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  • Let's talk about unplayable Video Games!

Over the years I've made a list of games that were unplayable for me, I would gladly post it on some developer forum to see if they could find something in common and maybe I'd get an answer, but I really don't know where to do that, so I thought I'd post this here, so maybe we'll have some things in common and something can be found.

So its mostly like this: If the game is safe, I can play it any amount of hours. Just like good screen etc. If its good its good. If not, its usually one hour (if no prior strain already with some other game of that sort), and the strain kicks in. Never was I able to fix this with in game settings (maybe just once, but I'm not sure the game was bad to begin with, I think i was just overreacting, it was Watch dogs 1 and I never have trouble with ANY ubisoft game).

Unreal engine is the most peculiar, since many games are fine and many aren't. I'm posting the ones that weren't fine.

Kena Bridge of spirits
Lies of P (both very sad, cause great games)
entire Dark Pictures Anthology
It takes two (still finished it playing an hour each day)
Vampyr (same, finished with short sessions)
Sifu
Stray
Remnant from the Ashes
Dishonored

However a lot of games like Days Gone, Life is strange, Sherlock holmes series, System Shock remake, Little Nightmares, The Medium, Twin Mirror, FF7 Remake , Jedi Fallen Order and many other Unreal games are fine.

ANY Ubisoft game is fine. ANY Unity engine made game is fine. Battlefields were all fine. Witcher and CP2077 are fine.
Square Enix games are all fine. Both Niers are fine. Prey was fine. Sport games like FiFA or PES have always been fine. Konami Fox engine is fine.

Playstation ports are not fine (except for Days Gone which used Unreal). Last of us, God of war, doesn't matter, Decima engine kills my eyes, HZD, Death Stranding etc, unplayable. Quantic Dreams games are unplayable (detroid, beyond two souls, heavy rain etc). Resident evil remakes (2-3) are not fine, but resident evil 7 was fine and seems like so is the village. Rockstar Engine was fine until RDR2. LA Noire and GTA's were all fine.

I could go on forever, but so far this is the general picture. Anyone has any ideas what can be going on here?|

P.S. Forgot to mention that obviously the platform is PC, but I find playstation unplayable in general. Haven't tried Xbox. And also, the GPU, screen etc don't matter, it's all about the game itself.

    it was PS3, 10 years ago, dont even remember what it was 😃

    Also, scratch Lies of P, it's playable it seems. Cautious optimism.

    I'm still not convinced individual games do anything. If there's flickering or something else, I still think it's from the hardware like your display.

    That is unless someone plays these games and is able to measure more flickering on certain ones with all conditions being equal and using the proper measuring hardware.

      I find many Unity games tend to cause low level eye-strain.

      This is the same as browsers - some are OK and some aren't in how they use the GPU/OS.

        AgentX20 oddly unity VR games seem to be fine for me too..

        When I had a VR back around 2020-2022 it gave me zero issues. Valve index connected to my 12700k/rtx 3090/ddr5 PC. Whenever I would look at the monitor instantly would get discomfort. VR however was fine.. use to use my VR as a monitor basically. Not sure how things would be now I am very sensitive.

        Elever my problem has nothing to do with flickering. My monitor can have visible flicker and i won't care.

        AgentX20 Interesting, we are indeed snowflakes here 😃 Unity is an easy pass for me. Most platformers I played were on unity, great experiences.

        For me personally I think it is mainly the device / hardware that has caused me issues and that is based on playing the same game on different systems.

        Fifa 22 & 23 on PC caused nausea and eye strain however on Nintendo Switch did not. I believe this is because when I first bought my PC monitor I had issues with it for the first couple of months until my eyes got used to it. Since then some games are okay but others are not so I think there is a low level issue with the monitor which causes some games to be a problem.

        On my mobile I play a football game regularly called DLS24 (Dream League Soccer) and started playing this back in 2020 with DLS20. There are yearly updates and with both DLS23 and DLS24 I had an issue with the graphics for the first few days until my eyes were okay. Again I think this is my device a Google Pixel 3a as at first I had mild issues but after a few weeks my eyes were okay.

        Obviously games can cause issues as for decades there have been warnings with games for example if you are prone to seizures and there is intense strobe lighting or flashing in the game.

        I think based on the plethora of symptoms on this forum it may be a mixture of hardware and the game itself.

          jayd of course if I play a "good" game on a monitor or system that is inherently bad for me, then it won't be good. But the point is that my screen is good and system is good, but certain games have been problematic over the years. Always the same.

          well I used to play Breath of the Wild for hours and hours with no problem, but now, when I play Tears of the Kingdom on the same TV I feel as if the game has a lot of light or glare and it blinds me

          6 days later

          Don't think it'll be that helpful to you but I have somethin' similar as well, although it feels totally random which games cause it. I don't play many high-end games in general because every time I've tried upgrading my GPU it's caused me varying levels of strain, but with the one I use currently (RX480) like, almost every game I play tend to be fine, strain-wise. But from what I can remember from the past couple months I've had trubs with

          • Sea of Stars

          • Fuga: Melodies of Steel

          • Small Saga

          • Palworld (literally just got done playing this about an hour ago, lol.)

          All of these tended to give me headache symptoms on one side of my head after about an hour in, with varying levels of severity dependin' on the game. Some I could push through, but I had to turn off Palworld cause it was making me frickin' nauseous. Figured it might be an engine thing but pretty sure all of these are all different engines. (Unreal, Unity, Construct)

          Also I guess it might be worth mentioning that I played the demo for Lies of P back in the summer and it was fine for me. Now that it's been a few days how is it holdin' up for you?

            Chippo I'm already in chapter 8 so it's definitely playable, but it's not the fully fine one. The bad ones cause actual eye strain and pain, but this one sort of makes my one eye dry a bit. Ill probably limit my playtime but I'm like 1/4th left. I even installed kena again for comparison, and it was terrible.

            22 days later

            funny. For me, most Unity games are unplayable due to an eye strain. but Unreal is often ok.

            8 days later
            6 days later

            Find an unplayable game and change/disable the antialiasing and see what happens. unity and unreal had different schedules for releasing their rendering pipeline and postprocessing options to developers.

            dev