When the music doesn't stop on the Pause screen.

spongy bosses don't always mean they're challenging. I can't count how many times I've fought a boss who isn't hard or interesting but just wastes time cause they have a ton of health.

mechanics matter.

I’ve got perhaps an unusual one - 99% of the time I play games with the music turned off. I just find it much more immersive and I enjoy, for example, not knowing that combat is about to start because the music’s just changed.

There are plenty of games where you can’t turn the music off. I’m not a fan of that, but I get it. The devs want you to play their game in a certain way, and turning the music off isn’t part of that. No complaints.

But then there are games which allow you to turn the music off, but all the rest of the sound has been made under the assumption that the music will be playing. The music often covers up a litany of jankiness like background sound effects not looping well. And sometimes the atmosphere sounds (say the drone of an engine in a spaceship) are also controlled by the music slider.

So, if you’re going to give the option to turn the music off, make sure that the game still sounds good without the music.

Excessive reliance on audio recordings and written text for storytelling / world building. Oh look another game where I’m alone in this world and I have to listen to a ton of audio recordings or collect snippets of text throughout the entire game to learn anything about this world and what happened to it!

If anything, let it be audio, not text, I’m tired of reading through often very subpar writing, I just glaze over it. Better yet, have actual (skippable) voice actors read any text out loud. Ideally, weave all that info into the game’s main storyline or side quests, and have it communicated to the player via interesting NPCs. Also, use environmental storytelling more than info-dumps. Show, don’t tell.

Text/in-world notes/memos/books and found audio recordings have a place but don’t let that be the main way of learning about the world or my place in it.

I understand it’s also a budget issue, so I’ll cut indie games some slack.

Not being able to pause or save at any point.

I'm a "grown-up" these days, but I grew up with games and they're part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they're still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will ~~always~~ nearly always outrank them.

"We don't let you pause because it's a simulation and and you can't pause real life so it means the game is more realistic" = piss off

Challenges that require replaying a level several times to achieve them can be very rewarding

Unless the level also comes with unskippable cut scenes or long conversations on horseback

Bad console ports on PC where mouse control code was recycled from gamepad control code. For example, in Just Cause 2, the maximum turn rate is capped and so is the minimum cursor acceleration, with the end result being when you move the mouse your character moves like you've mushed a gamepad control stick instead of the fast, smooth, PC cursor style movement of the reticle that every other PC FPS manages to pull off.

Games with bird sounds. This wouldn't be too bad if i could turn them down or off but because of this I can't play some games or spend time in specific areas of some games because it make my birds go crazy because they think there's another bird in the house.

I wish we could individually turn up or down all of the different elements if sounds not just music/sfx/voice etc

when you can rebind movement keys (I'm an esdf player as opposed to wasd), but it does not rebind consistently. So a map is panned using wasd still, or menu browsing is, or even basic movement in a mini-game, or driving using a vehicle etc. It seems developers rarely really test anything but wasd...

Worst was cyberpunk, which always jettisoned me from the car in a super dramatic leap... on every right turn. XD

edit: also, when rebound keys are not represented correctly in tutorials or prompts.. ugh.

I have two.

1. The Culture

I do not claim to be a 'gamer'. I prefer to be best described as someone who plays games, but not nearly as often as one branded a 'gamer' would play games by. But I've been partly turned off from video games because of the culture surrounding them. The streamers who play games, the RGB droolers, the tech-junkies, the whales, the hype-train types, the multi-hour essay level of delivering an opinion on a game .etc

Not to mention, all of the gamer-branded merchandise from chairs to even drinks. It just turns me off and I do not ever associate with that crowd and it's a damn shame there is so much gullibility with the culture that it is difficult to avoid.

2. Game-Padding

Side-quest after side-quest does a game not make. That kind of thing is what you'd find in an MMO that needs to find things for you to do. Not in a more constrained container of a game that has a fixed story, a fixed completion rate and everything. All it tells me is that the developers did not think of or have had any faith in what they were making.

Photo modes that limit camera movement to within a tiny radius of the player character. FF7 Remake/Rebirth, and FF16, are glaring examples of this.

Or photo modes that fade out NPCs or objects when the camera gets close enough for good screenshots of them.

Just give me a boundless flying camera option and let me live with the unfinished bits if I so choose.

Cutscenes that can't be paused, especially if they're longer than 10 seconds.

Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.

When the only difference in difficulty is either by adding more waves of enemies, or giving bosses a bajillion hitpoints.

If I already learned all the game mechanics, and the only scaling is having to repeat them a lot more, that's poor design.

I dont mean this as much for adjustable difficulty, like easy vs hard mode, but rather in game progression...

Heal-over-time systems in CoD-like shooters lack feedback and are unreliable in terms of measuring difficulty of a task and feeling like you did something special. Everything becomes boringly average.