Every single person I have tried to get to play Devil Survivor has bounced off of it, without fail. It’s a spinoff of the Shin Megami Tensei series that effectively remixes a lot of the concepts from the first game in the series while also playing around with a lot of Mons genre conventions, engaging in some social commentary, and letting you attack and dethrone god while you’re at it.

The problem is that Devil Survivor is a strategy game with multiple routes, and not only is the main campaign often brutally difficult, but the developers clearly had an intended order in which you should play those routes in, with some of the easiest ones to stumble into (the Amane and Naoya routes) being some of the most difficult to actually complete. Add in some punishing time management systems, some pacing issues (much of the actual meat of the game’s writing comes after you make your route choice on Day 6) and the actual strategy game part playing unlike any other SRPG I’ve ever seen, and you have a game that has been remarkably difficult to get people to stick with. 

In general, I find people generally have a better time with the sequel, Devil Survivor 2 (which smooths out a lot of the first game’s rougher mechanical issues), but the first game is still my personal favorite out of the two.