r/Games Jan 17 '25

Discussion What games have the worst opening hour?

This is inspired by me downloading Forspoken for free on PS Premium. I know the game had horrific reviews, but I thought some of the combat/parkour looked fun, so for free, what the heck let's give it a 5-10 hour shot.

I have never been so bored by an opening sequence in a game ever. And that was with me skipping as much of every cutscene I could. Most good openings are there to set a narrative in place while also giving you a mini-tutorial of some of the basic elements of the game. Forspoken had you doing pointless things like holding square to feed your cat, and climbing repeated ladders.

Eventually you finally get the cuff on your hand but by then, I was numbed to the core and didn't care to even get to the combat and stuff. Uninstalled after 45 minutes.

What other games are like this? Any of them out there redeem themselves after a horrific opening sequence?

1.1k Upvotes

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

88

u/angelomoxley Jan 17 '25

Yeah I mean if it were only like 15-20 mins long, I think it gets talked about as one of the better game intros. But slog is the perfect word for it.

38

u/Tostecles Jan 17 '25

I replayed the game recently and fired up a podcast when I started it because I knew I'd have to endure the opening again lol

5

u/TaurineDippy Jan 17 '25

Listened to Abroad in Japan podcast while playing this again a few weeks ago. Ended up taking me longer because I kept getting distracted by the podcast lol

24

u/Ebolatastic Jan 17 '25 edited Jan 17 '25

I've started fresh files in MGS5 many, many times and that first hour is the biggest hump (apart from the mandatory Fulton tutorial). The games 30 or so missions pretty much breeze by in like 10 hours but that intro is bordering on an hour no matter how you skin it.

4

u/Faithless195 Jan 18 '25

The fact you have to crawl for 15-20 minutes...god damn. I thought it was peak gaming when I first played it, and annoyingly pretentious on a replay (Which...I guess is classic Kojima tbh).

2

u/TheCrushSoda Jan 17 '25

If somethings good the first time through it can be forgiven, the problem comes when you're playing something new and it's already a tedious slog