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

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• tobz619@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  Chrono Trigger had me looking up guides as several points just to find a way to progress.

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• dumblederp@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Control had me wandering around.

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  • zymagoras777@lemm.ee ⁨25⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    That’s one of the best games I’ve played with one of the worst map designs I’ve ever seen.

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    • dumblederp@aussie.zone ⁨19⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      I actually gave up because I was lost in an office most of the time.

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• j0ester@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Legend of Zelda I and II for NES.

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  • Tin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Metroid for sure.

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• TheDoozer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• simple@lemm.ee ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • impudentmortal@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • Landless2029@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Never had this issue with monkey island games…

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• Aganim@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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

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• socsa@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ecco the Dolphin is literally impossible without a guide.

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  • mudstickmcgee@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That game was like an unforgiving crack rock

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  • brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• hank_the_tank66@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • naticus@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• cmhe@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• OldChicoAle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  For me it’s always been Zelda games.

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• taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• hector@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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

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• intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Space Quest

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  • Dlayknee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Came here to say the King’s Quest games, but really it’s any of the ** Quest* titles.

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• CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨42⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ 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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The Outer Worlds is a perfect example of this in the best way possible.

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• nthavoc@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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 did which explains a lot.

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  • LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    It’s a bad game for sure, but it is far from the worst game in history

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  • alekwithak@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Obligatory Fixing E.I. The Extra- Terrestrial for the Atari 2600

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    • nthavoc@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Wow. Did not know this existed. Thanks!

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• SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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

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    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It is like a game designed by a bitter English teacher.

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• Delta_V@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  DOOM

  Fuck your Blue Key.

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  • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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

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• GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • nevetsg@aussie.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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• RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I remember the newes jedi game feeling like this a lot, but it was also effectively immersive.

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• HollowNaught@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Subnautica and Hollow Knight spring to mind

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  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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”.

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    • stephan262@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Subnautica’s art direction does give me Metroid Prime vibes.

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• rustyfish@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• kux@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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• kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Animal Well, but that’s kinda the point

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• stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Myst.

  Riven.

  Myst III Exile

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• krakenfury@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Any FF if you set it down for a month or two.

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  • pea@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    “Welp, I will just start it over, I guess.”

    Done this FF9 sooo many times

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    • krakenfury@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Currently my situation with VI

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• lonesomeCat@lemmy.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Prince of Persia Warrior Within

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  • Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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• BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Every

  Single

  Old

  Game

  I hate it

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  • Drbreen@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Devmapall@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I resonate with this. I feel like I had far patience and wonder as a kid.

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  • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If you can’t figure out Super Mario Bros then gaming just isn’t for you.

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