The Rogueies: Most Frustrating Game

Some games just make you want to break a controller. And when it's done well, it deserves recognition.

These games aren't bad! Elden Ring would go here, for example, and that's a Game of the Decade contender. We tried very hard (and were mostly successful) to keep this award from becoming Most Disappointing or just Worst Game.

Most Frustrating Game is a celebration of the joys of exacting gameplay and an acknowledgement that, sometimes, devs make things overcomplicated.

Cronos: The New Dawn

Chronos: The New Dawn is a really exciting entry into the survival horror genre, and I’m pretty excited to see what Bloober Team gets up to next because of it. However, it still frustrated me quite a bit during some of the boss fights.

Now if you go on Reddit or something, you’ll find a lot of people who struggled with the final boss or got stuck for hours. I thankfully didn’t have that experience, but I did get punched in the ass by a few bosses. This … sucks, because it feels like the team designed some encounters with a dodge of some kind in mind. But there is no dodge roll to be seen.

Sometimes, this works great, because it makes the main character feel like a damn tank, which they absolutely are. But you’re just so, so slow in Chronos, and sometimes that doesn’t mesh as well with the actual gameplay as I’d like. It took some encounters toward the end of the game that I thought were neat and just made them a slog.

I can see the enemy moving toward me, I feel them running up behind. And yet I cannot outplay this situation. Guess I should’ve had better positioning (which is true, but it feels bad when I just want to dodge something).

— RG

Elden Ring: Nightreign

What’s not to love about more Elden Ring!?

Well, for starters, it’s not really more Elden Ring. What Nightreign is is a three-player co-op disjointed highlights reel of Elden Ring. And what’s missing is the progression.

Instead of a satisfying hours-long grind of incremental improvements, Nightreign is Elden Ring Fortnite-ified into a PvE all-but-battle royale. Couple the chaos inherent in that premise with needing to get both good teammates and good loot drops, and Nightreign ends up feeling more like gambling than the skill-based "git gud" challenge of a From game.

— JP

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

We wanted to be careful with this category to avoid it becoming “this game was disappointing and bad” instead of celebrating good — if infuriating — design. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, though, slipped under the wire in terms of both timing and our definition.

It’s not that Beyond is hard — it’s (mostly) not. It’s not even that it’s a challenging game — it’s not. The reason it makes this list is that it’s a challenging gameplay experience.

There are dozens of design decisions that make Beyond a frustrating game — that Samus moves like she’s made out of lead, that it’s set on a not-actually-open-at-all open world map, confusing weak point highlights, etc. There’s a good game somewhere in Beyond, but the game that you have to play to find that game is a frustrating mess.

— JP

Nintendo Switch 2: Welcome Tour

Hoo boy, Nintendo Switch 2: Welcome Tour. 

Talking about the price here – or the fact that Nintendo didn’t pack this ad into the box itself – feels like it’s getting into beating up on the game territory, so we’re going to move past it. But it IS bullshit, for the record. 

Anyway, what's frustrating about Nintendo Switch 2: Welcome Tour is that it’s pretty cool. Or it would be. See, I really enjoyed running around and learning about the way my new Mario Donkey Kong machine works. Some of the mini-games weren’t great, but others were genuinely challenging and cool, and really sold the value of things like the Switch 2 Pro Controller. But that latter part is the major frustration with Nintendo Switch 2: Welcome Tour, and the reason it’s here: you need to buy all of the peripherals and have a 4K TV to do all the stuff.

I’m not really sure how Nintendo was going to get around this – which I also find frustrating – but it just leaves the entire thing feeling like an ad that I paid for. I didn’t pay much, but I’d rather buy a sandwich than pay Nintendo money to tell me I should’ve gotten that cool Switch 2 camera. 

— RG

Most Frustrating Game winner — Hollow Knight: Silksong

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a bastard game made by bastard people, and I will hold firm to that belief forever, no matter how much I grow to enjoy the game. 

I wrote in my review for Silksong that what helped the game finally click for me is this realization that it wasn’t made for me. The folks at Team Cherry built something they wanted to make and that shines through. But they wanted to make it mean and hateful, and tricky. It is intentionally designed to frustrate you and they know that. 

But that gets into the idea of this award of ours in the first place? Is it chastising a game for being shitty? I’d like to think not. Instead, I see this as a celebration of friction. Without friction, you have a boring experience that’s barely even memorable by the time you get to the end. But you feel something with Silksong – at least I did. And that thing might be white, hot rage. But it’s also passion.

There were games I played this year that made me a lot less angry than Silksong, but that anger fueled me to the end, and I’m so glad it did.

— RG