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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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”.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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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
Riven
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.
Divinity: Original Sin 1. took about eighty odd hours to get to the door that says sorry mate, not enough magic stones
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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”.
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.
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
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
Never had this issue with monkey island games…
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
Casper the friendly ghost
I played Thing on a Spring a lot but never completed it.
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.
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.
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)
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