 planets within a small solar system. There is a core game loop that lasts about 20 minutes wherein you can fly your ship anywhere and explore until the cycle ends.
The thing I really disliked was that you only got ~10-15 minutes of exploration before you had to restart the cycle back at home and go back to where you started. There was also a plethora of environmental hazards that were instant death, all while you had oxygen and fuel to manage. Dying would also reset the cycle so it wasn’t uncommon to spend 5+ minutes getting somewhere only to die and restart a few times. It just made me frustrated.
I did complete it with the help of mods that let me teleport to the key locations. People really liked the story but it really didn’t hit for me. I feel like I was born with the cilantro gene for this game because I really didn’t like it.
Loved Outer Wilds, but yeah, some clever “time dilation” could be applied while exploring inside of planets or particularly complex segments or close to a goal. So many times I had to go into Ash Twin to try to finish a puzzle before the sand rises. It does help that translator pauses time though, and options let you pause conversations too.
The puzzles were the best part for me, and are undeniably good. I did do a deep dive into the settings too when I started to get frustrated and those options were key.
Opening: “Oh no, a disaster. Everyone I care about could die. I wonder how I can prevent it.”
Ending
“Oh, I’m sorry, the disaster is unpreventable. But you can get to be the person who hits the reset button to bring about an empty world full of nothing! Hey. Did you know Starfield is about to come out??111”
I know!