Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC):
Got this for like $1.50 on a GOG sale at some point, and finally booted it up. I'd consistently heard that this is one of the best Bioware-style RPGs; I really liked Mass Effect 2 while hating 3 and thinking the new one looks terrible, so I'd been hopeful about KOTOR as a pre-lapsarian sci-fi treat.
But man, this really feels like a relic of when a "PC" game was partially a genre description. It's ugly as hell in that weird bad early PC 3D game way, incredibly clunky to control, and utterly festooned with annoying systems, a billion stats, and endless micromanagement, with stupid dice role combat (hitting a mutant dog with a lightsaber point-blank, "miss" "miss"). I get now why this would be appealing to people into this level of role playing, and you seem to have an interesting level of control over your character's alignment (I enjoyed successfully lying to the Jedi council about my intentions to become a Sith mass murderer), but damn this thing is a headache to actually play. I impressed myself by getting through the opening world, but now I'm on Dantooine and looking at another hub full of annoying monster enemies that take too many resources to avoid taking damage from during combat or else healing from combat. And a lot of the more seemingly fun stuff, like hacking solutions and such, takes an obnoxious amount of resources to mess with. I guess I could be playing it wrong or something by auto-leveling, but it's too niche/archaic for my threshold. Similar to System Shock 2 in that respect. So that's probably it for me.
Yooka-Laylee (PC):
And my current jam. I did not have any particular hopes for this one and find the naked nostalgia pandering kind of distasteful, but as a platformer fiend I figured it would be a time sink at least. At about 5 hours in it is that, and I will probably at least clear the minimum page collection threshold to get my money's worth. But boy, this is kind of depressing/cringey. Something about it feels like watching people re-enact a Monty Python sketch. Plus it does not feel good to play a lot of the time just on a visceral level, and the actual act of collecting stuff is weirdly lacking that good old dopamine punch. There's a large variety of activities to do, but few of them are particularly fun. The worlds so far evoke that mildly nauseating Banjo-Tooie feeling of being lost among a big scramble of ****. Like, oh here's some locked gim-gam I can't get yet, and will have to come back for, except I will never remember where this is. On top of that there's an unpleasant gummy feel to the whole enterprise, with its shitty camera, clumsy non-platforming-activity controls, annoying save system, inability to skip through cutscenes and certain (random?) dialogues, inability to resent mini-games after fucking them up off the bat, etc. Regardless of where you come down on the value of a slavish recreation of a collect-a-thon, there's just a ton of **** this game could and should be doing better that wouldn't diminish any Banjo-clone authenticity.