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
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
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.
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 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.
It’s in 1 where you find the item to avoid swamp damage
The old text adventures where being able to solve a puzzle required hitting the right words. “Oh, twist, not pull.”
I don’t understand how anyone beat things like Zork or the Hitchhikers Guide without guides.
The Babel fish shit had me in tears.
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.
UNSCREW SCREWS
I don’t know how to do that.
REMOVE SCREWS
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Ecco the Dolphin is literally impossible without a guide.
That game was like an unforgiving crack rock
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’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.
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.
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
Never had this issue with monkey island games…
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!”
Disco Elysium gave me this experience in a new context. But better, because it blurs the line between success and failure.
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!
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
SNES Jurassic Park. NES Fester’s Quest
Mirror’s edge
/s
I am playing Dark Light at the moment and I don’t know where to fuck should I go?
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
