I've been out of reach of good local game stores for years now, but a recent foray into civilization allowed me to pick up a bunch of new stuff... and while I have thoughts about the current state of the gaming industry (too much reliance on licensed 'engines' and generally poor design all around, papered over with culture war allegiances or great art, or both), what I'd like to comment on, and solicit commentary on, is the Red Flags of a bad game. I'm sure people have their own things they notice first when evaluating a new game.
Dice pools; This isn't a deal breaker for me, more a nuisance, but it tells me that the focus of the designer isn't on making a sturdy 'engine' to run the game but on just slapping some shit out there to bolster his amazing setting (or what have you). To me Dice Pool games show a distinct lack of interest in emulating a world, or to grudgingly use highly fraught language, an utter disinterest in 'simulation', which is something I tend to value highly. Obviously, using an existing 'engine', such as White Wolf's or the now very popular Mutant Year Zero engine may reflect a loyalty to a system more than an unwillingness to engage in the setting as simulation, and old, legacy Dice Pool systems (such as Shadowrun) don't necessarily reflect that ideal, as the limitations of the mechanic weren't fully known when they were designed.
Katamari Damancy Talents: This seems to be the predominant design philosophy of the modern game, and I can blame Savage Worlds for it, I suspect. I refer, of course, to the idea that 'Talents' under whatever name you give them, are the primary mechanism of character growth, and you just keep sticking on more talents until you are a star. Among other problems, these games, with their never ending quest for long lists of talents, inevitably wind up making things like... aiming a gun... into a talent that presumably requires lots of experience (level equivalents!) to master. I can show you thirty seconds of Old Yeller, where a ten year old boy demonstrates 'Aiming', and certainly he hasn't fought a hundred orcs to master that shit. That's not the only problem. At low levels, you can actually wind up with deeply incomplete characters who lack basic competencies, simply because they don't have enough talents to even do 'their job', as defined by the game (See again: Old Yeller), and at high levels have so many talents that it becomes easier to start a new campaign than keep track of every exceptional 'thing' that they've learned along the way, most of which will be minor nuisance buffs that may often be forgotten in the kludge of having to remember (and find on a character sheet that inevitably only has room for ten or so Talents, yet might have to accomdate fifty or more in a decently long campaign), that you have a +2 to Endure when walking more than a mile. Um.. yay?
Meta-Tech/Vidya Gaem Loot: The grand daddy of all RPGs, despite levelling Heros to the point where tossing planets becomes a mathematical possibility, never fucked this one up (though some of their decendents did, and recently too!). A sharp pointy thing is a sharp pointy thing, no matter what you make it out of. At the end of the day, while their are real and important reasons to use steel over bronze, the affect on a person stabbed by such a sword or knife, (or clubbed by a mace made of stone even...) is pretty much the same regardless of what metal you make it out of. Technology, to be blunt, is not something that 'levels'. Starfinder is not hte first game I've seen, nor Witcher even (though that one is close...) to use video game leveled weapons as a real feature of the setting, but it is ridiculously bad. It is STUPID, and frankly, I wasn't that impressed by the mechanic in Video Games either. Now note, I am aware that magic weapons are a thing, and they tread up to the border of this ridiculousness, but what did I just call them? That's right: Magic. Star-finder and the Witcher, and any other games I am currently forgetting or are blessedly ignorant of, are literally declaring that a norse battle ax is a tier leveled upgrade from a francisca, and That.Is.Just.Stupid. A fundamental failure to understand technology indicates the game is designed by a moron and might well be unplayable as written because clearly only stupid people would write such nonsense. If I had an earlier example of this entry (I don't, but if I did) it would probably be the more primitive and shockingly common 'One Gun to Rule them All', where a piece of equipment in any given catagory is clearly better than all the other entries, to the point where you wonder why anyone bothered listing all the vastly inferior equipment at all (or alternatively, said item costs so damn much you could buy a small army to do your adventuring for you if you could afford one, utterly making a mockery of hte notion of economics...)
I'm sure I have others, but frankly, reminding myself of these horrors is raising my blood pressure...