Beautiful, expensive, and unbearable – games where you want to skip every cutscene

Game technology keeps improving at breakneck speed, but writing departments don't get the same treatment – if anything, they're usually the first thing studios cut. Developers can render individual skin pores, simulate fabric physics down to the thread, and bounce light off a puddle with photon-level accuracy, all so a character can open their mouth and say something like "we need to keep moving."

The gap between technical polish and writing quality has gotten so obvious that gamers have started a whole genre of conversation around it: naming a game you enjoy playing while your finger hovers permanently over the skip dialogue button.

A recent Reddit thread pointed to Baldur's Gate 3 as an example. Not everyone agreed, but Larian style is hard to call conventionally pleasant.

The current champion in this category is Crimson Desert from Pearl Abyss. The combat system is genuinely interesting and the world looks gorgeous, but the dialogue reads like the characters are encountering human speech for the first time and cautiously testing it out.

The community even came up with a parody of a typical scene that captures the vibe pretty accurately:

Boy, this is heavy! Quit complaining about how heavy the bag is! It's a shame someone can't help us move this bag. Well if this bag wasn't so heavy it could be moved. PLAYER WALKS IN. Oh, greymane! We have this bag here, see? It's very heavy!

Racing games are their own special pain point, having mutated over fifteen years from criminal street romance into corporate team-building exercises. In Need for Speed: Most Wanted 2005, players got disrespected, mocked, and cornered, and the whole plot ran on the desire to punch Razor in the face.

In modern Forza Horizon, everyone is best friends, an ecstatic announcer narrates every little thing, and the voice assistant Anna cheerfully points out stuff the player can already see for themselves – and sometimes you can't even shut her up in the settings.

Good writing in games rarely functions as decoration – it's usually load-bearing. The difference between Left 4 Dead 2 and Back 4 Blood makes that clear: Ellis rambling about his buddy Keith or Nick constant complaining worked as a free atmosphere generator between zombie waves. Turtle Rock Studios, on the other hand, gave characters lines that were short, repetitive, and grating enough that plenty of players just muted the voices entirely.

Funny enough, writing that's bad on purpose works great. Neon White deliberately cranks the VHS-tape anime aesthetic up to absurd levels, with an angel who appears to the hero looking like Garfield holding a cigar – and it lands because it's clearly intentional.

The original Resident Evil operates the same way, forever remembered for "you were almost a Jill sandwich." The voice acting came from random English speakers pulled off the street, but somehow it turned into a perfect tribute to B-movie horror – one that the 2002 remake scrubbed clean.

The worst outcome happens when a studio gets scared of its own reputation. After Borderlands 3, whose jokes even the writers couldn't stand behind, Borderlands 4 came out so careful and inoffensive that nothing about it sticks in memory. Bad writing at least provokes a reaction. Sterile writing provokes nothing at all.