Top 15 Worst Games I’ve Played (So Far)

Hey! I play video games, and a lot of them. I also sometimes play bad games. Not too often, the most I play is pretty average, but sometimes, you just come across something that does not agree with you, and can be objectively broken down as kind of trash and smelly. I need to specify that I do not just mean games I do not like or like very much. I mean the real deal bad stuff, the sort of stuff your average gamer these days will never subject themselves too as they pick up the newest major releases.

Some of those major games are buggy. Some will be broken at launch. However, with a few rare exceptions, these sorts of games usually have a baseline quality in several areas that will generally be met. However, it took decades to reach this level of gameplay and system refinement. People who tried new things messed up, or overlooked simply quality of life details. Good ideas were given to less then ready teams. Sometimes, you’d just get a perfect storm of bad across the board, and end up with some real, high level garbage.

As I stay on the lookout for more bad games to better grow my pallet for the medium in general, I figured I’d list out fifteen of the worst games I have played, at least so far. So, grab a snack, some coffee, and set some time aside as I go down the sins of gaming past and present those I’ve borne personal witness to. We about to break em off something proper, so let’s do this!

And if you got that reference, congrats, you are an old nerd.

BUT FIRST! I must go over a few games that did not place, but I felt compelled to mention still.

Dishonorable Mentions

Advent Rising

I decided to be nice to Advent Rising, as it does become dumb fun once you get powers. Make no mistake, though, the game is a cobbled together mess. This is what happens when two dorks with almost no experience try to create a multi-media franchise, forgetting to nail the fundamentals that will keep people in. Then again, with the absurdly large scope and empty maps to show for it, one can assume that this failure suffered from a lot of budget mismanagement and poor design planning.

It’s a weird, janky mess where it is not uncommon to have your weapon clip into the ground and blow you up when you fire it while in that state. The script has exactly one interesting idea saved for a sequel hook, while the writing otherwise is generic and even cringe inducing (Olson Scott Card lost his pen game when homophobia ate his brain). The first half of the game feels completely disposable and is a frustrating slog to get through. There is some promise here, but the main people in charge of the project just didn’t have the chops yet to pull the vision together. A sad, almost pitiful showing, but there’s still charm in the score – assuming it actually was composed by Tommy Tallarico, who’s lied so much about what he has done that everything about him is suspect now.

Call of Cthulhu (2018)

At least they tried. That’s all I can ask from developers, really, and the team behind this second stab at an official Call of Cthulhu game definitely tried with what they had. Smart decisions were made at a lot of points in development, it succeeds in making a mood, and an initial play can be a bit gripping as you haven’t seen through the matrix code yet to see how thread bare the experience really is. For people complaining about how little variety Mass Effect had in choice outcome, I beg you to play this and see how bad it can really get. It’s a choice and stat focused adventure game with randomized basic skill checks. Not a CRPG with over 100 hours of story – a short, ten to fifteen (if I’m being generous) adventure game. That alone was already a warning sign.

The problems compound from there. The script feels very half formed, not knowing what to do with many of the pieces of the plot. The detective gameplay feels hollow as you realize you can miss clues by just not having big enough stats, and that most clues influence barely anything. Anyone with even the bare bones understanding of what eldrich horror is can guess most every twist from miles away, and the ones that are better hidden feel empty because of how they’re hidden. The absurdly awful post processing effects did not help, which I had to force off because it felt like I was drowning in pea soup. There’s no in-game options for this, I had to edit game files. I would consider this on the bad side of things overall, but it’s another case where I can’t necessarily hate it. I’m just disappointed the developers didn’t have the means to fulfill their goals.

HunieCam Studio

Ugh. Finding out the main dev behind this series was a gamergater was all I needed to divorce myself from his work, but I was already looking for an excuse as I saw how gross the previews for the sequel were. HunieCam did not help, a disgusting game made by a edgy little boy who’s first game was only as good as it was in spite of his creative touches (ie the racism and chan speak). I mean, turning AIDS into a game mechanic is genuinely a tasteless thing to do, and especially in the context of a comedic cam girl tycoon game.

What kept it off the list is that the game itself is fine. The design and mechanics are all sensible. It would be a bit hypocritical for a perv like myself to place the game for being crass and nasty. Still, it is a huge factor as to why I detest it so much, a repulsive experience, not helped by the frankly off-putting art they did for this one. I think it would have placed if not for the dev having at least a microcosm of sense and slowly erasing their trail to places like 8chan, telling me he does at least realize when something is beyond the pale enough to affect his bottom line. This game raises a lot of negativity in me, and low key makes me want to vomit.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Andromeda was never going to place, but it also can’t really be ignored. While I love the combat, the party, and I enjoyed the multiplayer a good bit, there’s no getting around what a mess this entry was in an otherwise fantastic series. Guess that’s what happens when your leadership thinks it’s a good idea to focus on a planet randomization system that gets outdone by a small indie team that ends up being completely useless because it can’t make fun play spaces, so you have to hastily slap a game together in a year.

Andromeda isn’t quite a disaster, which is an amazing accomplishment for the shitshow development, but you can clearly see how that cycle hurt it. Boring and empty side quests, barely thought out moral choices with often unclear outcomes, a dull recycling of ideas from the original trilogy, a lifeless hub world, and even that combat system has an utterly broken skill system attached with an absurd level cap that seriously needed to be balanced out. The game isn’t bad, but it gets harder and harder to consider it good the more I think about it, a massive disappointment that I do not have a strong urge to replay, which is a huge sign that it has failed as a Mass Effect game.

Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness

What is it with Lovecraft fiction resulting in so many messy games? Does it have something to do with what he named his cat? No matter the case, this little point and click is Not Good, but in a charming way. Hammy acting, butt ugly character models, a malformed story, and puzzle “design” that doesn’t even slot into old school cruelty, but a confused middle ground of not knowing what a puzzle is. Are puzzles trial and error mazes? These developers thought so.

There’s some charm from its aesthetics, but the game has not aged well, and probably wasn’t well liked at the time. However, at the end of the day, it’s just the game version of a B-movie, one a bit more artsy then the norm but a B-movie nonetheless. I can’t help but respect that on some level, obvious badness be damned.

Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter

Serious Sam has had a weird track record with spin-offs, partly because there’s so damn many of them. The Greek Encounter was the end of the first indie game wave of them, and it was a sour note at that. I can’t be too mean about it, though. It was clear the dev, who seems to have quit game dev entirely after this one, had a bad time table, and I feel good about that call because that was the case for that RPG spin-off too. I think it may have been rushed because Devolver Digital suddenly realized they didn’t need the game anymore since Serious Sam 3 released, meaning it wasn’t that useful anymore as an ad.

The game itself is a bare bones top down shooter with lifeless backgrounds and barely recognizable monsters due to the perspective chosen. There’s no variety, no difficulty balance, no flash, nothing. It’s just the most basic game you can imagine with this description, an unfinished something or other that just makes you feel bad knowing that it may have pushed someone out of the medium due to how it came out.

Serious Sam Advance

This one is definitely worse, though. Serious Sam Advance is slowdown hell, with almost entirely incomprehensible graphics, even compared to other GBA FPS games. Playing it is the opposite of fun, a barely functional car that can only inch along as you try to get it on track. It was so close to making the list, but I ultimately decided against it because while this is very bad, it’s also ambitious.

Anyone who tried to make an FPS work on the GBA gets some props. That is notoriously difficult, something very few people even got close to doing. There was thought to how it would work, and there was even some clever additions to Serious Sam lore I would like to see revisited (like the time lock remote that makes anvils and pianos drop on things). While the tech just wasn’t there to do what they wanted, they definitely tried, and I respect that.

The Shopkeeper

Here’s a weird one. I didn’t want to place it, that felt too mean, but also what even is this thing? I think I wrote about it years ago and gave it a confused recommendation because I had no idea what to make of it. The Shopkeeper is a short adventure game that’s basically a short time loop (?) story with poor acting that’s also in interactive video game form. It’s hard to say anything about it because nobody seems to know what the story was about and what happened in it – and that includes me.

Like…what is this? What was the point of it? Were they trying to say anything with it? Was there a point to the story? I want to say this is a badly written story just because of how incomprehensible it is, no matter how much I look at it. It’s just a weird, strange thing.

Super Star

Man, there was a saga attached to this one. Super Star itself is a bog standard raising sim that looks at copyright law in the eye and spits in it, made by some shady Chinese devs who took real pictures of real celebrities and just traced over them. Known at the time as SakuraGame, they became a bit infamous for people realizing just how much of the stuff in their games was stolen, and this game was definitely the funniest example. Also, you should never play it.

The other thing SakuraGame was infamous for was scamming doujin developers. Before Valve opened the floodgates, getting adult games on Steam was a nightmare. The best option was a publisher, and SakuraGame was one of the few, and the most they did was fax over extremely shady and pre-signed contracts, and then tossing the script of a game into google translate and just paste in the results. They are scumbags of the highest order, especially with what those contracts entailed as far as distribution rights go. Their first release on Steam gets a mention here for both its own merits, and for how trash its developers really were.

Yakuza (PS2)

Before any of you even start – have you played the original Yakuza on PS2? Have you actually played it on the original hardware? Because if the answer is no, you have no idea just how bad this series started out. Controlling Kiryu in fights was like trying to control a tank being driven by a drunk Bill Dauterive, the idea of turning around more a very vague suggestion then anything else. The dub is worse then you heard, a bizarre mixture of some solid actors giving badly directed performances and some of the most awkward dialog of the era, the end result of translating the script to be more like GTA3 then the more emotionally vulnerable story it really was. Almost every single character being miscast did not help. And the load times…my god. It took at least a full minute just to load a random encounter!

What saved it was that halfway through the game, Kiryu learns to sidestep. This makes the game go from torture to playable, and the story still manages to shine through the cuss heavy translation. Still, the overall experience is a mess. For all the small issues I have with Kiwami, it gets the edge just for being playable right off the bat. Sure, not telling you how central those kiwami moves are sucks, but at least Kiryu moves like a human being. It really is shocking in retrospect just how much an improvement Yakuza 2 was.

And with that out of the way, it’s time for the real shit show. Strap in.

15. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (PS2)

Now, many of you may be confused. After all, Ultimate Destruction is widely regarded as the best Hulk game! Granted, this is like picking out the least transphobic tory politician, but that is still an accomplishment. What some of you may not remember is that this was a multi-platform game, releasing on all of the sixth generation consoles. I bought and played the PS2 version, which was a huge mistake. That console, in particular, tended to have the weakest ports over all, due to lacking the specs Nintendo and Microsoft had on their devices. I have to wonder if this means the jank I encountered was a unique problem for the PS2 version because this game became infuriating as the difficulty spiked.

There was exactly one moment in this otherwise fun game that landed it so high on my shit list that I placed it on this list proper, beating out some real obvious trash. I was a good ways into the game, and if memory serves, it was a mission after an encounter with the military and the threat of the devil hulk breaking free in Banner’s mind. The mission revolved around fighting anti-hulk robots and breaking shield generators to take down shield barriers and make progress. Simple enough.

It was on this mission that I learned of some quirks of this game. A major one was that there are a butt load of projectiles in this game at times, especially in this mission. It was a fairly constant health drain made more complicated by the shields. These dome energy shields would lock off portions of the area, and generators powering them had to be destroyed to take them down. Thing is, there was a point where the game traps you under barriers, so you can’t go wham on the generators outside. To take those down, you have to throw things at them.

Because you are under a barrier, there are a finite amount of things to throw, which normally isn’t a problem. If the area is clear, lining up a clean lock on and toss is easy. But, as I have established, there are huge swarms of projectile spamming anti-hulk robots in this level, and they do not stop whittling away your health while you do that. They also fuck up the lock up, causing you to throw things at the wrong target, because the game starts assuming you’re aiming at an enemy. So, better destroy those robots before you accidentally waste what few items you have to throw!

A good way to do this would be to use some of Hulk’s cinematic moves, where he performs a devastating attack with a unique animation and camera angles. If you’ve ever used a heat move in a Yakuza game or modern DOOM‘s glory kills, you should understand how this will work. Activate the move, and you will not be damaged by anything while the move animation is going.

Here’s where the punchline comes in: THERE ARE NO FREE ACTIONS IN THIS GAME. What I mean is if you do one of these moves, enemies will still be firing at you! A lot! The animation will play while you get your health shredded even more! Oh, and remember how you’re in a barrier? The robots can enter the barrier…and leave it. If they are not in the barrier, you can only hurt them by throwing stuff at them, which is finite, so you should try throwing the robots, which requires hurting the robots, of which there is no safe way to do, because they can’t be hit by your fists outside the barrier, and the other robots will fire at you while you deal with one robot, and more robots spawn in!

I almost destroyed a controller as I hulked out and smashed it on my desk.

Fuck this game. Hulk Smash.

14. Mega Man Network Transmission

I love the Mega Man Battle Network series, even if it did go on for way too long. However, there were some weird entries in there, and this attempt at putting the series in the old platforming mold ended up being completely confounding. It looks good, presentation is down pat. It sounds good too, almost like the series’ anime come to life at points, and I’m a sucker for cel shading. Then you play it, and you instantly realize something has gone horribly wrong.

From what I can understand, the goal here was to merge a classic Mega Man platformer with the RPG elements of the Battle Network series, and they did that by just mashing those two things together with no thought whatsoever. Megaman.EXE is a slug in comparison to the OG blue bomber, with the weakest buster shot you’ll ever see, taking a ton of shots just to take out the most basic enemy in the early game. His moves that actually do any actual damage are with the chip system from the main series, complete with the usual random draw and waiting for a meter to fill to bring up the chip menu. What this means is that most of the game is you waiting on that bar to fill so you can actually do moves that do damage, and there’s always a chance that you’ll end up with a hand lacking any attack chips.

If this happens in a boss fight, kiss your butt goodbye. They are often pretty cheap, made worse by the lack of invincibility frames after you take damage. Every section of the game becomes a slog with all this adding into each other, and while you can grow your stats to make it less frustrating, you’ll still only reach the basic movement and power of the classic Mega Man.

The sloppiness of the platformer elements and the poorly explored implementation of the RPG elements results in a slap dashed mess, boring and frustrating in every step, with an extremely rough difficulty curve that never leaves any success feeling satisfying. While Network Transmission doesn’t quite have the same sort of obvious badness as some of the real trash out there does, when you play it, you can feel just how wrong every decision made really was. The fact it released with so many average scores is surprising, because this may be one of the worst Mega Man platformers ever made.

13. The Powerpuff Girls Gameboy Games

Okay, time for the sort of stuff you were expecting to see on a list like this, and we have a real doozy here. If you’re familiar at all with licensed games today, you’re probably used to a certain level of quality to be met. In the old days, it was another story. These games would be thrown out when something was the new hotness, or as an extension of a movie’s ad campaign, with little care if the end result was good or not. This resulted in a lot of rushed projects littering bargain bins, decorated with all sorts of familiar brands and franchises. Unsurprisingly, the Game Boy had a lot of these, especially in the Color days.

During the far off year of 2000, when an embarrassing white dude was telling us to keep on rolling with our chocolate starfish or whatever (you know what time it is), The Powerful Girls were the biggest thing on Cartoon Network and became a merchandising powerhouse. The first games to be based off the amazing cartoon (serious, it slapped, go back and watch the twerk free OG series, though be prepared for the style of the time the past was a mistake moments here and there) ended up being god awful and this would be a running theme for Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup’s digital adventures. While there’s some big question marks on the PC offerings (The Learning Company has a lot of credits for some reason), handheld and console offerings were complete nightmares the entire run.

The Game Boy Color ended up being home to three games that were basically the same (down to reused music), but with different starring girls and villains, and you could trade cards between them because everyone was trying to make Pokemon strike twice. Heck, Blossom and Buttercup’s games released days apart, while Bubbles’ seemed to take three extra months that didn’t help. The one I had as a kid was Buttercup’s, Paint The Townsville Green, and I kept trying to play it to understand just how to progress and never got anywhere until I tried some cheats and was further underwhelmed.

If you were expecting a game to properly emulate the cartoons on some level, where you get to be a hyper powerful cartoon girl and go to town on bad guys with really cool superpowers, you were a fool – as was I. The games are really simple platformers with bare bones “combat” that commits a major, Superman 64 style sin of depowering the characters. Flight works on a meter that can run out and need to recharge, which pairs badly with instant deal pits and a lack of a good save system.

That’s all that really needs to be said, really. The badness of these games is so obvious, down to their ugly look, that just realizing you have limited flight time should send home just how badly the team misunderstood the property they were given. Maybe being a Game Boy game didn’t help, but looking at console offerings show that tech wasn’t going to solve everything either. These were just sad wastes of my mother’s money, and one of my earliest regrets with a game I was super excited to play. At least it taught me an important lesson early to avoid licensed games without seeing a lot of praise out there, a lesson I never forgot. Saved me from a LOT of pain in the PS2 era.

12. Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

While I did grow up with Nintendo consoles, I did play around on the Playstation thanks to a friend I had in after school day care. I ended up playing some of those Digimon PS1 games, and also the original Spyro the Dragon, which I really enjoyed. I remember the flight and dashing momentum being really fun to mess with. Getting a next gen release on the Gamecube was a big deal for me, and then I played it and I could tell something was wrong almost instantly. I was just young enough to try powering through it, and it never got better at any point.

Enter the Dragonfly might be the worst mainline entry in the series, partly because it’s so obviously unfinished. The first game made after a dev change, the game can best be described as the team deciding not to rock the boat too much as they moved into a new console generation, while not being given the time and resources they needed to create the polished game people expected from Spyro by now. It is a glitchy mess so infamously broken that level skipping in it doesn’t involve any sort of speedrunning strats, but just swimming down to the bottom of a starting pond and bam, final boss. Not ideal.

The formula was running dry and needed a shake up at this point and the team here had no good ideas. The most we got were elemental breaths for very, VERY light puzzle solving, bringing nothing of interest to the table as a result. They added nothing to combat, which was already bare bones, so being able to spray lighting offered nothing of any interest or excitement. That just leaves the charm of the game’s writing and world itself and they botched that was well.

Spyro and friends are at their most annoying and half baked, especially Hunter’s doofy looking design here. Some of them look like there was no development of their look jumping to a new gen, resulting in a cheap and uncanny feel. This extends to the levels, ranging from boring, a failure at an interesting concept, to outright baffling stuff. There’s a farm level themed around alien abductions in this game, which should at least be novel in how out of nowhere it is, yet it’s just really dull in execution once the shock wears off (and it wears off quick). The entire game is stuck at a butt numbing level of excitement, bad jokes failing to add anything to the proceedings. The art direction is also a huge step down, partly because the devs seemed to not have any idea of what to do with all this new graphical power, lacking Insomniac’s inventiveness with what little they had to work with.

The end result is Enter the Dragonfly is less something you want to play, but instead smother with a pillow to put it out of its misery. It’s pathetic in every sense of the word, something that can only inspire pity and disgust. It’s only value is as a reminder of just how big a graphical leap the sixth console gen really was, because while we got a lot of classics in that era, we also got a lot of stuff like this – developers having absolutely no idea how to maximize the technology they were given and never given the chance to. In the end, we all lost.

11. Social Justice Warriors

Man, fuck this game. This one really ticked me off back in the day, but my feelings have softened on it a good deal since. I can respect what this wanted to be somewhat. For those unaware of what Social Justice Warriors is, it was an indie roguelike about social media and culture wars that released at the very unfortunate time of just around when GamerGate went down. That really informed my initial bitter reaction, but in retrospect after a long arc of becoming sick of social media and the type of behaviors it perpetuates, I can respect what the designer was aiming for. This game wasn’t meant to be a take that at racist trolls or online activists, but a statement on the importance of remaining calm in a heated cultural environment. There is something to avoiding reactionary thought processes for your own good, a stance we should be seeing more often and in a coherent manner.

This game is still on the list, though, but I think it utterly failed at what it was trying to do, lacking that coherent part. It is one of the most obnoxiously smug games I have ever seen in my entire life. Even if that wasn’t the intent, the end result is the interactable version of a centrist lib smugly saying nazis and anti-fascist activists are the same and them smelling their own farts while everything is on fire behind them.

This game’s commentary was already poor at launch, but it has only aged like milk. I would at least appreciate the game’s balliness to actual include dumb shit people actually say online if not for how the game’s mechanics refuse to engage with any of that, just using it as window dressing and creating unintended meaning as a result – at least I have to assume because it is really hard for me not to look at this in a more cynical light.

The idea is you are basically a twitter reply guy, lashing out at “trolls” for saying horrid things about actual groups of people, either out of ignorance or proper hatred. You go for as long as you can, but eventually you run out of mental health. The commentary intended is obvious in retrospect, but the game’s lack of care for the issues it brings up, not to mention the surprisingly empty statements from the developer, suggests a vapid ignorance that refuses to be examined. It feels intellectually dishonest and just doesn’t engage with why people get caught up in these self destructive patterns – and it’s usually because most of us actually care a great deal about these things because they directly affect us and our friends.

This is the product of someone who has no direct experience with issues of racial injustice, queerphobia, poverty, war, or any of those topics, and also isn’t curious or empathetic enough to try to have even basic understanding. The end result is a game that seems to mock everyone as equally foolish, refusing to understand that these patterns exist as a manifestation of a feeling of fear and powerlessness, seeing people you love hurt and be hurt and being unable to fix the problem. It fails as satire so much that a quick glance at the dead steam community shows the presence of a weird dude who shared GamerGate anti-SJW memes. It’s a fundamental failure that fails even at delivering a simple message more people need to hear because of that complete lack of emotional vulnerability.

I find this game gross to this day, and that opinion will probably never soften.

10. Devil May Cry 2

…oh my god how did Devil May Cry 2 only get to the number ten spot. I thought I hadn’t played enough garbage to make this list at start, but when I realized how low DMC2 placed, that thought process quickly flipped. For those unaware of just how big a deal this is, Devil May Cry 2 might be the single biggest disappointment Capcom ever released. Considering the state of the Resident Evil spin-offs, I realize how heavy a statement that is. The story goes that half of the game’s development time was wasted by a director who didn’t seem to know what they were doing, leaving Hideaki Itsuno barely a year to organize the team and finish the random pile of assists they had made to make something resembling a game. And brother, you can feel it.

I think the reason the game is placed so low here is because I can respect what little of the vision I can make out. This game has a great style to it, some really interesting demons in concept, a bunch of juicy story ideas begging to be re-visited, and one of the best soundtracks for the franchise (especially the final boss track). The problem is two fold – Dante is extremely lame now, and the game itself plays like poo-poo cah-cah. Where the original Devil May Cry was a game changer that showed people how a good 3D action game could be made, the sequel is a return to the then wonky norm most everyone else was operating on, mixed with a ton of unfinished areas and extremely dumb enemy AI.

On the subject of Dante, while his character hadn’t been ironed out yet, what with the first game’s being too goofy to the point the game’s overly sweet ending almost gave me diabetes, this was not it chief. We now have the opposite extreme of an edgy poser who’s so above it all, dismissing everything happening around him and throwing out the odd cuss to unexpected hilarity. It was a weird direction to pivot to, and while he has a rad look, that’s all he has going for him. The fact that the team managed to wrangle him into an actual character after these first two games sort of fumbling around is an accomplishment in itself.

As for the game proper…have you ever seen that one MST3K skit where the evil scientist say that the film for today would be woven together with DEEP HURTING in it? This is the game version of that. The longer it goes on, the more you can feel it gnawing at you, smoothing out your brain, as nothing of any interest is occurring mechanically so much that you actively start to notice it. There are some moments of life, where the goofy Matrix dodge button actually becomes an important mechanic for some boss fights, but 90% of your time will be spent either doing very weak sword combos or holding down the gun button until everything in the area dies, including enemies currently off-screen.

They will be off screen a lot, not helped by the absurdly huge and empty levels. While the dodge button does open up wacky combo opportunities, the levels won’t allow for it for the majority of your time playing. Heck, you don’t even get much in the way of weapons, just a sword skin with higher damage output that’s usually hidden away for some cruel reason. You need those if you hope to face any of the bosses and have them end in under ten minutes.

The boring boiling point of all this is definitely the now infamous infested chopper fight, starting with a slightly broken platforming challenge, and ending in a rooftop battle on a very small arena while it flies just barely in melee range, and not consistently. It takes so long to do any actual damage to it, while the dumb thing barely has any attacks to worry about, resulting in a boss fight so devoid of any stimulation that you can start to feel yourself age. The game is an endless stream of annoying emptiness, a complete waste of time just barely salvaged from being the worst of the worst by about two or three not terrible boss fights.

It only gets worse from here.

9. X-Blades

I almost feel mean for putting X-Blades on this list. I actually have a good deal of respect for it and not just for horny reasons. This game has a bizarre history, a jank ass Russian PC game from the mid 2000s ported to seventh gen consoles to cash in on that growing horny weeb market, despite it being an extremely amateur production that received no real polish or improvements. Its big lasting legacy is that its main character wore the world’s thongiest thong on the cover and in the game with her starting “armor,” when it’s biggest legacy should be the inexplicable prog rock song that sneaks up on you and then slams into your unsuspecting ears at the menu, of which has an origin I am still unsure about. That thing got me like a jump scare the first time I heard it.

I think this was the first exposure for a lot of anime loving dorks just discovering the vastness of Naruto hentai of the infamous B-game, a middle market toss up that always had some sort of jank, but the quality was always a big question mark. X-Blades ended up on this list so you can probably infer where it lies, but not for a lack of trying. There is an understanding of the basics here that the studio would use to more success on later projects, including a reboot called Blades of Time that is better but also way more infuriating. This was the product of some vodka soaked nerds wanting to make a hot anime girl action game and took notes from Tomb Raider and Devil May Cry to do it because they played those and thought they were rad. That’s respectable.

This is all to say that X-Blades is not a game I hate, but also it is very obviously bad. A lot of elements to it are clearly here because these guys didn’t quite know what they were doing, which is a bit of a surprise because the game doesn’t give off that vibe initially. It has a pretty solid art style, mixing cel shading to make anime girls in 3D, alongside almost nostalgic seventh gen realistic style ruins areas and flashy effects. The game has energy – too much. It really shows in the cutscenes, where the guy deciding camera angles heard of still shots and thought anyone who uses those was a coward. The game is always moving, with even main gal Ayumi having flowing twin tails going every which way.

This extends to gameplay, which is a wild explosion of colors and effects, which helps disguise how bare bones the gameplay actually is. Ayumi’s pistol blades function as both melee and ranged combat options, the former for pretty basic comboing with some light DMC style flair, and the latter being hitscan shots to deal with flying enemies, for the most part. The two styles of offense don’t mesh well as a result, which you would know if you had also played Devil May Cry 2 and had a sinking realization that this description also clicks with that game as well. Sword and shot do not mix naturally into combo potential, meaning two different styles of game have clearly been jammed together, creating an awkward base to work from.

The issues from here come from the team knowing good ideas for a game like this, but not knowing how to convey information to a player well, or not knowing how to make that play interesting. For example, the game’s key mechanic, the rage system, is never explained. That system is how you use magic, the only proper way to do any real damage to enemies in the game, so not being told about it despite being told about so much else is a bizarre overlook. Also hilariously, the game has two endings, and you get locked into the bad one if you use dark magic even once.

While some levels are fine enough, a lot are completely inexplicable, like starting the game with a boss fight, and one of the earliest levels having you fight a giant turtle while being pelted by fireballs seemingly being fired from the invisible walls of the arena. It is weird because good ideas do appear as you go with somewhat okay execution, like a variety of puzzle bosses, but the general clumsiness of the controls and animation still don’t let you forget what you’re playing. X-Blades is a game I am arguably too fascinated by, when it’s really just not that good at all, albeit in a way that makes you want to know why that is.

It doesn’t cause nearly as much pain as DMC2 does, true enough. However, it’s also lacking in any sort of highs, the product of inexperienced devs not knowing how to make an action game like this, alongside some good old slav jank. The end result isn’t the worst time in the world, but as you play, it is impossible to ignore the endless string of flaws keeping the game chugging. This is a bad game in the most pure sense, and it got sold on the Xbox 360. Wild.

8. Painkiller Redemption & Recurring Evil

I have played every Painkiller game and can safely tell you that you do not have to play any of them beyond the first game’s Black Edition. This is not a franchise, but rather one good game that a desperate publisher tried to force into franchise status in the cheapest way possible. Every sequel has its own sin. From Overdose deciding that health and ammo isn’t something you need to play an FPS, or Hell & Damnation nickle and diming you into rebuying the game you played less then ten years ago but with better textures and lighting, it’s an absolute shit show. Even Resurrection can be seen falling apart at the seams, enemies spawning on top of each other with delayed AI.

However, there’s usually something to most of these games that can at least justify their existence. Overdose has a new interesting protag with unique weapons, Resurrection has some charming Max Payne style comic cutscenes and attempts to weave narrative into levels, and Hell & Damnation does have some interesting concepts in its story and its idea of remixing old levels that were worth at least trying. Redemption and Recurring Evil, though? There is no reason these exist beyond greed and desperation.

These were the last two of these direct sequels to be released (Hell & Damnation is a whole other can of worms), seemingly made by teams pulled from the modding community. The money ran so dry at this point that they couldn’t even manage comic style cutscenes with narration, and instead made shoddy slide shows with whatever concept art they had lying around that included text explaining what was happening. Continuity is also handled poorly, bringing in “Wild Bill” from Resurrection during Redemption to bless some weapons (???) while Recurring Evil starts right up about where Resurrection ended, meaning he had not time to do this. It’s a mess that does try to follow up the original game, something neither of the previous sequels really bothered with, but the end result is a sad, wet fart.

The games are also quite bad, in a unique way compared to the previous entries. Painkiller has a certain rhythm to it, often feeling like a sort of dance when played right, and the devs of these sequels didn’t quite nail that, or in the case of these two games, didn’t even understand the base concepts. What we have here isn’t even a DOOM wad filled with a ridiculous number of monsters, but two Serious Sam ripoffs that fail to understand that Painkiller is not Serious Sam. Monsters behave differently, mobs are designed differently, and the weapons aren’t made for those large numbers chasing you, especially with the complete lack of ammo. Making matters worse is that most of these levels are just multiplayer maps loaded up with ridiculous waves of enemies, meaning there’s not even level design to appreciate, just a funnel through a meat grinder.

The fact that these games are official, published, commercial entries is an insult to the original game and the people behind it. Heck, there are regular spelling mistakes (in a monster horde FPS!) alongside the uninspired creature mobs. The games wear out their welcome just a few minutes in, not even ten percent through the first levels, as you realize that oh, this is just going to be several hours of this. These games might actually have more deep hurting than Devil May Cry 2, and accomplishment absolutely nobody should feel good about. Can you believe they’re still working on another Painkiller game!? At least it can’t be as bad as these.

7. Sinful Eden

And speaking of scams, fuck this game and do not buy anything from these developers. Then again, that may be easy since they seemed to have dropped this scam and then disappeared off the face of the Earth. The group behind this one, Dualhaze, are almost non-existent now, but used to be an active indie publisher on Xbox Live Arcade and the like. They would make games with a striking art style and lots of pretty women with titles like “Date the Boss” and “The Sexy Exorcist,” but the games they would release would just be the most absolutely thread bare minigame collections, sometimes with maybe a sim element that was equally half assed.

Sinful Eden remains their only Steam release, probably because as soon as it dropped, people realized what the game was and weren’t having it. I picked it up because I found the art design really charming, a unique blend of clean 3D models and minimalist character designs, creating this sort of smooth, erotic vibe I hadn’t really seen from any sort of game before. There is a legit vibe here with the sleek tropical and modern look, no question. Then I played it and, as I played it for two or three hours, I started to channel the Fresh Prince as I kept asking myself “where the video games!?”

The premise is kind of unique and amusing. You are a guy who has just entered adulthood, and are on an island ruled by a woman god who does away with any guys who don’t manage to get a partner by a certain age. This is now a problem because your girlfriend dumps you, and now you need to get married or you will die. The framing is very goofy without breaking the game’s unique vibe, and everything looked promising as the sim elements opened up and revealed a focus on time management, doing activities to improve yourself or meet new people, and eventually date a cute girl.

The problem quickly rears its head as you realize there is fucking nothing to do in the game itself. The amount of dead air in this game is astonishing, especially for a game like this. Games with a limited amount of in-game time to do what you need to do tend to focus on putting pressure on the player, and doing what you can with the time you’re given. Sinful Eden instantly shoots itself in the foot with extremely limited schedules for some activities (like a part time job), so you really just have two activities that never grow in complexity or challenge – or if they do, it takes so long that it’s not worth finding out. I hope you like the one single slide puzzle with the one single picture and a poorly coded sexy Breakout mode because that’s all you’re fucking getting! Seriously, the physics in that second one are so borked that a ball can get stuck on a wall and slide up and down it randomly.

The sim elements are just as vapid and empty. For a dating sim game, your potential love interests are all paper thin, interactions amounting to learning what they would like as a gift and getting them the gift and that’s it. Doesn’t help one of them exists entirely to be a fat joke that was so tired that Family Guy would have made it a running gag in the late 2000s. Add in how slow time moves, and you end up with an awkward, empty turd shined up to the nines, where absolutely nothing happens and you start wondering how you got here in the first place.

I have genuinely never encountered anything else like this game. It’s so lacking in anything of substance or even basic amusement that it just barely qualifies to be called a game. The problem is so glaringly obvious that it is actually difficult to talk about because there’s so little to add. I would be a bit nicer towards the dev if not for the fact that I have basically described every game they’ve ever released, banking on base level sex appeal to get impulse buys, and that’s just a bit too scummy for me to put up with.

Oh, and the kicker? That sexy Breakout game? That was added in a later update when people complained there was nothing to do in the game.

Can’t make this shit up.

6. Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Persian Carpet

I have played every Sherlock Holmes game that Frogwares has ever made, and this one is absolutely the worst – which granted, isn’t saying much because of how enjoyable that series mostly is. Mystery of the Persian Carpet, however, is a bit of an outlier as being the first entry in their short lived casual line. I think that line was surprisingly solid on the whole, but it started extremely rough, a clear slapped together side project that I feel insulted to find out cost money, and that I paid for.

I feel confident in this read because of how many assets are just screens from The Silver Earring (the second game in the series), which was already pretty old by the time this game released. The idea here seems to be to make a simplified version of one of their mainline Sherlock Holmes games, giving a basic mystery revolving around a carpet that you solve this time around almost solely with minigames and puzzles taken from the main series, with a few new ideas added here, alongside a deductive set of systems to reward logical thinking. The end result is a game that is somehow both extremely simple and somehow so overthought that it starts to feel like you’re trapped in the house of leaves.

The initial problem that following any narrative is near impossible with how poorly thought out supplying that narrative is, creating very little context for going from activity to activity. You will not get much in the way of written dialog, and information gained from gameplay segments is so blink and miss that it rarely ever registrars. The fact that every screen is from The Silver Earring just makes it more confusing as they had to write a new scenario would use those screens, and anyone familiar with that game would just have their brain stuck on that first story.

This is made worse by the fact that taking minigames and puzzles from the main series means the game is far too difficult for a casual experience, or in the case of the cuneiform puzzle, way too fucking long. Those older Sherlock Holmes games had some of the most brain draining puzzles you’ll ever see from a point and click outside the more Myst-inspired side of the spectrum, so a lot of puzzles used did not fit well with the more simple pacing and structure. The cuneiform puzzle is especially horrible to see make a return from Nemesis, which is just a drawn out guessing game that goes on for an eternity.

New stuff added is also very bad. The deductive boards are so confusingly put together that trying to make sense out of any part of them could potentially damage one’s sanity. How clues go together is also confusing due to a complete lack of context for the majority of the game, meaning there’s barely anything to think about. The suspect minigame is also just a bog standard pixel hunt that offers nothing of interest, not even in the new art made for them.

You add everything up and you’re left with an extremely shallow experience that is also far too difficult for an average casual gamer to finish. It’s a severe misunderstanding of what anyone wanted from a game like this, not helped by the extremely cheap production values. The later casual releases would be equally cheap, but make the most of things with striking art design, something this game didn’t bother with. Definitely bottom of the barrel for this vast, vast genre.

5. Devil’s Hunt

Oh yeah, now we’re at the fun entry. Gather around bros and non-binary hoes, because the story of Devil’s Hunt is a thing of beauty, an almost Disaster Artist level exercise in ego and poor management, a perfect storm of drive and lacking talent. Based on a series of books by one Paweł Leśniak, Devil’s Hunt also had that writer listed as creative director, and he was the CEO of the game’s studio. That studio went out of business, with a lot of the staff never getting paid, and console ports never getting finished. You can already kind of tell where this story is headed, but the devil is very much in the details here.

Devil’s Hunt looks and sounds like a professionally made video game, at least on first sniff. The environment designers and backdrop people did ace work, and some of the models look pretty good at first glance. They things start moving and characters start talking and the problems quickly become clear. Hope you like dead eyes and awkward idle poses! This game feels unfinished, and probably is, with animations that have camera angles focusing on the face of the model while not animating the face, and a script that is so tell and don’t show that one suspect’s it’s just a straight text lift from the original novel at more than a few moments. Everyone has to tell you exactly who they are all the time, all while barely showing any real personality beyond the most basic archetypes.

These characters go on and on in full Robot Devil explaining he’s angry mode, an endless stream of exposition that dances around getting to the actual point because there has to be a sense of mystery in the plot so predictable twists can exist. The end result is a swarm of cliches that may have worked with third person narration, but not in cutscene form. It does not help that our lead character is so lacking in definition and intelligence that we have to put up with him being tugged along by demons and angels for several hours and never asking the obvious questions, or asking them and then getting no answer in return. It’s just such a thread bare story, one that was setting up sequels we will never see, a massive miscalculation. I don’t just mean in the ending either, but also in the prologue, starting the game at a point in the story that we never see in this entry.

As for the gameplay, it seems like it’s going to be some sort of action game, but it’s only that in the most basic definitions. You can punch and claw at enemies with your demon claws, but it never feels right. It’s very, very bare bones where you have the attack animations, but a lack of feedback in both the dull sound design and any sort of satisfying damage animations. Models are often posed in the second most simple pose besides a T-pose, making everyone feel like mannequins rather than monsters and people. The upgrade tree also feels completely pointless, all of the moves you unlock being functional, but offering nothing in creating combos or stylish touches. Why bother with any of them when you can just keep punching and clawing?

This is all further made worse by the world exploring mechanics being walking along a thin bridge line or inching through a crack in a all or some debris. I don’t mean as a way to build tension in the middle of some difficult sections of action, I mean as a thing you do all the time because the designers realized there were long stretches with nothing to do and this was all they had to fill time and make it feel like you’re doing something. There doesn’t appear to be fail states or even these needing to be there for loading reasons, so you’re just left wondering why you’re doing this at all. The only parts of this game that seem to work at all are just ones where you walk around your house and read notes, and even that gets screwed up by some of the most repetitive and overused tension and dread music ever composed.

Devil’s Hunt is such a basic experience that it makes experimental 3D games from the PS1 era look modern and polished in comparison, even with its superior graphics and occasional good rock beat. Where Sinful Eden was empty in terms of stuff to do, Devil’s Hunt is empty due to what you can do being so simplistic and lacking detail that it barely feels like you performed any action at all. It is a miserable pile of decimated ambition, and it might honestly be worth experiencing for a bit because of that. The fact this game exists at all is a sort of horrible miracle of failure.

4. Black Rainbow

Returning to the world of bad casual games, Black Rainbow is easily the most baffling of all of the ones I’ve played, which is impressive for such a deranged genre or adventure games. It appears to be a single release from a no name studio, and I’m not entire convinced everyone on the team knew what a video game was – or what storytelling was. The game has the general aspects of these sorts of games, with a normal to fantastical story with a lot of simple logic puzzles to solve, and a unique art style that’s very detailed and flashy in a gaudy sort of way. However, it does not take long to realize something is very, very wrong.

What’s unique about this list entry is that it’s not that bad as a game. The puzzles are fine enough, not too hard or easy (though there is a lot of Simon Says). What gets it so high is that the context given is complete nonsense that could have very well been the results of playing Mad Libs or the devs coming up with a puzzle and just making up whatever random crap they could to justify them. Or, what I suspect, trying to make a story from a handful of models and assists they had on hand, and being extremely bad at it.

Despite the surprisingly well produced (for a small release like this) FMV cutscenes, the character models in game look remarkably cheap, and we’re talking early 2000s fetish comic made in a random and poorly optimized modeler program cheap. They’re put into awkward poses, and objects have weird textures and lighting applied to them that give me a lot of unwanted flashbacks to the backgrounds some some weird tentacle and parasite stuff (I have seen some things). Things are often just plopped into the scene with no real sense of image unity, and the hair rendering…man, Poseidon has seen some shit.

The fact the story of this game is built initially on white savior tropes (an explorer dealing with savage natives and being the one who saves the world) and I’m not particularly grossed out by it should tell you just how many things are wrong with this game. The white savior stuff is like twelve on the list of things wrong with this game. I mean it is shocking initially when dealing with racist as hell tribesmen models (plus one dude trapped in a very awkward and expressionless quicksand sinking pose), but plenty soon follows to distract.

Hard to focus on that when you get tossed out the world’s most half-assed chosen one story (you opened the door ARE YOU THE CHOSEN ONE?????) that includes the smoke monster from LOST, whatever the pointy sword chair from Game of Thrones is, and a Socrates ass looking dude who seems to be smoking a cigarette while hanging out on sky Atlantis. There is no build up for any of this. Things just happen. The ending of the game is your character rubbing two jewels together and that makes a generic 3D model of an orc disappear. Also, scorpion venom? Makes you breathe under water. Try it kids!

I try to never say a game is lazy because making a game is hard work, and there was clearly some effort here, like in those cutscenes. But boy did they cut corners on a lot of this, and it feels like it was for the contemptible reason of having little respect for their target audience. This feels like something put together as a quick product that checks some boxes and little else, creating this accidental madness space from the sheer lack of care in writing, conceptualization, and presentation. It’s a laughable experience that manages to not be reprehensible just from its sheer ineptitude. I do not hate Black Rainbow, I’m actually appreciative of all the laughs it gave me as I tried to process what the hell I was looking at, but it is also a deeply cynical game made solely as a quick cash in. It’s not good, but you can point at it every few minutes and go “what the fuck” and that’s not nothing. And also bad.

3. Those bondage games made by that one Chinese dev with alt accounts

Oh, we’re gonna be in the weeds on this one.

So, I like bondage (more in a “I Think It’s Neat” sort of way) and my neurons activate when I see games based around it, and I am often disappointed in the end results. This particular example, though, is a bit different. What we’re talking about here is special, one of my few accidental brushes with the bottom barrel of Steam listings. I tend to stay away from that cess pool because I don’t want to reward these people for their laziness, preferring to watch from afar via youtubers, but I ended up slipping into it via one “MCG,” or sometimes “MA Game,” and probably a few other names by this point.

As far as I can tell, they appear to be a Chinese developer who uploads a lot of indie games to Steam, once having tried releasing a shooter in 2020 and then went to constant bondage baiting. I don’t want to say they’re an assist flipper, there does seem to be some effort in places, but it is kind of remarkable just how empty and bare bones every game they put out really is, plus that one time they just straight up ripped off Hajime, the creator of Huuma Mina and Cinderella Escape. He’s kind of one of the more established names in the bondage games scene, someone who’s work I greatly enjoy, despite its constant cheapness. Ripping off his work is really noticeable.

It’s actually a bit difficult to talk about these games because there’s not much to say with most of them. The badness is extremely obvious on every level. Lazy use of premade assists and UI elements, bizarre character proportions in comparison with the environments in some games, often barely coherent mechanics, ect. Only 2019’s Bondage Girl is free of my scorn, a basic but does on the tin bondage flavored stealth and escape game. I suppose I’ll lay out the biggest offenders of the group to really trash this out.

Sprite Hunter is a baffling experience, a combat focused souls-like (maybe?) with the world’s most obnoxious stamina bar and a complete lack of natural feeling animations, making action feel like a soupy mess. Prison Girl is a sim and stealth game with broken stealth, mind numbing day to day life sim moments, and I still have yet to figure out how to leave the scene that follows being caught. Rose Action, developed under the handle “Ma Ge Game” (the only other game under this studio name being a racing game with bondage in the trailer), is just straight up broken on a fundamental level. There’s multiple modes of play, but the beginning tailing section is so confusing and strict towards mistakes that finishing said level feels genuinely impossible. There extremely slow and awkwardly funny game over scene where you get slapped is, admittedly, funny, but not after trying to pass the damn first level over a dozen times.

The worst of them, however, without any doubt, is Room Prison. It doesn’t even count as a game. It’s an executable that loads up a girl assist you can put in bondage, in rooms that are scaled way too small for said girl, who usually clips through the ceiling and enters the sub sky. It’s supposed to be some sort of escape room game, but in reality, it’s an unfinished program with nothing to do.

This guy is still making games, by the way, and they all look just as crummy.

2. Zool Prototype Repackages

Now, this one is a special topic. If you’re familiar with Wii shovelware, you probably already know what I’m about to talk about, but for those new, buckle up for a baffling story. This entry starts with the story of a long running game studio called Data Design Interactive, some old hats from way back in the 80s computer game scene who had been managing to stick over the years through licensed gaming. After acquiring another studio called Metro 3D, they became a massive shovelware developer in Europe, which people did not appreciate.

The rumor from here goes that at the start of this shift into quickly made trash games, DDI managed to snag a deal to develop a 3D entry for the Zool series, a then popular platformer that was a big hit for Amiga computers back in the day and basically nowhere else. The rumor goes that what the prototype they made was so bad that the rights holders broke the deal off right there, and took the IP from them. If you want a more through explanation check out this Rerez video on the subject.

I need to stress that I did not find out about what I’m about to talk about from Rerez, I found out by buying and playing three out of four of these games that appear to be reskinned versions of that Zool prototype. I own Ninjabread Man, Anubis II, and Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland. They are all terrible and also the exact same game with different paint jobs. This was made possible with in-house tech made for porting and tweaking, allowing them to release the same game on four different occasions with different looks, sometimes just days apart.

Let me tell you, it was a strange experience trying to fill out my Wii library as the system’s cycle was ending. I went nuts at used bins, only to be flushed with all sorts of cheap crap, though most of it didn’t make this list because the games I got were at least competent. The fact they were released on the Wii was baffling, but they were proper complete games with some fun to be had, once you got past their cheap nature. Heck, some were just indie games that somehow slipped on via a publisher picking them up for a quick buck.

These Zool reskins, however, really took me aback as I quickly realized from playing a few what the studio actually did, even before learning of the Zool connection. Mechanics, enemy behaviors, a few levels, and basic control was the same across every entry, and flat out horrible to experience each time. Along with the usual problem of bad waggle controls, the camera felt like it would be subpar even for a game released on the original Playstation or N64. Finding out years later these were based on a crummy prototype helped explain a lot, not to mention they were also ports of PS2 releases, thus how badly the waggling fit.

These games made it so high not just for being smelly, leaky trash left out in the sun too long, but for the sheer audacity of how they were released. Ninjabread Man and Anubis II originally being released just days apart is still so shamelessly wretched that I have trouble believing that actually happened. If it was just one of these, they would not have made the list (okay, they’d still be in the top ten at least), but together? Nah man, I gotta call scummy practice what it is.

These awful scams still have nothing on what hit my number one spot.

Be warned. It’s going to get very, very weird from this point on.

1. A.D. 2044

So, one day, back in the dark times when I used twitter (ew), Good Old Games, or GoG, announced another free game giveaway. One of the games, Stronghold, looked pretty nifty, a British made strategy game based around sieges. It was the other game that got everyone’s attention, with this blurb (with some amusing edits I added, you’re welcome):

“Male civilization is on the VERGE OF EXTINCTION. Genetic engineering has made human reproduction possible without the NEED for man’s involvement. Women have decided to fight THEIR FINAL BATTLE and to shape the WORLD the way they want it. But if that’s not enough, women have a new LASER WEAPON which KILLS only MEN, and the few remaining men are being turned into ‘SHE CLONES’ in the BIOTIC CLINICS. And there’s more, a rebel FEMINIST has stolen a supply of warheads and INTENDS to start a GLOBAL NUCLEAR WAR.”

And you, as “the last remaining NORMAL MALE,” must “avoid these FEMALE superpowers [and] REVERSE their DOMINATION.”

In a post-GamerGate world, this turned heads – especially when people realized this game was from 1996. I decided to write about it for HG101 on a whim, and then started studying up on the game’s history. Things only got weirder from there.

You see, A.D. 2044 is not a random bad game. It is, in fact, a remake of a 1991 Atari game, which was based on a Polish film from, hilariously, 1984. That film, Seksmisja or “Sex Mission,” was a political sci-fi satire about Communism, feminism, and various topics relevant to the Polish political climate at the time. I have not seen the movie, but based on what I do know about it, the film does at least look competent and coherent in its themes.

This version of the game (no idea on the original, sprite based game) is not.

A.D. 2044 is easily the worst adventure game I have ever bore witness to. It is an ugly, confusing mess, where that description up there doesn’t even feel remotely accurate to what is occurring. This is partly because the voice acting present is so badly mixed that it’s impossible to understand what is being said without subtitles, meaning the introductory cutscene is meaningless dribble. What this results in is an adventure game with no clear context as to what the entire game is about, leaving you to randomly try items with whatever is on the screen and hope this leads to progress. This is made frustrating by so many items being hidden with obscure angles and areas you have to find with the cursor, one of the worst sins of the adventure game genre.

While all that is happening, you have to put up with butt ugly graphics, which actually further obfuscate what is happening because all the regular women models look like the supposed fembots the game’s description mentions. It is unclear if you actually face any fembots in this game. It’s full on amateur hour on every level but the snazzy look of the UI, which is then undercut by how basic the item icons are. Extremely basic textures, overly busy lens flares on lights, piss poor FMV, and a severe lack of color that make the game look like a beige nightmare you can’t wake up from.

If you were hoping for some relief from the score, bad news! It is shockingly cheap sounding for the period, with what sounds like horrible midi tracks with poorly chosen instruments for the composition. This leads to ear bleeding high pitch noises at times, with some very chintzy drums. The compositions themselves just sound like random chaos, the sort of thing your parents probably heard when complaining about the beeps and boops from your favorite console game. Together with the horrible audio mixing and eye gouging graphics, you have a recipe for pure disgust on every screen.

The kicker here is that despite the game tossing out the original film’s plot (maybe, it’s hard to tell what’s going on at any given moment), it still keeps the ending where you mess with a reproduction machine so it makes male babies, and the game ends with FMV baby dick and screaming women, which I think was lifted directly from the film’s ending. So, uh, yeah. This game fucking blows on every conceivable level, the only non-negative thing I can say about it is that it is short with a guide. It doesn’t feel short while playing it, but is is technically short, the best kind of short.

One day, I might find something even worse than A.D. 2044. That day will probably not be soon though, because dear god, this was an absolutely horrid experience from beginning to end.