Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.

I don’t like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I’m going to download a mod.

Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur

Insert real world money to continue/for advantage. Whether it’s modern FTP with MTX or old school quarter eaters, it’s poison to games.

QTE, especially when they’re randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.

Game has collectables scattered in almost every room including lore text and audio logs.

Meanwhile the story NPC is nagging you to move on every 30 seconds on a loop and won’t shut the fuck up. Because play testing revealed most of their players are fucking morons and get lost in one way apartment rooms I guess.

These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it’s immersion breaking every time.

Very few checkpoints or save options. I don’t have time to try to beat something if there is like 20 mins of playtime from the last checkpoint.

Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.

Time gates. Gacha games are rife with them…

Want a piece of equipment for your character? Well spend daily currency to get one that regenerates over a day. Oops rng God hates you and you got +Def for a character that wants +Atk, better luck tomorrow/next week… Oops it’s still not your week +Hp this time.

I don’t think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.

• Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs — like the D&D Gold Box games — came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one’s map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there’d be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn’t like this mechanic.

• Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.

• In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one’s precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There’s some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don’t think that it’s necessary — a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don’t really like situations where it’s just added for the sake of being there.

Been playing Dark Deity (a Fire Emblem clone) lately and instead of permadeath, it reduces a random stat by 10% permanently. Can’t say I’m a fan. Just have a permadeath mode and a regular mode.

Doom3 flashlight. It’s Doom. Not fucking 5 Nights at Freddy’s.

Capitalism, as seen in monopoly

Both Control and the dogshit Avengers game had these upgrade systems where you were constantly bombarded with pickups that offered inane benefits like “2.5% increase to headshot damage for 3 seconds after taking damage while in midair” and you spent half the game managing your goddamn upgrades and the limited upgrade slots instead of having fun. It got to the point where I was relieved when I DIDN’T get any upgrades after a battle.

Taking control away from the player for stupid bullshit.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 had this to the most extreme level I had ever seen. Random NPCs can initiate dialogue without you hitting a prompt (and they can appear anywhere, even in the middle of a cave full of monsters). Your companions will sometimes high five you, and it just forces you into an animation that it didn’t prompt you for. There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.

Dragon’s Dogma? More like Dragon’s Dogshit. 😬