Anything requiring you repeatedly mash a single button super fast

Exponentially growing requirements that out pace rewards. I don’t want to spend 10 hours grinding just to level up.

Lootboxes

Not the worst, but I’m annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can’t be there.

A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games’ so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.

Then after you’re comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven’t seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.

Achievements.

I want to enjoy the game, not artificial milestones for bragging rights.

One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion Skyrim where I found this, particularly annoying.

press ▲ to jump. shit button. it’s x.

Health as a resource

“Here’s a rare weapon dropped by this boss! But wait, you need to be at least level 30 to use it, and you’re still on level 2.”

I went out of my way to repeatedly grind and kill this late game boss during early game, just give me my reward for not following the stupid linear progression

Fragile world-spanning deliveries.

Silksong has me screaming over them, 10 - 20 minutes of walking and one too many smacks at the end ruins it. And then there’s the one that’s also timed!

But to be fair, most of Silksong gets me yelling at the TV on the regular! I love it and hate it!

Survival crafting. I spend my real life days trying to keep up on sheltering and feeding myself. I don’t want to “relax” by punching trees to make a fire to cook a bird I punched to death.

The pervasiveness of this in every game has limited the content I engage with the last 10 or so years. Everyone started chasing that Minecraft money and now it’s Ubi-fied into just about every mainstream title.

I don’t want to forge new weapons. I want to find them in a chest or earn them by killing a boss. I have bounced off of so many games the moment they ask me to learn a system of crafting. Keep that in it’s own genre and stop padding games out with repetitive busy work.

Puzzles that are entirely music based with no visual cues.

They’re bad enough for me as just a guy with no rhythm or note recognition, but also just fuck deaf people I guess?

Any game that forces snap to center cameras. No one should ever have to fight against the controls in a game.

(Looking at you No Man’s Sky)

Ante, Magic the Gathering