Having too much fun in the wage cage, skipper? Enjoying your 9-to-5 grind to the point where you wish you could feel the pain of working a job you hated? Then, gee golly, do I have 50 nasty little surprises for you. Get ready to ask for fifteen minutes of your life back, because here are 50 games you should play if your day job just isn’t tedious enough.
#1 — Every single Assassin’s Creed since the second one
You ever vomit everywhere, and there’s chunks of food you ate two days ago spread out across a giant area of floorspace? Ubisoft’s been studying this imagery’s effect on humans for the past dozen Assassin’s Creed games. That’s why their game maps look like giant, bloated piles of vomit that’ll take you half a decade to complete. It’s a social experiment.
#2 — WWE Champions
I used to have a wife, Katrina, and a dog, Casper (like the friendly ghost). She took the dog and left when I decided to dedicate time to grinding out Hulk Hogan JPEGs instead of focusing on our marriage. But good god, I needed those gacha pulls. I still do. And gin. I need gin. Alexa, tell Scopely to send me some gin.
#3 — Starfield
My buddy Todd and I got together before he started mapping out Starfield, and as a prank, I said, “hey, if I can fit this whole cucumber up my ass, you gotta let me make one design choice on your next game.” Well, long story short, don’t blame Todd for the fact you have to navigate about sixteen menus every single time you want to take your spaceship anywhere or remove an item from your inventory. Sorry!
#4 — Baldur’s Gate 3
Imagine you get home from a hard day of work, and all you want to do is watch a bear fuck a gay vampire. Simple goal, right? Wrong. In order to do that, you have to navigate about five wheel menus to select the “fuck” action, and then you have to listen to some nasally narrator use her “bedtime” voice to painstakingly describe the lust you feel all for the privilege of maybe catching some bear sideboob in a thirty-second cutscene. Yuck.
#5 — Marvel’s Avengers
Plundering natural resources from Wakanda as Iron Man is all well and good, but does the guy with a nuclear missile for a heart really need to spend that much time grinding in order to defeat a robot spider the size of a minifridge? Anyway, Square Enix agreed with us and killed the game, so you don’t really have to worry about any of this anymore.
#6 — Telling Lies
You ever spend way too long fast-forwarding and rewinding through a YouTube video to find the one interesting bit you wanted to share with your friend? That’s the gameplay of Telling Lies. Anyone nostalgic for VCRs will enjoy it.
#7 — The Last of Us Part 2
I’ll never forget the day Neil Druckmann was dropped off at my orphanage. Even as a youth, he had a mature, developed hatred for humanity. One day, as I was serving him his dinner of orphan gruel, he stared me down and said, “I’m going to make you traipse through the hollow corpse of America as a bodybuilder who plays golf with fathers’ heads. And I’m going to watch as you weep when I win Game of the Year awards from an industry desperate to appear sophisticated.” Sick fuck.
#8 — Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon
After years of Sonic fans calling him a softy, Sonic Team’s Morio Kishimoto declared war on gamers, incensed by their baseless claims that he suffered from erectile dysfunction. But as it turned out, they weren’t saying he had ED—they were accusing him of making Sonic games too easy. Kishimoto later recognized these criticisms were lost in translation and confirmed plans to apologize for Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon in the near future.
#9 — Twelve Minutes
You know how if you get in an argument with your spouse, smoke a cigarette, smash some dishes, and apologize, but do it all in the wrong order, your wife will stay with her sister for the weekend and then you have to repeat the cycle next weekend? That’s Twelve Minutes.
#10 — Final Fantasy XV (but really, all of them)
Yeah, the antics of Final Fantasy XV‘s metrosexual boy band were boring, but let’s not dance around the truth of the matter: every Final Fantasy is thirty hours of tedious, mindless anime melodrama wrapped up in stupid haircuts.
#11 — Monster Hunter World
Monster Hunter World was actually an alpha build of Horizon Zero Dawn that Capcom stole and eventually released as-is. It was a complete fluke that Monster Hunter World became a best-selling sensation; Capcom did not expect people with actual friends to get together and aimlessly dick around in a jungle for hundreds of hours.
#12 — Horizon Zero Dawn
Sony, much like Capcom, figured out how to make a game about dinosaurs tedious: shove in needless crafting, a map that’s too big, and a narrative backdrop that’s a waste of everyone’s time. Much like Capcom, Sony was shocked that this formula—which was designed to repulse intelligent life—could sustain a franchise.
#13 — GTA V Online
Honest to God, earning money in real life is less tedious.
#14 — Marvel Snap
In the time it took me to grind out 7,500 gold bars for one of Marvel Snap’s premium card bundles, my son applied for college, got accepted, went there, and returned with a liberal arts degree in basketweaving. He now works at Google.
#15 — High on Life
Imagine having to endure hours of Rick and Morty humor alongside some of the blandest gunplay since the gaming industry’s most recent FPS release. Horrifying, right?
#16 — Papers, Please
This game actually is a day job. It’s probably not too different from yours, in fact. So why would you pull a double shift if you’re not getting paid? Ask Lucas Pope for your 1099 form.
#17 — Rainbow Six Siege
Keeping up with this game wouldn’t be so tedious were it not for Ubisoft rebalancing it every five minutes to destabilize any sort of playable, enjoyable meta. Seriously, I take a break to make lunch and the yacht map is no longer in the game. I pick up my kids from school and Blackbeard’s been neutered past the point of usability. I go to Yves Guillemot’s house to demand an explanation for Ubisoft’s recent actions and I end up in jail. Great.
#18 — Doom (2016)
Lock yourself in a closet filled with bugs and kill them by hand. After eight hours, you will have completed Doom. Now do it again to complete Doom Eternal.
#19 — Ghostwire Tokyo
Ghostwire Tokyo might look better than an average Ubisoft game, but it doesn’t play better than one. Picture a big sandbox map filled with icons– icons as far as the eye can glaze over!
#20 — Shadow of the Tomb Raider
More like Shadow of My Ass Falling Asleep on the Couch. The finale of Square Enix’s store-brand Uncharted trilogy is every bit as formulaic as you’d expect. The tedium of watching Lara refuse to develop any sort of personality after three entire fucking games… it’s enough to drive a person crazy.
#21 — Borderlands (all of them)
Rumor has it, if you whisper “Claptrap” in front of a mirror three times, Randy Pitchford will materialize behind you and rattle off some jokes that were so bad they couldn’t even make it into the Borderlands games, otherwise known as the endless lootershooters Randy used to beta test his standup routines.
#22 — Far Cry (all of them)
Assassin’s Creed is a little different with guns, but not much, you know? There are still numerous bad guy camps to conquer, shareholder meetings to attend, quarterly fiscal targets to meet, lowest-common-denominator game design principles to formulate future monetary plans around… The list goes on.
#23 — Control
There is a plot somewhere in Control, but you’ll need the patience of a saint to find it. If scraping through every inch of a digital office to find lore nuggets sounds tedious, that’s because it is.
#24 — Destiny 2
Much like with 9/11, people thought it couldn’t get worse after the first one hit. Then came the second, and everyone realized it wasn’t an accident: it was a coordinated assault on the American people. Destiny 2 is villainy of the same degree, almost. It is the free-to-play shell of a mobile game rebranded as a premium experience by executives who want to use your syphoned time as an experimental means to achieve immortality.
#25 — Deathloop
Thank God we don’t live in the world of Deathloop. Imagine if all the homeless people you shanked to death last night respawned every morning. You’d never get through your daily chore list. Is this relatable to anyone? I hope not.
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