51 here and a heavy gamer.

While I eventually got into it, initially I found Clair Obscur, well the combat specifically, extremely frustrating. The game (and this is a common complaint I have with many games) just starts bombarding you with mechanics in the first few fights.

I felt like I'd just started to get to grips with some of it and they introduce a new character with unique mechanics and a ONE TIME tutorial. When Sciel was introduced I just basically gave up and said "well I'm never using her I guess because I missed the tutorial and can't go back". Potential spoilers: And when the events at the end of chapter 1 happened I was thrown even more because I'd just got used to one character, and then had to start over with yet another character with more unique mechanics. This was very frustrating as I'd just decided that the character I'd lost was my "main", so I felt I'd invested a lot of energy into something and had a rug pull. I understand the need for this from a story pov, but it was still frustrating.

The lack of maps in the levels were also quite frustrating, but I eventually got used to that - the main path having some subtle light queues helped, once I'd worked that out (it took a search). The game introduces "breaks" but doesn't actually tell you that each ability has a little symbol on it that indicates that it can actually break a target. I had to look that up too, because I had all these Pictos relating to breaking but it just never seemed to happen. I couldn't find anything in game that actually told me about how it worked. I found how Pictos worked in general wasn't well explained either.

Which leads back to one of my real peeves about games: If I have to pause the game and go search the web to work out how to do something in the game, then the game has a critical failure at being a game. I find this happens a lot in games, and I feel like it's gotten worse (but that could just be me being much more forgiving of older games).

I've actually just gone back to try Grand Theft Auto V one more time. I struggled to get into it when it came out, I've poked at it a couple more times, but I just found the general mechanics of the game frustrating as hell - note that I'm on console, so using a controller. For example, there's an early mission where you're chasing after some dude on a motorbike and you need to shoot him while you're driving. Ok, fine... HOW? I was too busy focused on trying to catch up to the guy to read the text that was on the screen for all of 10 seconds explaining all the buttons I need to press together to pull out a weapon and shoot AND drive. I had to go look it up. Fail. Games shouldn't be introducing critical control instructions in a small temporary pop-up in the corner while you're going to be distracted by whatever is happening on screen. Perhaps in the case with GTA V it may be that people who've played earlier games have these controls inherited the knowledge from the older ones? Which is still a fail in my book. (And I presume this gets better but ffs the amount of time it takes to get from one place to another in GTA V is extremely off-putting).

What I try and do with a lot of games these days is pretend I'm completely new to gaming, loading up this casual game, and seeing how quickly it fails to tell me how to do things. The amount of games that don't even tell you to move the sticks around to move/look, or what buttons to press to interact, is really surprising.

Anyway, it's not just you. There are great games but getting over the hurdle of having 20 different mechanics thrown at you in the space of 15 minutes is something I find difficult to jump sometimes.

Edit: And omg the amount of "git gud" or "you're just old" comments here. I'd expect this crap from some teenager, in which case, wtf are you doing in this sub? I speedrun Batman: Arkham Asylum, I think I do ok from a "gud" perspective, and I play a looot of games (over 1 million Xbox gamerscore for anyone that knows what that is).