What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?

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• simple@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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!”

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    • zerofk@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Also the end of the hallway is glowing, and there’s a big arrow 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”.

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    • simple@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • moakley@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Disco Elysium gave me this experience in a new context. But better, because it blurs the line between success and failure.

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  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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    • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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  • impudentmortal@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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…?’

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    • ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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  • Landless2029@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Never had this issue with monkey island games…

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• socsa@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ecco the Dolphin is literally impossible without a guide.

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  • mudstickmcgee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    designed that way to make more money on people renting it over and over to try and beat it IIRC

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  • brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I don’t really see 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.

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  • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That game was like an unforgiving crack rock

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• hank_the_tank66@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • naticus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Quality design will show you the important parts early on without needing to explicitly state them. Leaving that out in sequels is poor design.

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  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • bravesirrbn@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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  • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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)

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• Aganim@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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 so 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.

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  • Twinklebreeze@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There are more than 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.

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  • ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The number of times I totally overshot distance based on the quest description and ended up in the Ashlands…

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  • GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• Delta_V@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  DOOM

  Fuck your Blue Key.

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  • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    still need to get around to beating doom 2. It just got so repetitive I had to take a break

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    • Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Don’t feel too bad about it, the best bits are the first half or so I’d argue.

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  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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).

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• rustyfish@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I actually like those a lot. Just listing some in no particular order:

  • Metroid Prime Series
  • Dark Souls Series half the time
  • Resident Evil 1, 2 and maybe 8
  • Hollow Knight
  • Castlevania Symphony of the Night
  • Outer Wilds

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  • ChilledPeppers@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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• taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ieatpwns@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s in 1 where you find the item to avoid swamp damage

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  • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s a secret to everyone!

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    • taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • eru777@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There is a setting you can enable to make entrance and exit visible if I remember correctly

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  • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    in the development a lot of stuff got cut too so there was art meant to be interacted with that ended up not being

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  • zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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• TheDoozer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”

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  • Frostbeard@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Lots of the vanilla WoW instances was like that. Often the way to the entrance was populates 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 Maraudin and parts of Dire Maul if my memory serves me right

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    • Obi@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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• jonjuan@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • VitoRobles@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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 ago, I decided to read about Ecco and yeah, fuck that game.

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  • lowered_lifted@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah you have to free Willy yourself but before that you have to … do some sort of katamari thing(?)

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  • ReasonablePea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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• stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Myst.

  Riven.

  Myst III Exile

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• dumblederp@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Control had me wandering around.

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• Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Disco Elysium for me. Too many open directions. Too much player agency. I had no idea where I should go.

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• DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Most LucasArts 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)

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• SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The old text adventures where being able to solve a puzzle required hitting the right words. “Oh, twist, not pull.”

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• HollowNaught@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Subnautica and Hollow Knight spring to mind

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• kux@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Divinity: Original Sin 1. took about eighty odd hours to get to the door that says sorry mate, not enough magic stones

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• PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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

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• j0ester@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Legend of Zelda I and II for NES.

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• Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Morrowind, but in a good way

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• CCAirWater@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• tophneal@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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 😅

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• OldChicoAle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For me it’s always been Zelda games.

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• kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Animal Well, but that’s kinda the point

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• jsomae@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Any metroid game.

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• Bunny19@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Halo ce?

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• Derpenheim@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Bro nothing will ever beat fucking metroid for the nes.

  Main progression literally behind random wall tiles you have to bomb

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• madame_gaymes@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Antichamber

  Serious headfuck of a puzzle game.

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