Worst/Cringiest Games You've Played

I have to agree with most of you with Sonic '06, though I'm in the camp that think's it's funny bad.
One game I really hate is Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, AKA the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2. It's like the designers thought that good challenge = poison mushrooms, warps that take back to worlds you beat, and plenty more cheap tricks that I can't remember right now.
As for the cringiest, Fire Emblem: Awakening. I outright quit playing it after chapter 10 because I got fed up with the waifuism and weeb pandering.

 

Alone In The Dark was pretty lousy. I remember it being boring, and glitchy as all hell. I ended up quitting the game when, during a climactic escape scene where you had to drive a car and make a cool jump, the dramatic music played, explosions happened, fire was seen everywhere (the game had amazing fire physics, but not much else), but I didn't have enough speed to make the jump. So, I went to make the jump again, only to find that the ramp was now gone (due to the explosions) and I was now stuck with no way to continue the game. A couple minutes later, I heard music from a different part in the game and later what sounded like the audio from a cutscene. The game thought that I had made the jump and it was playing the music from later in the game and the audio from the cutscene. I pretended I was listening to the radio until the fire reached my car and killed me.

My friend told me that the Wii port was a lot better, but that doesn't excuse every other port being shit.

 

But... but Kick the Autistic is a great game and one of America's Favorite Pasttimes!!

Fo' cereals tho...

I think of a lot of the worst/cringiest games I've played mostly fall into the "we're so profound, aren't we so insightful and provocative" category... either that, or the community at large hellbent on making me believe, so much to the point where it will undoubtedly have the exact opposite effect on me.

Gone Home for example, is one of the first "indie" games I ever played. I mean, I played a lot of niche titles like Killer 7 and the like, and of course I played Minecraft when it was just starting up, but I never really got into the indie games until just a few years ago. And for what it was, and especially since I got it for $5, it was... okay, I guess. Nothing amazing, but ohhhh shit every fucking game journo site was doing backflips for a chance to lick Gone Home's taint.

This incident alone pretty much soured me on a lot of indie shit.

The next game I can distinctly recall just audibly sighing was Thomas Was Alone. It's essentially a "move the block into the right slot while avoiding obstacles" game, but the constant narrator kept trying to personify the block and all of "his" friends. I think the ending moral was something about teamwork or whatever, but in the end, it's just a fucking "move the blocks" game. I could mute the narrator and play KMFDM over it and it wouldn't make a goddamn difference... except probably make it better because I wouldn't have a whimsical British voice trying to make me empathize with shapes.

Also, while I never played it, the fandom for Undertale, but my now-complete distrust towards anything the gaming community now exalts as the new Gaming Savior has pretty much convinced me that the game will be a complete and total waste of my time. So, good job with that.

Most recently, I played and completed The Witness (at least the main part, not the end challenge because at that point I just didn't care). It's a good game, mind, for what it is- a bunch of puzzles, which leads you along throughout this strange abandoned island in the hopes of figuring out what has happened, and also tossing you a lot of cryptic clues and passages, to make you think there is going to be some big reveal...

Spoiler

And it's barely any more rewarding than the Thomas Was Alone ending... unless you feel like solving about 200-300 more puzzles, including one which will take you 60 minutes to complete by standing in one spot and watching the moon move from one spot to another annnnnd yeah no.

In the end, you realize the creator of the game was probably just fucking with you the entire time.

 

Yeah, the game's creator used the same waiting 'puzzle' in Braid with a slow-moving platform, except it took longer.

 

I have a middle-aged aunt who practically swears by the game as the best thing ever and bought Steam keys for it for almost everyone she knows, whether they have Steam or not...and I happened to get it as a Christmas present from someone else before then so I was able to save her the money.

I actively avoided spoilers as much as I could for as long as I could. I didn't like the constant fan art and random people I knew in various Internet circles talking it up. I didn't want to be hype for it going in - basically I heard that pacifist runs were possible and picked up enough of the premise and setting from screenshots to make the guess that it's a game that seems like an allegory for going through purgatory or whatever (which said aunt emphatically denied when I was trying to explain the game to someone else).

I went into the game, determined to have a pacifist run as my first run and try one where I selectively kill things based on whether or not I think they deserve it if I liked it enough to give it a second playthrough. About thirty minutes in, I got killed by a random enemy I couldn't figure out how to defeat without killing, could no longer dodge the bullet patterns the various enemies made like I could in the labyrinth, and couldn't improve my character defensively. I have not played the game even one time since then - I might some day, and if I do I'll be continuing to try for a pacifist run.

 

Here's how I describe Undertale.

It's basically a spiritual successor to Earthbound with game mechanics updated for the current age, a severe graphical downgrade (the art is passable at best), and a distinctly Tumblr-esque feeling to it, right down to the breaking-the-fourth-wall thing that the Internet loves, the RPG thing that people love, and the man-is-the-real-animal-you-should-feel-bad-for-killing-things trend that Spec Ops popularized to the point where even Triple-A games try to emulate it.

It's no wonder it became popular.

 

I remember falling asleep during outlast and that basicly being the reason why i cannot return the game anymore

 

for real? its already a pretty easy game i dont know how you couldnt beat it in pacifist but being mad at a game simply because you are not good enough to beat it is a poor reason for disliking it come on dude

 

In terms of a game that's actually finished and functional: Duke Nukem Forever.

No one expected it to be good, but I thought might at least be a passable, fun shooter with some humour in it. But it isn't. It looks like shit, it takes all the bad elements of linearity in modern shooters with none of the good, the weapons are crap, the action is constantly interrupted by stupid, boring puzzles, you spend too much time in shitty little driving sections and manning turrets, there's fuck all enemy variety (the last boss is just a three stage version of the guy you fight in the intro), and the attempts at humour aren't funny.

It fails at literally everything it was trying to be. GG.

 

It's not that I was mad at it for being hard so much as that I was bored and not having fun, then the enemy difficulty ramped up from "everything is easy to dodge and enemies tell you how to spare them" to "screen full of bullets that do way more damage too" in the span of five minutes.

I've played and loved many much harder games. It's more notable that I didn't want to play again after my first death, not that it killed me.