What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?
from eru777@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 03 May 15:17
https://lemmy.world/post/29070149
from eru777@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 03 May 15:17
https://lemmy.world/post/29070149
We’ve all played them. Backtracking, not knowing where to go. Going back and forth. Name some of these games from your memory. I’ll start: Final Fantasy XIII-2, RE1
threaded - newest
Unreal. I stopped playing when I couldn’t find the exit.
Edit: But to be honest that was kind of the norm back then. I hated Half Life for popularising the more linear level design.
I don't know, man, I ran around hugging every wall of deserted Doom and Wolfenstein 3D levels that a) noclip became the default way to play those games, and b) Half-Life felt like an amazing breath of fresh air.
Well, Quake 2 did, I guess. Half-Life felt like the next-gen take on that idea.
My pet theory is that the whole “liminal” trend got triggered by that feeling you get walking around areas of hell you’ve completely decimated.
Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the GameBoy Color in the mid-90s. I got to the second temple, and was totally stuck - to progress I needed to learn to jump, which I inferred was in this temple, but I just couldn’t figure out where it was.
Wandered all over the available map, which of course was constrained due to lacking the jump skill and other story-driven tools. Nothing.
Finally bought a game guide, which explained to me that I needed to bomb a wall in one room in the second temple to progress. It was indicated by a small crack, a staple in Zelda games but invisible to me in my first experience with the series.
The cherry on top was that by that point, I didn’t have any bombs to break the wall, and I recall that I didn’t have the ability to buy or acquire any and had to restart the game to progress past the point where I was stuck.
After that point, Zelda: Links Awakening became one of my favorite games of my childhood. It is hilarious how much frustration it caused me before that realization.
Some games really do depend on learned conventions from previous games which can feel a bit unfair to the uninitiated. It’s a double edged sword of avoiding too much tutorializing vs alienating newcomers.
Quality design will show you the important parts early on without needing to explicitly state them. Leaving that out in sequels is poor design.
Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so...
It's weird to me that Simon's Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact "defer to the guide" nonsense.
In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.
OG LoZ was just:
Step 1: “Here’s a rusty stick.”
Step 2: “Kill God.”
I’m playing Oracle of Ages for the first time in a while, and it is not great! The level design is flawed. The eighth dungeon is a a dark room, some ghosts, and a hint owl that tells you to “attune your ears to the sound of sword on stone” which, right, standard Zelda fare, good of them to make explicit the reminder. But none of the walls clank! You need to push one of the non-pushable statues out of the way, in the dark, to even expose the bombable wall. I went over the whole place twice, and then thought “oh maybe they’re doing a cool metapuzzle thing and I’ve got to leave the dungeon and bomb a new entrance” so I went out and tested the whole area with my sword and then bombed everything in case I was just misinterpreting the clank sound.
The underwater dungeon had the interesting raise/lower water level mechanic, but I explored in loops for an hour before looking up where to go next. I’m not saying it’s supposed to be easy, I like a challenge, but it felt like the layout was deliberately withholding information, which is bad design.
The Long Hook is an upgrade for the Switch Hook. The improvment is marginal and the puzzles that require it feel confusing (I finally have the tool for this but it’s not working (before you know about the L2 version)), forced (this is the same puzzle but the anchor object is two tiles further away) or frustrating (oh of course I was supposed to know about the offscreen anchor).
The Long Hook has an entire dungeon dedicated to it.
It seems all my fond memories are actually from Oracle of Seasons. I wonder if they had parallel teams working on them.
I sorta had the same problem with Ocarina of Time. Was stuck in the Deku Tree basement. Didn’t know you had to use a stick with fire to burn cobweb. I thought the game was broken and was thinking about returning the game until I accidentally solved it by fucking around. Not sure if Navi explained it or not, but my English wasn’t very good when I was 10 and the game didn’t had my native language as an option.
Yeah Link’s Awakening is the one that came to mind for me. Even after having beaten it, the next time I played it I would still get stuck.
When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother got a NES and three games. One was Crystalis.
Me and my two cousins played the game in turns, and we eventually got to the first boss, which was quite an achievement because there are puzzle elements to the game.
We could not beat this boss. Several years later, I have my own NES and I borrow Crystalis. I’m pretty sure I got to that boss again and realized something. Hitting him produced a sound that no other monster had. It sounded like hitting solid glass. I finally intuited that I wasn’t strong enough and leveled up to level 3, and wouldn’t you know it, I beat the boss.
It’s one of my all time favorite retro games. It was so ahead of its time. Worth playing if you’ve never tried it.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It’s supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn’t mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about “travelling far”. Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.
I had a similar problem with ocarina of time (and lemme tell you having to run around in not one but multiple times was a… blast…)
It was the first Gannon fight where you shoot the paintings… I’d never played a Zelda game before and it took me ages to give up and look it up (thankfully this was after the internet was born, and walkthrough sites were all over)
I got stuck in the first dungeon, because one room required pushing two blocks together but I didn’t even think any of these blocks could be pushed at all!
Bought the official guide book a bit later
That’s my experience with 99% of old school point and click games. At some point in every one it devolved into me running in circles and trying every item on every object.
When I played Day of the Tentacle I got stuck. Eventually I caved in and ordered the official hint book. Mind you, back then this entailed mailing a physical letter and the money somewhere. I guess my parents helped with that. And then you had to wait for your order to arrive. And the post was a lot slower than today.
I waited weeks for the book to arrive. And then, the day before it came, I finished the game. Use physics book with horse was the last puzzle I needed.
But the money wasn’t wasted entirely. The game’s story was written down from the pov of one of the characters. Pretty funny.
What a solid game and experience. I’ve played through it so many times, and I can’t ever get over Bernard’s voice actor being Les Nessman from WKRP in Cincinnatti
Hint books were an experience back then. I remember the hint book for myst had this whole narrative about some other person who got trapped in the book, which was supposed to be like the player. It was this whole story of how they solved all the various puzzles. I remember it being quite long but I was also like 9 so maybe it was just like 10 pages
Yeah, basically every game that runs on scummvm is a good candidate here: leisure suit Larry, kings quest, police quest, the dig, sam and max, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, all the sierra and lucasarts ones
Myst series is another good one. Journeyman project trilogy. These all ruled when I was like 12 years old
I miss when games were confusing and aimless by default. I know there are still games like this but I feel like the default now is a game that’s like “oh hey, go down this hallway full of locked doors! Except one door is unlocked, that’s a secret area, good for you! But otherwise go down the hallway to the next hallway!”
Also the end of the hallway is glowing, and there’s a pulsating dot on your minimap. And if you take 5 seconds longer than needed, your character says to himself: “maybe I should go to the end of this hallway”.
Oh man, king’s quest. Those games were literally impossible without a guide and you needed to go to areas in very specific steps to not softlock the game.
All those old games were so punishingly hard
You’d play leisure suit Larry or whatever and get 3/4 of the way through and get stuck. Then you’d check a walkthrough and realize you didn’t check the trash can on the first screen of the game for a key item and now you’re fucked and literally have to start over from the beginning
Or you’d get to a death condition and get a screen that just mocks you: remember to save early and save often!
Disco Elysium gave me this experience in a new context. But better, because it blurs the line between success and failure.
The worse is when a solution seems obvious but doesn’t work. Then you lose your mind clicking everything until you get the actual solution.
Never had this issue with monkey island games…
I gave up on point and click games when the solution to a problem in Monkey Island 2 was to put a fucking dog in your pocket. Even the look Guybrush gives when he stuffs the dog in is like "bet you didn’t think to do that initially huh…?’
The funny thing is that LucasArts games were done as the “antithesis” to Sierra games, as the latter were chock full of cheap deaths and “Did you remember to do some little side thing 2 hours ago? No? Progress locked, fuck you” situations
Oh right … Yeah at least with all the Lucas arts games you would just be stuck and not perma fucked.
Like letting a rat live when you only have literal seconds
Casper the friendly ghost
I played Thing on a Spring a lot but never completed it.
Hard to recall them since I tend to drop them when I get stuck. If I look up a hint and find out it is something that never had any previous hints to figure out I also drop the game because nothing is more frustrating than guesswork.
Fallout 1: If you play it going in blind and don’t look up help, a first playthrough can be stressful early on if you don’t know how much progress you are making on the time limited main quest.
Kenshi: The game doesn’t have quests or main goals, so it is up to the player to figure out what they want and how to get it. Certain game areas are lethally dangerous, factions can be angered if you don’t figure out their customs, and even in less lethal areas being beaten and crippled by bandits is a real problem.
I hate timers on games that give you little guidance. People claim that Fallout 1’s timer is too lenient, but I ended up replaying (and failing) the game twice and still not coming close to finding the water chip. Also, the game constantly reminds you “We’re all dying, hurry up! Every minute you take is an other life lost!”. Same reason I dislike Lightning Returns.
The Gang Gets Abducted by Religious Slavers for Not Joining The Book Readings.
The funny thing is being enslaved by the religious zealots is one of the best starts you can pick in the game. You’re stuck in a quarry doing backbreaking work (which levels strength), are fed just enough that you won’t die (acquiring food is normally a nightmare in the early game), and most importantly the guards won’t (intentionally) kill you, only knock you unconscious if you misbehave. Which matters because taking damage is how you train toughness, making it one of only a few places on the entire world map where you can train it without a high risk of death.
And it gets better. Every night after your shift you can sneak out and practice lock picking on doors and slave shackles and assassinating sleeping guards (since failure only results in a beatdown), which combined with the strength and toughness grinding leads to you becoming a ninja powerhouse by the time you escape.
10/10, would lead a slave uprising again.
hell yeah kenshi mentioned. Honestly the game feels like ‘slop’, but is fun as hell also in an old-school RuneScape type of way
excited for the 2nd game on unreal engine (but small dev team, might take couple more years)
I actually like those a lot. Just listing some in no particular order:
I wouldn’t add hollow knight to the list. It is an exploration game, being lost is the point, the problem are linear games that you don’t know where to go next.
Can I say half life?
You certainly can say it, but I’m going to have to mostly disagree it’s a good example though because I felt Half-Life was very linear. What it did do a good job at was creating a convincing illusion of non-linearity, which I can certainly see some people getting lost in occasionally, but probably briefly (unless you have particularly poor navigation abilities which some people definitely do). It can be especially bad once you get to Xen, which felt deliberately confusing and not really the greatest section of the game for a lot of reasons.
My first playthrough of Half Life 2, I bailed from the boat when it got stuck on the wall in a section with lots of guns. I continued on foot through two more loading zones until I reached a section that required the boat to progress, so I walked all the way back to get it lol
The original Final Fantasy. If you don’t have a walk-through open next to you I have no idea how you would naturally beat the game in a respectable time frame.
Everytime this game got ported, I’d retry it. I’d get over the bridge, get into town, fight the pirates, earn the boat… and get completely lost.
I think I managed to get the Earth and Fire Crystals and couldn’t figure out how to get to where the Water Crystal was. All of THAT was from literal wandering.
I don’t even remember “where” I got, but I do remember I got to a point I had no clue how to progress. My party was around level 46, super powerful, but I just couldn’t find the right dungeon anymore
Metroidvania games can be pretty good for this sometimes. One that really got me was Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. You have to get an ability to progress at a certain point that is a random drop from an enemy. Any game that relies on RNG for progression is going to make me go running in circles. I love the game, but did not love that part.
RotN doesn't have any progression requirements that aren't scripted drops, off the top of my head, but I could be wrong about that. What ability are you thinking of?
Dawn and Aria of Sorrow do, but in fairness those are communicated in other scripted drops and are part of the "get the good ending" puzzles.
I’m pretty certain it’s an enemy drop I’m thinking of. I think it’s from a fish that allows you to go under water.
Oh, man, you may be right. I've gone back and forth the Igavanias so much I definitely don't remember which "go underwater" upgrade goes where.
Gonna look it up because it's gonna kill me otherwise.
Okay, yeah, got it. I remember now. They do a weird thing in that one where you have a bad way of moving underwater by using a weapon and you unlock the proper walking underwater thing after. So yes, you do need to kill enemies to get it as a random drop. It's a super high drop rate, though. I think I didn't remember because you have to be fairly unlucky (or be speedrunning and not killing enemies, I suppose) to not get it naturally, but you are correct.
.
Daggerfall
Such a great hangout game. As a kid with a vivid imagination and not enough English understanding to follow the plot I enjoyed my time just roaming around crafting spells and exploring samey dungeons a whole lot.
I got certainly the most lost I’ve ever been in a game in a Daggerfall dungeon, trying desperately to find the tiny wall tag that’s supposed to be the exit.
Those are torture.
it looks like I get to be the one that mentions:
ET on Atari2600
Obviously, you go home.
Antichamber
Serious headfuck of a puzzle game.
Glad someone posted this game. It had no right be fucking good lol
I still think about how I managed to finish it once, then tried again 1 month later only to be completely dumbfounded as to how to get the damn yellow block upgrade again
I was looking for this one. I really enjoyed the game, but the amount of days I spent going back and forth trying to find the next path was nuts!
Bro nothing will ever beat fucking metroid for the nes.
Main progression literally behind random wall tiles you have to bomb
I had tried a few times before, but the first time I actually completed Metroid 1 was just after its remake, Zero Mission. The original game was included (also as a bonus in one of the Metroid Prime).
The thing is, the map structure is the same (just with extra levels, more puzzles and ability gating). Power-ups and bosses that already existed in 1 are at the exact same spots. Helps a lot if you can just remember where important stuff is supposed to be.
Silent Hill 2 - dropping canned juice in the laundry shoot. Weirdest mechanic I’ve ever seen, nothing pointed to do it, just finding the juice was weird, how was I supposed to know to put it down the laundry shoot of all places. My friend who got me to play it watched me wander around the apartment for like 10 - 15 mins, getting more and more confused and frustrated before telling me what to do.
Chute
Thank you, my wife wasn’t reading over my shoulder to correct me at that moment.
DOOM
Fuck your Blue Key.
still need to get around to beating doom 2. It just got so repetitive I had to take a break
Don’t feel too bad about it, the best bits are the first half or so I’d argue.
There is a really fun Doom mod called “my house” that seems totally absolutely normal artsy house recreation at first…
Until you discover the mirror universe and the downstairs (at the time this mod released multiple overlapping layers of level geometry was not technically possible).
Been playing Diablo 2 Resurrected again, so… Diablo 2. Especially on higher difficulties some of those areas (Durance of Hate, f.ex) are extremely maze-like and the only reliable way to navigate it is to just follow the left wall no matter what.
Otherwise, I played a demo for a game years ago that I can’t remember the name of anymore that was built around non-Euclidian geometry, so walking through a door in one direction would take you to one place, but walking back in the other would take you somewhere else instead of back to where you came from and such.
Sounds like Antichamber
every Metroid or Castlevania game, to the point metroidvania is a genre.
I am playing Dark Light at the moment and I don’t know where to fuck should I go?
Halo ce campaign.
I’ve just finished Turok for the first time. Some of these levels are absurd.
Turok 1? Cause IIRC there’s only a couple areas where I feel you can get stuck unless you really think about things. For the most part you just explore all parts of the map until you find the right place to go.
The one that first comes to mind is the level where you’ve got to find a bunch of switches to raises “stairs” over a pit of lava. Again, IIRC. The other one is a place where you’ve got to know that falling off the cliff won’t kill you. But IIRC you can see the tree tops in that area which you wouldn’t see in an area where falling will kill you.
Yeah, the maze with button platforms is catacombs, that was definitely the one that had me stuck the longest time. Partly because of the maze-like structure and partly because it relies on a few climbable walls that are a lot less obvious than the usual and a very missable teleport tile.
There’s also plenty of places especially in treetop village where I was like “how the fuck am I supposed to go there?”. Turns out none of them is really necessary (and some might just not be normally accessible, even though they have items?) but that’s still confusing.
And even though I didn’t get lost too bad in it, Final confrontation surprised me. From the name I went into it expecting maybe a short level and the boss fight. That thing took forever to go through. I even had multiple moments where I was like, “lots of ammo, music is becoming ominous, here we are, boss fight”… And… No. Just another room full of enemies.
I’m gonna have to go super old school on this, because I think gradually games have gotten progressively better about this as the art form advanced. The absolute worst for this that I know of for this has to be “Below The Root” which, despite this point of criticism was a mind-blowingly advanced game for its time, arguably the first real open world CRPG. I have no idea how anyone could’ve legitimately completed the game without either using a guide or playing it over and over for years to learn every possible route of progress. I think the confusing nature of the world was in fact simply because nothing of that scale had ever really been attempted before and there was absolutely no precedent for how to adequately guide players through it.
The world was, for its time, truly immense and sprawling with a multiple screen interiors for most buildings, a full cave system hidden underground, ladders and secret platforms aplenty. You could converse and trade with various NPCs in houses and wandering around on many of the screens. And when I say “screens” you have to keep in mind I’m talking about something this size. That is not a lot of context to work with for navigation.
It’s also full of secrets and hidden things, and like many games of the time you will need to find and use pretty much all of them, in pretty much a specific order, to actually complete the game. I can’t even describe how insane the sequence of events you need to do to actually complete the game is, this guy uses a guide and save states but I think it illustrates the general lack of clear guidance in almost all cases. Combine that with the fact that you “die” easily, your inventory is extremely limited capacity, and did I mention you’re on a time limit? Because the “goal” of the game is to rescue a guy and if you take too long, he dies and you can’t win anymore!
Many naive players (myself included) weren’t even convinced it HAD an ending and just kind of played it endlessly like it was some early version of The Sims.
Myst.
Riven.
Myst III Exile
Hmm. I’m not sure these count.
A) they’re supposed to be mysterious
B) the progression makes sense, even if the key is in one of several burned books on a bookshelf among many other similar keys, or given to you in one of the bad endings.
The information is there, you just have to work for it.
I haven’t played Myst III, that was by a different company, right?
Myst III was made by Presto Studios in collaboration with Cyan, it does have a slightly different feel to the other games, but it is not bad
Tunic
Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal
Metroid
tunic was the only souls-like game I could get myself to play and I’m so glad I did it was incredible
I’ve probably played a bunch, but the one that most comes to mind is Antechamber. Super weird FPS puzzle game ala portal but with a lot of mindbending illusions, non-Euclidean geometry, etc.
It’s got a metroidvania structure but without much guidance and a lot of stuff will just loop you back to where you’ve been if you’re not getting things right. At some point I was just completely lost. I couldn’t possibly think of where I haven’t tried to go or do. Worst part if I tried to look up a guide I don’t even know where I’d begin to look.
Unlike the others here, I would argue that this is supposed to be this way - it’s a mind bending puzzle after all.
True to some extent, but I think there are limits to how enjoyable it can be to not even be able to find the puzzles in the first place. It also makes coming back to it super confusing.
It tests your ability to remember and navigate routes, in an environment that's explicitly non-Euclidean. And you have to think out of the box sometimes to solve things.
...damn I need to play again. I think it's been long enough now.
Uhg, I’m pretty sure I got 90% of the way through that game and then I took a break for some reason or another. Came back and was just completely lost. And just like you, cant even look up a guide because I don’t know where I’d begin to look.
Legend of dragoon
Blue Prince for me right now.
It's SO GOOD. If you're reading this and you like puzzle/mystery games, play it now, play it blind, and have a pad and paper handy.
Yeah it’s good in a lot of ways but especially early on you can just get stuck with no way to progress in a day due to bad luck. Also, many synergies require a sequence of specific randomly-generated rooms and the resources to use them when they show up (and in viable locations). But there are a number of permanent upgrades that make it much more consistent, and a few of the minor upgrades are fairly common.
Lego Harry Potter
For fucks sake it was obtuse. I had to use a walkthrough to figure out what to do next multiple times just in the first episode
I’ve installed Myst around 10 times and I haven’t gotten anywhere with it. I refuse to look at solutions because its a legendary puzzle game and I will not be beaten by it, but also I’m not at all sure what to do at all. I have never solved a single puzzle. I’m never even sure what’s interactive or not, or if I’m even looking at a puzzle or just seeing clues where there are none.
I should try it again soon…
Morrowind.
Can you find this person whom wandered off into the ashlands? They went east-ish.
I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit in the Construction Kit to find out where in Vivec’s name I had to go this time. Usually it turned out I just barely missed the person or location I had to go before starting an hourlong search.
But despite that still a game I deeply love.
The number of times I totally overshot distance based on the quest description and ended up in the Ashlands…
That’s what I like about the game. The NPCs tell you where to go to the best of their ability, and you follow to the best of yours. I like it a hell of a lot more than quest markers.
There is at least one occasion where NPCs just straight up lie to you in quest directions though. I can’t think of it off the top of my head but I remember it existing because I complained about it on a forum.
On one hand - great worldbuilding! “Local dumbass gives you bad directions” is a funny and memorable point on top of what might otherwise be a forgettable side quest. On the other hand, I spent the better part of four hours looking for whatever egg mine or ancestral tomb or whatever it was he asked me to find before getting fed up and having UESP tell me “lol no actually it’s off in this complete other direction”, and I’m pretty sure I assassinated that NPC after I turned in his quest.
Yeah I remember some fuckin guy said you can find the herb east of balmora. Que an hour long search and epic journey for the ages only to finally read a guide that says the guy lied
Jesus, the finding people thing was tough, but finding the quest item that I had already looted from a grave and either dropped or sold to a random merchant? Game ending, man.
This was me lmao. On my first playthrough of Morrowind as a teenager I dicked around and did everything except the main quest for ages. Around level 18 I decided to actually progress the main quest. Hasphat, check. Arkngthand, no sweat. Talk to Sharn Gra-Muzgob, she says to fetch the Skull of Llevule Andrano. Cool, go to Andrano’s tomb, looks kind of familiar. Where is the Skull of Llevule Andrano? Cause it sure ain’t here in his tomb. Whoopsie.
Never found the skull, never progressed the quest, had to start a new character to actually experience the main story. I wonder how many potential Nerevarines failed to ascend due to missing minor quest items. Wish I could ask em that inside the Cavern of the Incarnate.
Yes! That’s the one! That damnable skull!
So many failed nerevarines. If only they knew they were just an
exploitINTENDED FEATURE away from saving MorrowindOh snap, time to go back 30 years and get lost in Alone in the Dark again!
Ecco the Dolphin is literally impossible without a guide.
designed that way to make more money on people renting it over and over to try and beat it IIRC
I am not really seeing it. I did finish it without a guide back then. It was the Windows 9x port, but I don’t think it changes much.
Really in my case a guide would not help for the hardest parts, which were mostly the crazy moves needed to push those floating things to break rocks and to swim against currents with boulders.
That game was like an unforgiving crack rock
Divinity: Original Sin 1. took about eighty odd hours to get to the door that says sorry mate, not enough magic stones
Every
Single
Old
Game.
I hate it
As an old game player. If I stop and think about it, I really hate that I get frustrated /bored if I’m playing a game that doesn’t tell you what to do / where to go at every moment.
To me I’ve feel like I’ve lost my sense of adventure.
Maybe it’s also a time factor too, I don’t have the same amount of time to play when I was a kid.
Having said that, game design certainly has improved over the years and lessons learned in what not to do when it comes to level design!
I resonate with this. I feel like I had far patience and wonder as a kid.
Yeah I wonder how much of it is we’ve gotten used to having quest markers all over the place to tell us where to go and just need to have the option of turning them off and rewiring ourselves… Or I just don’t have the patience anymore? Haha
My ass repeatedly reset games I had beaten or got close to beating, especially if I was stuck. I was especially guilty of this with Pokemon games, where I would just reset if I couldn’t get past a certain point (didn’t find the strength TM in BW so couldn’t fight Team Plasma), I beat PMD Gates to Infinity like 4 times lol. I grinded so hard on Platinum Victory Road in an attempt to beat the elite 4, that I found my first ever shiny from ruining the local Rydon population.
I’m far too tired to do that shit now, I felt depressed going from Octopath I to Octopath II because I have to grind again and I’m broke 😅
If you can’t figure out Super Mario Bros then gaming just isn’t for you.
Uncharted 1
Shiet, I’m still having this problem with more recent Naughty Dog games. Getting the hint option that pops up when you’ve been stuck somewhere for a while in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered embarrasses me. Though I am thankful that it’s there.
Final Fantasy 7 has a lot of mini versions of this moment because the level art is rarely distinguished from the actual terrain you can interact with so sometimes you kinda get stuck until you realise that this time that little ramp is actually something your supposed to walk up rather than un-interactable scenery like all those previous times.
in the development a lot of stuff got cut too so there was art meant to be interacted with that ended up not being
There is a setting you can enable to make entrance and exit visible if I remember correctly
Back in the day I once timed out on the bombing mission escape because I couldn’t find the right spot to climb the damn ladder near jesse
Zork. God forbid you forget to look mailbox
Animal Well, but that’s kinda the point
You want the absolute “guide damn it” example? Try playing the OG Dragon Quest games. They’re nonlinear by nature and there’s a spot in 2 (or was it 3) where you need to literally check an unmarked floor for an item. No indicator, save maybe a vague NPC dialogue in another part of the planet that didn’t get adequately translated in English so you’re truly aimless.
It’s in 1 where you find the item to avoid swamp damage
It’s a secret to everyone!
Reminds me that Nintendo had help lines you could call for stuff like Zelda secrets, and they may have intentionally added things like secret caves to incentivize that lucrative service.
Prince of Persia Warrior Within
Oof yep I feel that one. I love the wheel and spoke moderately open world level design, but if you actually need to move the story it can be very difficult to find where the next bits are.
I don’t remember that one being too bad. I actually beat that one, unlike Two Thrones
Two thrones is a cake walk compared to WW
Subnautica and Hollow Knight spring to mind
Wait, open world, specific upgrades needed to access new areas and progress the story… I think Subnautica is a secret metroidvania. It’s just most of the upgrades are “you can go deeper now”.
Subnautica’s art direction does give me Metroid Prime vibes.
That’s what a lot of the upgrades boil down to, yeah. Air tanks increase endurance, fins and seaglide increase movement speed, rebreather eliminates an endurance draining effect at depth, seabases and submarines allow you to start your dive from greater than zero depth. Pretty much all of that boils down to “dives to this depth are now practicable.”
Other than that, the knife allows you to harvest plate coral for making computer chips, kelp for making fabric, and seeds for plants. The scanner is required to obtain the blueprints for several other required buildables. The mobile vehicle bay is required to build the Cyclops. The Cyclops is required to make the shield module. A radiation suit…I think speedrunners don’t use it and just tank the damage with medkits, but I consider it a requirement.
There is one straight-up key you have to craft; there are several others for required or optional doors but you only have to craft one to complete the game and two to unlock all doors.
There’s a tool that is like Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, which can be used to move heavy obstacles out of paths, but it’s never outright required for anything. I usually don’t bother with it.
The laser cutter is required, You have to cut through one of two doors in the Aurora to gain access to the Captain’s Cabin.
Pocahontas on Sega Genesis. I don’t even remember the plot, but I got stuck and had to return it to Blockbuster.
This one’s pretty controversial, but if you’ve never played it before,
Half Life 1
It’s really confusing and enemies will pop out of nowhere and kill you instantly. Not really fun imo, but then again I AM playing it for the first time 27 years after it came out 😂
I’m sure Black Mesa is more intuitive though.
Which bits in particular? Because on one hand it’s a fairly linear design, but on the other there are some bits that can loop around themselves and objectives aren’t always obvious.
past the first few chapters it got a bit confusing, but the train trolly thing was like a maze and I kept going in circles for so long 😵💫
Oh I completely get you, on a rail is a famously difficult spot for a lot of people. I think the lack of landmarks and long duration really hurts that chapter. If it’s any consolation it’s mostly a one off situation, and yeah black mesa doesn’t really have an equivalent.
Make sure you listen to the NPCs. They give you clues like being quiet around the big beaky things that one shot you. Also, if it is really big you guns do nothing. Go and find the other way to destroy it.
It feels like such a silly example now that I know the game, but tales of symphonia made me give up for about three years before coming back and beating it. There’s a section where you’re supposed to go to a specific city to progress, but there’s a semi-secret long way around that lets you experience a different character’s story early. Well, I somehow sucked at following directions and went the semi-secret way, and then couldn’t figure out how to get ANYWHERE that let you do anything. I wandered around the same continent for several months (playing a few hours a week) before moving on.
Atari’s ET. Game was bugged. Every 80’s kid that bought this was disappointed. It is the worst video game in history and all unsold copies were buried in a landfill only to be rediscovered decades later.
en.wikipedia.org/…/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(vi…
The High Score is a great documentary that actually has the guy that developed it. I think he was high when he developed it which explains a lot.
Obligatory Fixing E.T. The Extra- Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
Wow. Did not know this existed. Thanks!
It’s a bad game for sure, but it is far from the worst game in history
It’s not bad if you learn how to play it. A little too ambitious. The reputation is unearned. It’s not like the Pac Man port, which was just straight shit.
The old text adventures where being able to solve a puzzle required hitting the right words. “Oh, twist, not pull.”
Dear God those text parser adventures. I remember playing Hugo’s House of Horrors and trying for the longest time to remove some screws from a grate.
Okay screws np.
I don’t know how to do that.
I don’t know how to do that.
Reeeee… Turns out it only responded specifically to UNDO SCREWS
It is like a game designed by a bitter English teacher.
I don’t understand how anyone beat things like Zork or the Hitchhikers Guide without guides.
The Babel fish shit had me in tears.
For me it’s always been Zelda games.
I spent so long on the 3DS in ocarina of time just running all over the entire map not sure how to progress, I eventually gave up. Those stupid boulders are supposed to give you tips but idk I just couldn’t figure it out back then.
The Water Temple.
I don’t mean to brag but 9 year old me beat it blind… took me a long ass time though
I never used a guide or anything either, I was 13 when I beat it the first time, but finding that one missing key always trips me up for at least a few minutes.
I honestly cannot fathom how someone WITHOUT NINTENDO POWER would figure out East Peninsula is the Secret and to burn a specific bush
Probably half life. It’s kinda intentionally tricky and meant to be some kind of puzzle
I was playing Star Wars: Bounty Hunter on Switch today because of the current free trial. At first, running around as Jango Fett in the Gamecube era was fun, but then shortly after getting my jet pack, I get completely turned around while chasing the bounty guy and spent over a half hour being lost. Called it quits after that.
The Outer Worlds is a perfect example of this in the best way possible.
Devil May Cry 4, but I was able to finish it. I couldn’t even complete Devil May Cry 3.
La-Mulana
Any FF if you set it down for a month or two.
“Welp, I will just start it over, I guess.”
Done this FF9 sooo many times
Currently my situation with VI
Gonna add Kingdom Hearts to this (cause Sqenix), because I was playing 1 as a preteen, beat Cerebus, got in the Gummi ship, and promptly got lost on where to go after. Bonus for stopping the game for months, picking up again, and being lost so I just never beat it. I plan to finish KH1 this summer after beating Metaphor Re:Fantazio, but I probably will reset to get that full experience factor 😅
Space Quest
Came here to say the King’s Quest games, but really it’s any of the _ Quest titles.
I remember the newes jedi game feeling like this a lot, but it was also effectively immersive that you don’t instantly know exactly where to go.
I would say many games with procedural generated worlds, like Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, etc. Where the main task is deciding where do I go next, where do I settle down, maybe there is some better place over the next hill, next planet, etc.
There are other games, where it is also sometimes not quite clear what to do next. Like games have a lot of progression and rebuilding of stuff that was done before because of it. Like Satisfactory, Factorio, etc.
And on a more literal sense, where you actually redo the game over and over to progress, like The Stanley Parable or Outer Wilds.
Some games have a very labyrinthine level design, where it also isn’t really clear what to do next, like Dark Souls, Subnautica, etc.
Or environment puzzles, where you have to figure out how to progress, like the Myst series, Riven, etc.
Open ended games, like Minecraft and NMS , can be really hard for people who only play ‘on rails’ type games to wrap their minds around. ‘Whats the point?’, the same one as in living your life.
Also, personal opinion, Stanley Parable is NOT a game. It is a walking simulator with a bunch of bad philosophy thrown in.
Wherever Stanley Parable is a game or not, isn’t really important. Someone could make the argument that open ended games, without a clear winning or completion state aren’t games, but instead simulations.
Someone could argue that the winning or completion state of Stanley Parable is seeing all endings.
Other people say that to be a game, you need some kind of adversary or challenge to overcome, but that would depend on the definition of challenge. Is figuring out what to do in order to see a ending you haven’t seen before a challenge? If not, that would exclude many other genres.
So I just do not want to down the road of making useless distinctions, and be liberal in my understanding of words, and just ask if something is not clear.
I just call Stanley Parable a game, because the creators call it a game, you can buy it and games similar to it for game consoles and on Steam under the game category. Wherever you can or cannot find enjoyment in experiencing it, does not depend on wherever it is a game or not.
Came looking for someone to say Minecraft. If I’m not good about intentionally placing landmarks and the like I can get myself lost very easily. And sometimes even when I do place landmarks and write down the coordinates of my starting place! I have to tryhard on keeping directions, placing markers everywhere, on crafting maps with a little icon that shows where I am, to prevent getting lost when exploring. Admittedly I am not the greatest with directions in real life.
0 0 0best place to build your base to not get lost x)And as a bonus, you spawn there without needing a bed
Metroid and Legend of Zelda I and II for NES.
Metroid for sure.
Metroid 2 was really bad for this too. If I hadn’t been on a very long and boring vacation all those years ago, I probably would have never finished it.
Everyone should feel free to start their Metroid journey with Super Metroid.
Oh man. For me, Tetris. Every time.
I get past the first dungeon no problems, and find the heart container, but as soon as I meet that old guy with his kite in the tree I’m lost. I think I need to craft a slingshot or something but I’ve no idea where to get the rubber for an elastic band.
SNES Jurassic Park. NES Fester’s Quest
This is an extremely specific situation in a game, but…
In World of Warcraft, back in the day, there was a dungeon in Outland, I believe it was Helfire Citadel. It wasn’t particularly hard, but if you died, you were screwed. The way dungeon deaths worked was your spirit would spawn in a graveyard out in the regular world, and you would have to run your spirit ass back to the dungeon entrance to respawn. But finding the entrance to Helfire Citadel was so difficult I told the group if they don’t rez me, they’d have to just kick me, because I’d never make it back in. It was awful.
There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”
Lots of the vanilla WoW instances was like that. Often the way to the entrance was populated by the same level elites as the dungeon so you had to run a gauntlet just to get in.
The Deadmines and Uldaman comes to mind. And since you spawned at the entrance you had to dodge and sneak past patrols avoided on the run. Gnomereagan and Maraudon and parts of Dire Maul was very maze like if my memory serves me right
Blackrock Depths was fucking big, too. Later on, with the LFG tool, it was separated into 2 or 3 parts, I think. I mean, running alone back in WotLK days, where you could easily kill everything side, would still take you 2 to 3 hours to fully clear the place
Forgot about BRD. I also remember stranding in Ironforge begging for someone with the key to Upper Blackrock Spire to unlock it. Man that key was hard to get, and the gems did not even have a 100% droprate
Maraudon was the worst of all imo, big empty rooms so not only did you get lost it just took forever to run everywhere. Good times.
Abiotic Factor, survival in a facility like Half-Life with crafting, survival and exploration. Really great game and it’s pretty hard understanding where to go
Control had me wandering around.
That’s one of the best games I’ve played with one of the worst map designs I’ve ever seen.
I actually gave up because I was lost in an office most of the time. It was just dull.
Surely that’s the point though. Isn’t the map design part of the Tower of Babel madness vibe?
Most recently it’s Clair Obscur Expedition 33. There’s an actual overworld map but you need to get your bearings in area maps and dungeons because there are none. You’ll have to use local landmarks to get around, find clues for hidden areas, and the direction you actually need to go. I’ve spent hours in single areas just getting lost admiring the design and artwork.
So far for me the game has done a great job of having recognizable landmarks at least. I might not always know where I am, but I’ll frequently come across something that orients me again.
I despise being lost in video games, but claire obscure has been fine because I never feel like I get lost for too long. Just long enough to appreciate the gorgeous and very weird world I’m in.
I still sometimes wish there was a map but it would probably be a net negative.
Chrono Trigger had me looking up guides as several points just to find a way to progress.
Beavis & Butthead (SNES/Genesis)
Try Platoon on the NES, you get bombarded by ennemies while you have to find your way through this abomination of a maze!
Just started playing a simple isometric game called Tunic. It’s cute, and you play as a little button mashing fox creature with a sword in a language that’s gibberish as you find hidden paths in the isometric style. It’s frustrating for being so simplistic, because the hidden paths are hidden. I kinda like it so far tho. Just simple, relaxing, chill music, and cute AF artwork.
Absolutely adored that game! It’s one of those that I wish I could replay without having remembers how I uncovered all the various secrets.
It is super, super cute. I started it on a whim and I love that it doesn’t really give ya anything. Like a souls-like game, it’s just ‘figure it out as you go’ but a cute fox and bug creatures.
Fantastic game. If you haven’t been already, you can tilt the camera slightly to get a peek at some of the hidden paths.
Yeah with the lock on button? When I figured out that holding the dodge button let me sprint, it blew my mind haha
Head Over Heels. Somehow I eventually managed to complete it, after much trial and error.
Myst, sometimes Max Payne, Doom 3, Tomb Raider
Jedi Fallen Order has no fast travel and the map sucks, do you often end up lost or backtracking.
Divinity Original Sin is also one that doesn’t guide the player particularly well.
Jedi survivor is the exact same way
Old DOOMs up till 64. Halo 1 was also very repetitive in its lookalike hallways and got me lost multiple times. I don’t miss the get lost mechanics of these games. Especially in doom where the function of the many look alike chambers was unknown to me so the architecture made no sense.
I remember playing Assault on the Control Room on Halo 1 and one of the doors glitched and didn’t unlock. I must have walked around those hallways for hours trying to work out where I was supposed to go
I think Hexen takes the cake among the “old Dooms”, since it has a hub map and you have to revisit some levels to toggle switches that became accessible after toggling another switch in another map.
OMG! Yes! classic doom had some of the most frustrating level designs. I started to hate the game after being lost forever on some maps.
Halo 1 was never difficult with Cortana telling you were to go and the waypoint on screen. Assault on the Control/Two Betrayals has arrows on the hallway floors and I never got turned around in The Library.
If you really want labyrinth level design from Bungie, the Marathon series is were it’s at and completely explains why there’s so much hand holding in Halo CE.
The original Bard’s Tale
Me and my best friend literally spent a month of near nightly playing trying to get through the first in-town dungeon
Daggerfall also fits the bill
The problem with Daggerfall is that the dungeons are procedurally generated. I have spent hours digging through a dungeon, hugging the right wall and spam clicking on every surface for a hidden door, to eventually give up and hotkey through all the spawn spots, to find the quest target in a disconnect glitched out dungeon segment.
I would love to see a complete remake of Daggerfall with the same randomly generated dungeons; I’m not sure that the random landscape and dungeon generation would work with the way games are programmed now though.
Come to think of it, re-doing Morrowind, Arena, Battlespire, and Redquard would be neat, too.
So many times in GTA V I had no idea how to trigger the next mission. I would probably go back to it and play through if it had some sort of indicator for how to trigger the next campaign mission.
Go to a mission marker on the map?
Some missions are characteristic-specific, but those are labeled too.
It was a while back, but I feel like I remember trying this, switching between characters and going to their various markers on the map but nothing would happen. It was long enough ago that I can’t rule out hitting a bug or missing a required side mission, but I remember not being the only person saying this.
I was never a fan of just driving around the city causing havoc, so even short amounts of time with no missions felt like eternity.
I remember there being a few points like that in Megaman Legends 1 and 2.
Legends 1 certainly had more “exploration”, as there was nothing to point you to where you should go. Legends 2 has neat red arrows on the overworld map, so you have a decent idea of where to fuck around, though the dungeons got much more elaborate. Fuck the Nino Ruins
A couple times in Linda Cubed Again. The game’s next objectives are told to you by characters, or through the in-game voicemail system.
However, there is no “current quest” screen so if you take a break from the game, you can easily forget where you left off.
Also, it doesn’t help that the game was only released in Japan (and fan translated only recently) so there’s not a lot of walkthroughs you can follow.
Most 90’s and late 80’s point and click games (Sam and Max, Full Throttle, Monkey Island, The Dig, Loom, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zack McCraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Kings / Space quest, Dark Seed, Beneath a Steel Sky)
Dark Seed was old school hard and explained nothing. Gave up multiple times, wasn’t playable for me. Sucked because I’m a huge fan of H.R. Giger.
Half Life 2 for me
Whaaat? I feel like most levels are really linear
I still got lost enough that I’ve never finished the base game
Disco Elysium for me. Too many open directions. Too much player agency. I had no idea where I should go.
I always took Disco as just a “stumble into the plot” kind of game. You’re not supposed to go anywhere.
True, but the problem (at least for me) is that I was simultaneously going nowhere and running out of places to go. I legit wasn’t sure how to progress literally any of the opened quests and felt like nothing was getting done.
The funny thing about Disco Elsyium is that there’s so much to do in the opening area and it builds such a rich picture of the city that you assume it’s a much bigger world than it really is.
It really isn’t that much bigger than the first part, but they did such a great job you don’t end up minding.
All of fucking Bloodborne. Fast travel is great. Building into the narrative where you don’t tell the story directly? Fuck that.
Morrowind, but in a good way
I still remember the first time playing morrowind and being blown away by the freedom. For some reason my clearest memory of that game is a dude falling from the sky and splatting. Then I stole his magic boots and died the same way.
Any metroid game.
The first 4 Tomb Raider games on PC/PS1
Digimon World on PS1, made worse by the fact that it’s a tamagotchi roguelite RPG. I never played DW3, but I heard it can easily become a “where the fuck do I go now?” because of obtuse/asshole time sinking designs here and there
I’m sure I can think of several examples but recently I was replaying the original Darksiders and boy howdy did I get lost all the fkn time
Halo ce?
I got lost a few times in that game as a kid. I do not htink it is too bad these days. I think it was a matter of being put in a significantly larger world from what we were used to.
I’ve played it so many times at this point, I think I could navigate it without enemies or needing to click on consoles it with my eyes closed.
I got echo the dolphin for Sega genesis when I was about 8. I don’t know how much of the game I got through, but thinking back it couldn’t have been more than a few percent. And I played that shit for hours trying to figure out where to go next.
Holyshit I forgot this game existed! I had the exact same experience, no idea what I was doing but for some reason I kept playing
I still have the fond memory of the Ecco the Dolphin being called like game of the year by many magazines. So I begged my uncle to rented it from Blockbuster. First few days, I struggled. Then I asked to extend the rental. After a week, I gave up. Game was bs. I played Nintendo hard games.
A decade later, I decided to read about Ecco and how brutally unfair it is and yeah, fuck that game.
I found the way to progress once, you have to like flip up out of the water and across to some other part of the level. I couldn’t ever remember how I did it afterwards though.
Yeah you have to free Willy yourself but before that you have to … do some sort of katamari thing(?)
I really need to try it again with a guide, I want to see the wild shit after that first damn level.
That game, bro, omg
You stumble around, find a key, a corpse gets up and you have no idea how to fight back, and then do it all over again.
Currently playing through Rainworld for the first time, and “where the fuck do I go” has definitely crossed my mind more than a few times.
I will say I’ve mostly been enjoying just exploring, but it has been frustrating at times trying to figure out what to do or where to go when my little in-game helper suddenly decides to play coy at another crossroads.
Myst 3 and hollow knight got me that way. Hollow knight was the worst, I simply couldn’t tell where I needed to go and where I’d already been 😅
Myst 😭
I like hollow knight, but i don’t think i can ever go back to that game. I had so much fun for a few hours and then i walked around for an hour or two, being beyond lost.
Interestingly that’s the exact thing I loved about Hollow Knight. I got so immersed in the exploration specifically because I got lost. On my first playthrough I ended up sequence breaking the game and cleared out deepnest, ancient basin, hive and kingdoms end before the city of tears. I was way out of my depth and I loved every moment of it.
azrael’s tear
Unreal 1 (not Unreal Tournament), some level were a bit too labyrinthic
Fractal Block World
I had the Old Ninja Gaiden i believe on some Collection for the PS3 growing up. Maybe it was just my age but i could never figure out what the hell i was supposed to do. There were a few games like that in the collection now that i think about it, like Echo the Dolphin and some top down rpg like thing
I remember playing echo the dolphin a lot as a kid. There wasn’t a single moment where i knew what i was supposed to do.
It’s a very confusing game lol. It was fun to swim around though
La Mulana for sure! It’s a game where you play as professor Lemeza Kosugi (i.e. Japanese Indiana Jones) exploring an ancient temple. I admit that I did not have the patience for it. The map is huge and exploration is very non-linear. You also have to solve fairly obscure puzzles. If you really wanted to give it a go, I’d keep hand-written or typed notes separate from the in-game notes. They only let you save so much data at once, and you need more notes (or a good memory). I still kind of loved exploring the maps even partially though. It’s pretty huge and ambitious in scope.
The combat and movement are not fantastic though. Not bad, but they feel very limiting compared to typical metroidvanias that let you style on enemies as you get better at the game. The game is not very shy about how it enjoys killing you too! I respect it, but it was tough for me to enjoy.
Came here to say this!
Riven
Beneath a Steel Sky, where literally half the game is going back and talking to everyone you’ve spoken to before for one extra dialog option that advances the plot
Son, you’re talking to a guy who spoke no English when he first played the legend of Zelda for NES. Talk about playing a game that doesn’t tell you where to go next
Many of the early console and PC games were only solvable by finding answers in published magazines. Nintendo was notorious for this - they had their own magazine called Nintendo POWER and a hotline you could call to get tips. A few that come to mind:
Blaster Master / Goonies 2 / Mad Max / The Kings Quest games / The Black Caludron
Kings Quest? I played them on pc. They had stuff you needed the manual for but that was it. Did they change it for Nintendo?
Probably just a comment on the moon logic puzzles in some of the games. And yea, Sierra had their own hint line to call. Or write in
On arcades, you’d get fucked by asshole difficulty. At home, you’d get fucked by asshole difficulty and purposeful lack of information. Took me a while to put 2 and 2 together and realize how “predatory games” have been around for a very long time. Can’t sell the game twice, but you can sell information.
Apologies, I can see how I was confusing. I was listing both Nintendo and PC games that came to mind; Kings Quest and Black Cauldron were PC
Star Flight. I played it on Genesis, and it’s still one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.
One space ship, 270 solar systems, and 800 planets. The manual included a captain’s log that was sent back in time from the future, but without that you’d just be scouring the stars for clues, interrogating aliens, digging through ancient ruins, and watching slowly as a rash of planet-destroying solar flares spreads through the galaxy.
So fucking good.
Sounds interesting. Reminds me somewhat of Uncharted Waters, which is a naval RPG set around 1560. You could visit ports all over Europe, Middle East and Africa, probably over India and Japan, too, doing trade runs or living a pirate’s life.
A lot of the game is scanning planets, gathering resources, and upgrading your ship. The upgrades allow you to gather more resources, explore further, and get better weapons so you can survive hostile alien encounters.
If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend giving it a try.
Chrono Cross. You can accidentally write out all the endings of the game if you try to play without a guide.
Also Mordor 2. Completely procedurally generated world. The game literally can’t tell you where to go, it doesn’t know.
Mirror’s edge
/s