Tia❗

This is me, but for FPS games at times (though RPGs have certainly had this happen) from watching Civvie a lot.

I've also bounced off of Fallout New Vegas, Blood, Skyrim and Prey (Arkane) (though, after about halfway through?), and I hit a point in Pillars of Eternity II where it became obvious from mechanics that the main quest had run out of steam, and I was expected to fuck off to side content for a while to level up. But the urgency of the plot in the main quest didn't die down at the same time. And it lost me there, and lost me hard.

For me, when it comes to games, one thing that can become a significant barrier is how much context I have to carry. So, like, Stardew Valley turns into A Whole Thing, and my ADHD brain wants to do the Whole Thing all at once. Both times I tried it, I ended up bouncing off. Roguelites are a pretty potent counterbalance to this in a lot of ways.

Another thing is average session length. One genre of games that can easily suck me in is deck-building card battlers. I've easily sunk 400 hours into a combination of Slay The Spire, Monster Train, Inscryption, and Pirates Outlaws. All of those games get one session of play done usually in under an hour. Then I can drop the context, there isn't some big ongoing Greater Thing I have to track.

I can't speak for most of the games you mentioned, but perhaps a useful model for thinking about it is that as there are positive things that keep you playing a game, there are also negative things that might act as personal barriers for it. Bad pacing can also kill a game for me, and that goes even moreso as an adult than it would as a kid. Wasteland 2 stands out as a game that failed a lot of the enjoyment checks for me after a certain point. I also struggled a lot with Cultist Simulator after a certain point, as well as Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies, because I often ended feeling kinda stuck.

And another one is the density of the game, I think? Like, for me, with my ADHD, games that do a lot of things, but each thing is a less engaging version of something I could find better elsewhere, like RPGs, tend to lose my interest.

For some reason, the games I can think back that kicked this for are games like Into The Breach (but only on Switch), and Wildermyth. And Wildermyth has a good variety and is pretty well paced, IMO. I've not finished every campaign, but I've finished several, most in all-nighters.

Other nice experiences have been games like smaller experiences like A Short Hike.

The last truly AAA-in-the-moment game I played was Breath of the Wild, which was fun for about 100 hours, and hard to want to get back into.

If any of this vibes, I can softly recommend Assault Android Cactus, Monster Train, Wildermyth, Trackmania Nations Forever, Dusk up to the boss rush at the end, Plants vs Zombies (the old one, it is on steam), and Steam World Dig 1, 2 and Heist as games that got over the ADHD hump enough for me to either get a lot of time and enjoyment out of them, or finish them to the end (or both).

Granted, we may have vastly different barriers and likes for what sorts of games our brains enjoy.

Another thought: There is also the chance that you may have to come back to a game more than once for it to hit right. I haven't done that much with games, but have with programming languages more than once. Games, as much as books or music, are often more or less suited for different seasons of life in ways

P.P.S: I tend to be okayish with game spoilers for the most part myself.

The other thing I'd add is just because a lot of people like a game doesn't mean you have to like it, or be able to finish it, either. Like, a game might just not Be For You. Especially with RPGs, a lot of people really like the back half of games that are poorly paced early on. Eye Divine Cybermancy is probably the strongest example of this, but a lot of RPGs can struggle there.

RPGs are the worst genre when it comes to pleasing my goopy goblin gamer brain