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.
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 was very maze like if my memory serves me right
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)
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 😂
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.
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.
Wandersong! You play as a Bard who has to save the world through music and singing. Minimal combat and absolutely wonderful storyline that will make you cry tears of joy.
A bit of a wilder rec would be Cassette Beasts, which is basically Pokémon but better and has really nice optional romances. Very combat focused tho.
Haha hell yeah. The OST for cassette beasts is an all timer. The devs behind Wandersong also just released a monster catching game called Beastball if you want some more indie pokemon fix. Haven’t tried it yet but I heard great things.
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.
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.
Some games have a very labyrinthine level design, where it also isn’t really clear what to do next, like Dark Souls, Subnautica, etc.
Or environment puzzles, where you have to figure out how to progress, like the Myst series, Riven, etc.
Open ended games, like Minecraft and NMS , can be really hard for people who only play ‘on rails’ type games to wrap their minds around. ‘Whats the point?’, the same one as in living your life.
Also, personal opinion, Stanley Parable is NOT a game. It is a walking simulator with a bunch of bad philosophy thrown in.
Wherever Stanley Parable is a game or not, isn’t really important. Someone could make the argument that open ended games, without a clear winning or completion state aren’t games, but instead simulations.
Someone could argue that the winning or completion state of Stanley Parable is seeing all endings.
Other people say that to be a game, you need some kind of adversary or challenge to overcome, but that would depend on the definition of challenge. Is figuring out what to do in order to see a ending you haven’t seen before a challenge? If not, that would exclude many other genres.
So I just do not want to down the road of making useless distinctions, and be liberal in my understanding of words, and just ask if something is not clear.
I just call Stanley Parable a game, because the creators call it a game, you can buy it and games similar to it for game consoles and on Steam under the game category. Wherever you can or cannot find enjoyment in experiencing it, does not depend on wherever it is a game or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Aktywne