For me, 2 things come to mind; Berserk & the Long Walk
Berserk may sound controversial, but I just didn’t have a good time watching the 90’s anime. I felt angry while watching it. I just didn’t like the characters for how dickish they were (especially Guts & Casica) and the setting was too miserable for me. And some of you may go, “but the comic is 10x better” (I know it’s manga, I’m just calling a comic to piss of people) I also just don’t like dark fantasy in general, since they’re edgy, pretentious, and worst of all… they’re ugly. There’s a reason why I never played the Dark Souls games, outside of the difficulty
The Long Walk movie is really well made movie with amazing acting. But man was it a miserable movie to go through. Seeing all those kids getting shot by soldiers for being slower was painful to watch.
Side note: there’s a lot of critically acclaimed stuff I like (Cowboy Bebop & the Dark Knight). It’s just that entertainment is so subjective that it’s not mutually exclusive to writing.
I tried very hard, but I did not enjoy The Outer Wilds.
For those who don’t know, it is a first person exploration game over ~12 planets within a small solar system. There is a core game loop that lasts about 20 minutes wherein you can fly your ship anywhere and explore until the cycle ends.
The thing I really disliked was that you only got ~10-15 minutes of exploration before you had to restart the cycle back at home and go back to where you started. There was also a plethora of environmental hazards that were instant death, all while you had oxygen and fuel to manage. Dying would also reset the cycle so it wasn’t uncommon to spend 5+ minutes getting somewhere only to die and restart a few times. It just made me frustrated.
I did complete it with the help of mods that let me teleport to the key locations. People really liked the story but it really didn’t hit for me. I feel like I was born with the cilantro gene for this game because I really didn’t like it.
Loved Outer Wilds, but yeah, some clever “time dilation” could be applied while exploring inside of planets or particularly complex segments or close to a goal. So many times I had to go into Ash Twin to try to finish a puzzle before the sand rises. It does help that translator pauses time though, and options let you pause conversations too.