10 Video Games With Incredible Stories But Terrible Gameplay

10. To The Moon

2011's adventure-drama To the Moon is often held up as boasting one of the most creative and emotionally impactful stories in the history of video games.

And while the particulars are best left unspoiled, the spine of the story involves two doctors who administer "wish fulfilment" to dying people by creating artificial memories in their minds.

Across just four hours, To the Moon tells a devastating, one-of-a-kind tale of love, mortality, memory, and regret with a level of maturity and psychological plausibility rarely seen in games.

It's just a shame that, as a traditional game, To the Moon isn't really up to much at all. In fact, at times it feels less like a video game than a visual novel, albeit without any major sense of choice.

Gameplay is largely limited to walking around and interacting with people, and even the few puzzles are so hilariously easy as to be completely trivial.

But what qualifies To the Moon's gameplay as terrible is the frustrating abundance of glitches throughout: it's possible to get stuck in the game's geometry at various points, enough that you may not even be able to continue playing.

As such, it's a relief that the game's play-time is so short. If To the Moon were, say, 10 or 20 hours long, players might be decidedly less forgiving of its leaden, clunky gameplay.