Games that aren’t as good as their soundtracks (see: nearly any Sakimoto-scored game, Xenogears, Panzer Dragoon Orta)
Games which never or nearly never “reset” your state so the entire game is one long series of incredibly stressful causes and effects and you get really stressed out (some Survival Horror, MGS3, Dragon Quarter, Vagrant Story)
Color Dreams and Wisdom Tree games.
Games which portray what it was long to be a teenager in a certain time period. Only two games have done this for me so far, Gone Home (90s punk culture, which I didn’t personally identify with) and Cibele (2000s anime/videogame forum culture, which I very much did).
SiN Episode (one only ever came out, I can omit the plurality) isn’t bad per se, but the adaptive difficulty stuff in it is legitimately broken; if you hit too many headshots, the game will just start spawning the strongest enemy en masse, which is saying a lot since there’s only three enemy types in the game. Also, the whole latex model-fetish angle.
I want you to imagine if Daggerdale was an “AAA” shootman unceremoniously pooped out because a sizable publisher came to you 5 years prior and you had nothing nearing the finally set release and you had to outsource it to yet another developer and you have Colonial Marines. One day, there’s gonna be a fine book or article written about the clusterfuck of false advertising and resulting lawsuit around that shitheap of a game.
Base Recruitment/Decoration games (Suikoden, Terraria, Harvest Moon, Fallout 4)
Man, now I have to buy it. I’ve noticed it’s crossed into the never-discounted tier of shitgame, where they don’t want it to be sold to people who aren’t in on the joke.
Adventure games where instead of a huge open world you have a string of fairly open hub areas in a strictly linear progression that afford a fair amount of freedom and agency (e.g. The Deus Ex series, Steambot Chronicles to an extent)
Adventure games with strong characterization that still afford a degree of roleplaying within the confines of such characterization. Don’t care much about the puzzle aspects (The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, the post-TWD output of Telltale, etc)
JRPGs with (what I remember as) impeccable pacing and a strong sense of adventure (as in, a sense that things are happening to your characters instead of you guiding your characters through a quest list ticking boxes) (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Suikoden II)
EDIT: Also, the Metal Gears and Soulslikes as a genre unto itself, but that’s a boring and kinda evident answer
Games with a character/item collection mechanic that directly ties into a home-base level up system - Suikoden, Rocket Slime, Dark Souls 2 (close enough), Breath of Fire, even stupid goddamn Warlords of Draenor.
Games that feature alcohol consumption or bar/pub/tavern culture as part of the main game (but not as like the main part of the main game)- Witcher, Catherine, uhh maybe that’s it?
Simulation games where you manage a base and/or team. Not a wholly functional world like a Dwarf Fortress or something, but something more limitd and personal. (New XCOM taught me that was the part of original X-Com I found interesting, rather than the combat part!)
Exploratory games where I just get horribly lost and have to plot my own way out. Some people seem to not really like being horribly lost but to me that’s when the fun of figuring it out and plotting it out sets in. (On a side note, I get moderately frustrated at maze games that in reality are super hyper linear. See also: newer Etrian Odyssey)
Any game with a Mysterious Forest/Cave or equivalent type area because the music is always rad. A lot of points can be won with me just by having a nice, dreary cave with relaxingly ominous music.
Top down puzzle games that don’t involve block pushing.
I bought because it was a coop-capable hack n slash, which is some of my favorite things to play. Even when they’re mediocre they’re a blast. I’ll say that Daggerdale was a blast. But not because it was mediocre.
