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
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!”
Also the end of the hallway is glowing, and there’s a pulsating dot on your minimap. And if you take 5 seconds longer than needed, your character says to himself: “maybe I should go to the end of this hallway”.
Oh man, king’s quest. Those games were literally impossible without a guide and you needed to go to areas in very specific steps to not softlock the game.
All those old games were so punishingly hard
You’d play leisure suit Larry or whatever and get 3/4 of the way through and get stuck. Then you’d check a walkthrough and realize you didn’t check the trash can on the first screen of the game for a key item and now you’re fucked and literally have to start over from the beginning
Or you’d get to a death condition and get a screen that just mocks you: remember to save early and save often!
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
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 … Year 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
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.
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.
Holyshit I forgot this game existed! I had the exact same experience, no idea what I was doing but for some reason I kept playing
I found the way to progress once, you have to like flip up out of the water and across to some other part of the level. I couldn’t ever remember how I did it afterwards though.
Yeah you have to free Willy yourself but before that you have to … do some sort of katamari thing(?)
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
DOOM
Fuck your Blue Key.
still need to get around to beating doom 2. It just got so repetitive I had to take a break
Don’t feel too bad about it, the best bits are the first half or so I’d argue.
There is a really fun Doom mod called “my house” that seems totally absolutely normal artsy house recreation at first…
Until you discover the mirror universe and the downstairs (at the time this mod released multiple overlapping layers of level geometry was not technically possible).
Currently playing through Rainworld for the first time, and “where the fuck do I go” has definitely crossed my mind more than a few times.
I will say I’ve mostly been enjoying just exploring, but it has been frustrating at times trying to figure out what to do or where to go when my little in-game helper suddenly decides to play coy at another crossroads.
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.
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.
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
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Came here to say this!
Most 90’s and late 80’s point and click games (Sam and Max, Full Throttle, Monkey Island, The Dig, Loom, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zack McCraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Kings / Space quest, Dark Seed, Beneath a Steel Sky)
Dark Seed was old school hard and explained nothing. Gave up multiple times, wasn’t playable for me. Sucked because I’m a huge fan of H.R. Giger.
For me it’s always been Zelda games.
I honestly cannot fathom how someone WITHOUT NINTENDO POWER would figure out East Peninsula is the Secret and to burn a specific bush
The Water Temple.
I don’t mean to brag but 9 year old me beat it blind… took me a long ass time though
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
Unreal. I stopped playing when I couldn’t find the exit.
Edit: But to be honest that was kind of the norm back then. I hated Half Life for popularising the more linear level design.
I don’t know, man, I ran around hugging every wall of deserted Doom and Wolfenstein 3D levels that a) noclip became the default way to play those games, and b) Half-Life felt like an amazing breath of fresh air.
Well, Quake 2 did, I guess. Half-Life felt like the next-gen take on that idea.
My pet theory is that the whole “liminal” trend got triggered by that feeling you get walking around areas of hell you’ve completely decimated.
Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the GameBoy Color in the mid-90s. I got to the second temple, and was totally stuck - to progress I needed to learn to jump, which I inferred was in this temple, but I just couldn’t figure out where it was.
Wandered all over the available map, which of course was constrained due to lacking the jump skill and other story-driven tools. Nothing.
Finally bought a game guide, which explained to me that I needed to bomb a wall in one room in the second temple to progress. It was indicated by a small crack, a staple in Zelda games but invisible to me in my first experience with the series.
The cherry on top was that by that point, I didn’t have any bombs to break the wall, and I recall that I didn’t have the ability to buy or acquire any and had to restart the game to progress past the point where I was stuck.
After that point, Zelda: Links Awakening became one of my favorite games of my childhood. It is hilarious how much frustration it caused me before that realization.
Some games really do depend on learned conventions from previous games which can feel a bit unfair to the uninitiated. It’s a double edged sword of avoiding too much tutorializing vs alienating newcomers.
Quality design will show you the important parts early on without needing to explicitly state them. Leaving that out in sequels is poor design.
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, 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.”
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Serious headfuck of a puzzle game.
Glad someone posted this game. It had no right be fucking good lol
I was looking for this one. I really enjoyed the game, but the amount of days I spent going back and forth trying to find the next path was nuts!
