The Evil Within

I quit the game around chapter 6, less than half way in.

Until then, I enjoyed the atmosphere and design. The story and characters are cliché, but the creepy set pieces make up for it.

But it's frustrating. First, there are the technical issues. The game is 11 years old and already won't cooperate when trying to play it on a contemporary PC platform. It took a lot of tweaking to get it to launch and run, and then to go beyond the locked 60 FPS. Every time you start the game or get to the title menu it wants you to log in to Bethesda's services with unacceptable permissions. You can cancel and still play but will get unfriendly error messages. And you have to do this every time you launch the game.

Once you do actually play, well, it's clunky as hell. Movement is sluggish and imprecise. Hit boxes are way off, with direct head shots at close range just not landing. And when that happens, death is guaranteed. Back to the beginning of the area for you. The camera is uniquely unfriendly. Relatedly, the game's default visual mode is letterbox, with big black bars on the top and bottom of the viewport. It's cool in a way, providing a cinema-like aspect ratio and nervous claustrophobia. But it makes the frustrating aspects of combat even worse. Disabling letterbox helps, but you still have so many blind spots.

After failing to get through a chapter ten times, with enemies ignoring my shots and grabbing me from outside the camera range, I came to the conclusion that I was not having fun.