The original Neverwinter Nights, you could kill main story NPCs and lock yourself from progressing. If you saved after this without realizing your mistake because you’re dumb, you have to restart.
Also, the original pre-order Ocarina of Time, if you did the keys on the water temple in the wrong order, it made the temple nearly impossible. Data sleuths have found a way to progress, but 14 year old me spent 20 hours trying to figure it out and quit the game.
The Nancy Drew adventure game series is in the vein of what you are looking for.
The community on the place that shall not be named is(was?) very active and full of people sharing point-and-click game suggestions.
There’s even a spreadsheet!
FF12 had some bullshit chest near the beginning of the game… If you opened it you lost the ability to 100% the game and get the Zodiac spear ( reportedly some ability to get one in a very tedious grunts fashion but it’s been ages)
Basically the straw that broke the camel’s back for me with ff… The games story and combat was already a let down after they dropped the turn based combat like all of them ff1-ff10
But yeah generally I dislike many soft lock mechanics or illogical things that punish you for just playing the game… Oftentimes these were put in games just to sell strategy guides.
Final Fantasy Legend for the og Gameboy. I remember getting pretty far in the tower and there was some weapon or item you had to have to pass or beat something and I missed getting it and couldn’t progress and never played it again.
Maybe add the old LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango to the list, it’s more comical than ‘scary’. It has a relatively recent remaster with modern controls. Some would say the original tank controls are a horror into themselves. Though looking at the ESRB rating it is T for teen.
Undertale is an indie game that promotes and encourages kindness toward others. You can play the game however you want, and there are a multitude of endings depending on how nice/mean you are in your playthrough.
But if you’re not 100% kind to everyone you meet; if you take even one unkind action toward someone, you’re locked out of the perfect good ending. And it remembers your playthrough, so you can’t ever earn it by replaying the game. I dunno if that’s been patched; I haven’t played it since about 2015, but that was the rule when I started it.
And there was no indication starting out that you had this choice. Most people default to fighting bad guys in games. There wasn’t even a hint that you could play the game as a passive, kind person and never harm anyone, despite their aggressive and harmful actions toward you.
So most gamers got locked out of that perfect good ending. Which I guess is kind of the message of the game. Every small act, whether good or bad, can affect people around you permanently. But it’s still annoying as a completionist, knowing that I could never perfectly complete a game because of a rule I wasn’t informed of when I started.
The game remembered a lot of things but you very much could do a pacifist run by starting a new game. I read about the pacifist run after about an hour into the game, decided I wanted to try it, and restarted and was able to achieve the best ending.
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