10 Incredible Video Games Most People Abandoned At The Start

10. Returnal

In Housemarque's face-melting roguelike third-person shooter Returnal, you can quite reasonably reach its first boss, Phrike, in less than two hours. 

Despite Phrike being the game's first major encounter, however, it offers up one hell of a challenge, enough that to date, 67.6% of players have never even beaten the boss at all.

Now to be completely fair here, players are absolutely supposed to spend many more hours building up their loadout before finally felling Phrike, but given that less than one-third of players ever made it past the boss, it's clear that folks hit a brick wall early on and quickly peaced out.

A month after the game's release, Housemarque even revealed that Phrike was the game's boss which killed players the most, indicating that the game's first boss is also its toughest, but that if players could prevail over Phrike, they had a much better chance of beating the rest of Returnal's tough-as-nails bosses.

On one hand it's a shame that so many bailed on Returnal so early, but on the other, the developer surely knew exactly what they were doing by making Phrike so tricky to put down.