I’ve spent roughly 40 hours of my life trying to change the brightness setting in a video game. Not because I’m slow. Because game studios, some of them employing hundreds of talented people, routinely design menus so structurally unhinged that the DVLA online portal looks like a spa retreat by comparison. The worst video game menus in history aren’t just annoying. They’re a genre unto themselves. A horror genre.
Let’s roast them properly.
Why do so many games get menus catastrophically wrong?
There’s a theory I’ve developed over years of gaming that goes like this: the bigger and more ambitious the game, the worse the menus. It’s as if the design team spent four years perfecting the open-world rendering engine and then, on the final Friday before launch, someone said “oh right, we need a settings screen” and an intern handled it during lunch.
The result is menus that feel like trying to book a GP appointment at 8am on a Monday. You know what you want. You can almost see it. But every click takes you somewhere slightly more confusing, and you eventually give up and just live with 60% volume forever.
The NHS website, bless it, does this exact thing. You land on the homepage wanting to check if your local surgery is open over a bank holiday weekend. Twenty minutes later you’ve somehow ended up reading about bunions and booked a repeat prescription you didn’t need. Video game menus pull the same trick. Dragon Age: Origins had a character creator with sub-menus inside sub-menus inside dropdown tabs that required a printed flowchart. I love that game. I will never forgive it.
The worst offenders, ranked from “frustrating” to “genuinely frightening”
Deadly Premonition (2010)
The inventory system in Deadly Premonition is, technically speaking, a war crime. You navigate it using what feels like three different button mappings that were never introduced, across a grid layout that appears to have been designed by someone who once heard the word “interface” at a party. The game itself is wonderful, chaotic and deeply strange. The menu is its spiritual twin. You can actually see the design philosophy: “What if finding your torch felt like renewing a TV licence?”
Dark Souls (2011)
Here’s the thing about Dark Souls. The difficulty is the point. Dying is the point. But accidentally unequipping your shield mid-boss fight because the item menu is a minimalist nightmare with no confirmation screen? That’s not difficulty. That’s a filing error. I’ve spoken to people who genuinely believe the menu was designed by Miyazaki as a metaphor for suffering. I’m not ruling it out.
The Elder Scrolls Online (early access version)
The DVLA’s vehicle registration portal has, at various points, required me to enter my details, lose the session, re-enter my details, get an error code, phone a number that goes to voicemail, and then discover the thing I wanted was on a completely different government website all along. Elder Scrolls Online’s early menus worked almost identically. Bank storage, inventory, crafting bags, guild storage, the costume system: all separate, all slightly different, all pretending they’d met before when they clearly hadn’t. ZeniMax eventually fixed much of it. The DVLA is still working on theirs.
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII is a linear game. Genuinely, almost aggressively linear for the first twenty hours. And yet somehow its menu system managed to feel like a labyrinth. The Crystarium upgrade screen looked gorgeous. Understanding what it was actually doing to your character stats required a separate Google search and an act of faith. I’ve seen convoluted comic book storylines that were easier to parse than the FFXIII status screen.
Cyberpunk 2077 (launch version)
At launch, Cyberpunk 2077 had a map that was more misleading than useful, a crafting menu that buried essential items under five separate tabs, and a quest tracker that occasionally pointed you somewhere with all the confidence of a sat-nav directing you into a river. The irony of a hyper-futuristic game set in Night City having a UI that felt like booking a British Rail ticket in 1987 was not lost on anyone. CD Projekt Red spent two years patching it. The game is now very good. The early menus remain a museum piece.
The NHS website comparison is funnier than it should be
I want to be clear: I have genuine affection for the NHS. What I do not have affection for is the approximately seventeen different login portals it operates, none of which share credentials, and the way that finding your immunisation history requires you to pass through what feels like a series of escape room puzzles before arriving at a page that says “try the app instead.”
Game studios making terrible menus aren’t doing anything the public sector hasn’t done for years. The difference is that NHS Digital (now absorbed into NHS England) has at least had the good grace to acknowledge the problem. Some game studios still seem to think their settings menu is fine, actually, and maybe you just need to read the manual. There is no manual. There hasn’t been a manual since 2004.
Good interface design is its own craft. It’s why a company like WDM exists, why UX as a discipline has entire degree courses attached to it, and why someone, somewhere, is being paid specifically to make sure that clicking on a button does what you expect it to do. Video game studios hiring that person properly would solve a remarkable number of the issues on this list.
Games that actually got their menus right
It’s not all grim. Hades has menus so clean and responsive they feel like a personal compliment. God of War (2018) moved everything into a radial wheel that barely interrupted play. Forza Horizon 5 has a map and menu system so intuitive it almost makes up for the fact that, as we’ve noted elsewhere, open world games rarely get British weather quite right. These studios proved it’s possible. The bad ones just chose not to.
The worst video game menus share a common failure: they were designed by people who already knew how they worked. A developer who built the system will always find it intuitive. They know where the audio slider lives. They put it there. The rest of us, loading the game for the first time at 11pm with the telly too loud, are just guessing. Like renewing a passport. In the dark.
According to the GOV.UK Service Standard, public-facing digital services must be designed with user needs at the centre. Game studios aren’t bound by that standard. Looking at some of these menus, you’d know.
Miyazaki, the DVLA, and whoever designed the Final Fantasy XIII Crystarium: all victims of the same curse. All completely convinced their system makes perfect sense. All absolutely wrong.