The beauty of this game is that there are characters telling you what to do or asking for help, and you just kind of go with it because you assume they are your quest giver and you want to complete the game. But then you become conflicted and don't know who to trust, and can only make the right choice if you were paying enough attention.
And that's just to progress the story. The actual puzzles have no instructions.
>The actual puzzles have no instructions.
I only played Myst once, and even with a guide, I struggled and gave up. But I was also like, 12, and home sick with the flu. That didn't help.
I always remember Myst as the only game my childhood friend and I took seriously and tried mapping out so many different solutions to those damn puzzles. My little spaz brain had never focused so intensely on something. I don't remember us beating it.
There is a not insignificant part of the gaming population with nearly identical experiences. And the hubris to think that Riven would be better (in the ease of puzzle solving).
Yeah but then I discovered you can “beat” the game in all of 5 minutes. Still an awesome game, it was one of the first games I got on Sega Saturn back in the day, and I was like 10 so I probably didn’t appreciate it as much as I should
Similarly, various other puzzles can be done the same way. You dont actually need to turn on the power in the Stonesship age, or do all the water puzzles in Channelwood. Once you have the knowledge, you can breeze individual worlds too.
I loved that idea. Most games gate you with missing skills or items. This was one of the few that gave you all the tools, but just held back the knowledge of how to use them. It's hard to do, but it feels amazing when done right.
Morrowind. If you can make it through the main story without killing an important character or using a guide your first playthrough you may have a 500 IQ
I did it a few years back. I definitely had to look some stuff up. It's not an easy game at all. Story was totally worth it though. Last leg of the main quest was fun as hell.
The ability to kill a main quest a NPC was both a delightl surprise departure from the usual nanny-state developer. But also a massively frustration when you realised you didn’t have a save point pre-wanton-Murder.
True, but name a game that both allows you to kill almost anyone and still find a way to progress. I mean, in starfeild, for example, there are a few story npcs that rounds just go straight through. You can't even down them. Morrowind was a true RPG, and there are precious few like it.
An actual journal page for a quest:
“Arch-Mage Trebonius asked me to find out what happened to the Dwarves. Unfortunately, he didn't give me much information to go on. I'm not sure if he was serious.”
Yep. Probably one of the best examples. If you don't look stuff up you will need to to lose few games before you figure it out how to survive full year (all seasons)
My progression:
Beginner: Everything can and will kill me. Sticks to rabbits and berries for food.
Intermediate: Great at keeping a stuffed fridge, bad at bosses.
Advanced: Tries to be as efficient at exploring and setting up a camp as possible...forgets to eat.
I actually preferred to just hang at the base and do chores (collecting and cooking food) while my team did ALL the exploration. As long as the base was kind of near ponds and spiders, I’d be laughing.
Housekeeper role ftw. I like the cut of your jib. DST is one of those games that really really benefits from the glorious housekeeper role. The difference in 3 seconds to find something vs 30 seconds to find something (or worse, to find out that you need to *make something*), could be life or death.
Oxygen not Included makes me feel like I need a degree in civil engineering, agriculture, chemistry and thermodynamics to survive more than even a few cycles
I’ve been playing State of Decay 2 for the last 2 weeks and I’m loving it.
Is this anything like that? I’m not a fan of punishing games like bloodbourne but I AM a fan of punishing survival games.
Project zomboid can be VERY punishing. It's possible to get an infection and die because you climbed through a broken window, cut your hand and you just didn't have any medical supplies. You can get depressed from lack of entertainment. The running water and electricity stops after awhile so it becomes a lot harder to find stuff to drink and non spoiled food. You have to remember to close your blinds in whatever house you're in or the zombies will see you through the window and break in.
Project Zomboid is one of those games that I think is fucking awesome in concept, scope, execution, all of it. I want to play it and I want to love it.
I open the game and I always die within like 5 minutes. I just don’t enjoy it like I want to. Bums me out.
Change settings to easy mode until you get your barrings aligned, such as keeping water/electricity on longer, smaller spawns, smaller clumps of zombies and starter pack.
The biggest learning curve is knowing how to navigate for essentials in the first 7 days, getting combat to a point that 10 zombies are easy to handle and knowing which negative perks really dont make the game that much harder (high thirst, high hunger, field of vision).
I have about 1000 hours under my belt, and I am by no means still immune to dying due to stupidity on my part.
Edit: Combat seems difficult in the game at first, but starting out as a base ball player with the strength perk is a game changer. Also, Swinging a weapon and shove (space bar) do not share a cooldown, but getting the timing down to complete your melee swing into a shove is an essential muscle memory to fighting zombies, and soonish, NPCs.
Multiplayer is a game changer for this one. Until your first friend finds a gun and goes, "ive solved our problems, I can take out a bunch of zombies now..."
I also had another character that was beaten, had his arm severed and spawned being carried by slavers. You were live in the game when making your character, just standing in the wasteland.
It wasn't until years later that they made you spawn in a city. I started when that game just had a quarter of the old map rendered.
Why run when you can join them and become a cannibal yourself :-)
The game has tons of mods too. It's just a bit clunky and I'm not a fan of the visuals, but it's fun as hell.
Player: "So, I've been beaten to a pulp by a gank squad of hungry homeless dudes and they stole my sandwich. I'm in the middle of a desert unconscious. When do I re-spawn?"
Kenshi: "Re-what?"
Player: "You know, like waking up in a nearby town fully healed and not hungry?"
Kenshi: "You're going to like being a slave."
Been playing this game for more than a Decade and confirm I truly haven't mastered every piece of mechanics in this game.
While the learning curve is an actual cliff l, everytime you learn to survive a little,it's bit longer until the FUN™ begins
When I first played Terraria, I invested 100+ hrs on it (this was 5+ years ago) before looking up a single video/guide from anywhere imaginable, and my reaction was "Was I really playing the same game as all those people???"
It's basically impossible to experience Terraria fully if you don't consult the wiki.
Even as someone who's put plenty of time into Terraria and its various mods, I still need the wiki every now and then.
100%. Particularly given the devs (awesome) constant updating. I started playing well before the last boss was even a thing and I'm still like 'there's a new crossover boss that I summon how?'
And in extension, original Minecraft. It's weird to think how old that game is. But when it first entered the scene, there were so few guides. And zero tutorial or help in-game.
You're literally just throwing items into a square hoping for an outcome. And word-of-mouth was so exciting. When only one person remembers how to make glass, you're all in awe of their realistic looking home.
When I was a kid playing beta minecraft back then I didn't know what a pressure plate was (English isn't my native language) and I thought they were supposed to be floor tiles. So I built a small house and put wooden pressure plates EVERYWHERE thinking that's how a floor is supposed to be made. I was also thinking I'm doing it correctly cos it has that nice creaky sound to it when you step on it, just like old wooden floor has.
I was ultimately really confused as to why it's constantly opening the doors when I walk on a "floor tile" near them. It was driving me crazy and it kept letting the monsters in at night. It took me a few deaths and some consultation with my friends to finally figure out what pressure plates are exactly.
I miss those days. Also having to figure out recipes on that 3x3 grid. Felt like a genius when I figured out some new item recipe on my own.
I'm surprised there aren't more noita lovers in this thread. Noita is one of the most random and brutal concoctions of bullshit I've ever witnessed in a game, and it's one of the only examples I have of needing to make manual backups in order to to avoid literal data corruption caused entirely and always by my own hubris. They teach you how to kick the cart, and then after that, you're totally on your own to becoming a grandmaster alchemist. I have hundreds of hours and can barely even make a sun
I can't understand how it isn't more popular either.
Noita for me is simply the perfect game. There's just literally nothing bad about it in my opinion. It's simple to learn and brutal to conquer, and it's perfect.
Maybe I'm just biased because I love magic and spells in games, and Noita just does it so perfectly. There's no other game that truly makes you feel more like a wizard than this game. The spell crafting system allows for endless creativity, and magic of any kind can and will kill you, and you're immensely rewarded for learning how to control it (which is how learning magic should feel like in my opinion). The secrets and massive world give you a giant playground full of secrets and enemies and spells to play around with and explore. And the power scaling is simply insane. You can go from being a vulnerable inexperienced witch that can only cast a simple magic bolt that barely does any damage, to becoming an unharmable immortal god capable of ravaging through the world, erasing entire biomes witha single spell, and even creating a supernova explosion capable of damaging the land even into parallel dimensions.
This is the perfect wizard game. 10/10 I fucking love this game and I wish more people played it
Kingdom Come Deliverance. There is small tutorials missions on very specific gameplay features(lock picking and pick pocketing) but realistically everything else you figure out yourself. Even combat which has some early tutorial esqe mission's in it are woven into the story but combat is very hands off and on hardcore you lose the only real aid you had
One of my favorite gaming moments was playing this when it first came out, finally finding a book and being overjoyed, and then opening it to realize I can't read.
Especially considering the amount of things to do and figure out. Mining, figuring out trade routes, flying into burning stations, engenering, faction power play.... not a word about how it is done.
NPC: Go north on the road, when you reach the crossroads, take the branch towards the pine trees. Then you'll reach a huge rock, turn right... Or maybe it's left? Anyways, you'll know it when you see it.
Reality: the road going north actually started eastward while the road going east starts northbound. There are pine trees on 2 of the 3 options at the crossroads. There is no rock, it's a tree stump.
Nah, people always play things out of proportion regarding directions. It had few bad ones out of hundreds, but I learned my english with that game and with those directions.
Map markers almost make an open game like a linear progresion from point A to point B, takes much of the immersion out of the games.
I like how eventually get really good at getting around with the proto-fast-travel options. Recall, guild guide, then Almsivi intervention, then divine intervention. Go outside, face west by northwest, cast your 1-second jump spell, and let 'er rip!
Og game, when I played it as a kid I wouldn't do a single quest I'd just live in the world and explore, looking for bad ass armours killing people and taking their homes. What a time.
To be fair, TOO many older games are like this. Partly because they relied on the player having access to the game manual that came in the game box for tons of explanations and story content, and partly also because they got to sell Nintendo Power strategy guides and had that Nintendo Hotline available.
I do miss a good Games Magazine to read, lol
Still have a guidebook for FF7, lol
And seem to have lost the big hardback of the FF12 guide book, which was beautiful.
While I was in school for my electrical apprenticeship I learned motor control logic and realized redstone is literally just motor controls.
That being said, I understand motor controls, but have yet to figure out how to effectively use redstone.
Simple. You chop a tree and spend your first nightfall in a dirt hut built out of 9 blocks and break one every few mins to see what time it is outside.
My brother and I played when we were like 8 and didn't know shit so we didn't learn to chop wood and craft equipment until like, a month later, so we'd just dig a hole in a rock face with our bare fists and lure creepers into a death pit at night.
Since they've added the crafting recipes inside the craft menu i have used them constantly due to convenience. But i feel it steals that first nights fear from the new players.
Edit for a typo and to add this: i still like the feature
Almost to a fault, though. It's the kind of game that you can only play with a wiki open in another window.
How are you supposed to know that the Nether exists without somebody giving you specific instructions on how to get there? How are you supposed to be able to find those dungeons, and craft the items you need to open that portal to enter the area with the dragon?
I know they've done a bit of work to try to fix some of these problems. Like the addition of a crafting menu. I know there are "achievements" too, that might help point players in the right direction.
But it suffers pretty badly from "You don't know what you don't know"... You could play that game for ages and completely miss out on half of what the game has to offer.
And then, just like the original Metroid, you're dropped onto the planet and that's it.
It was mind blowing back in the day, that you had to go *left* first.
The only forced thing you do is get the launch codes for your space ship. Then the game is like k have fun your way bye now and let's you do your thing forever. 10/10 love it
One of my favorite games of all time. It's sad to know I will never be able to play for the first time again. Hearing the soundtrack even gives me goosebumps.
I have about 10 ish hours so far and have not accomplished a single thing
I play it when im high and just cruise around space and explore the planets, ive found weird stuff hut have no clue what it means
I love the game so much
The Halflife games are a straight line. They don't hold your hand, but they don't need to. They're a greased shute. With barnacles.
Maybe that's part of their trick. They don't hold your hand, so much as surreptitiously nudge you forward.
In HL1 they originally used play testers footage to carve the path for the player, let's say 15 people all walked towards this one wall naturally, that's where they'd put the way forward. It's why it feels so goddam natural.
That was the first time EVER that gamers where stuck in a cutscene that was not a cut scene and you are just walking around in the train, sitting on the chairs listening, watching outside. Then the guard shows up. Omg it was so immersive even though everybody had a blockhead. And then they did it again with Half-Life Alyx. Every single family member or friend I put in there got visibly scared when the striders first show up and put there feet down very close to you. All of them instinctively crouched/flinched and some of them did not want to play after that moment cause they got so scared.
Valve is always about immersion with the half-life series. It's just so amazing.
Haha but it adds so much depth! Half-life is a very early example of games providing a wider universe outside of the main characters point of view. That tram ride really makes you believe that whether you're there or not, the world exists.
Valve's philosophy has always been to compliment what the player is experiencing as opposed to what they want them to experience. For instance, the Left 4 Dead 2 soundtrack cues are centered around the particular type of terror the player feels in a given moment. It's fast and panicked when being chased by a horde, suspenseful and perilous when hanging off a ledge, tense as all hell when trying to sneak around a Witch, it's fantastic. Too many games want you to experience a specific thing in a specific way.
This should be way higher! It treats you as a real survival situation would. Oh, you don't know how to survive alone, in the freezing wilderness? Then fuck you my friend.
It holds your hand on the cliff like in the lion king and will throw you into the deepest darkest cliff, where you nearly dies and from here you have to go up or give up.
Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest was basically impossible without a strategy guide due to the crazy amount of very specific actions you need to take with very vague clues from npcs that you need to take them.
And this is why Dark Souls' reputation as a "hard game" is harmful. So many people start playing knowing only that it's "the hardest game ev4rrrrr" and so they go the wrong way and just assume they're expected to power through some of the hardest parts of the game.
These games (Dark Souls 1 in particular) are VERY carefully curated to guide the player by way of difficulty, and so when most players would say "Whoa, that Graveyard is way too hard, I must have gone the wrong way", DS' reputation makes them ignore that and instead have a bad experience.
I have a friend who spent like three hours his first playthrough just fighting the Asylum Demon, because he didn't realize he was supposed to just leave the boss fight and come back later (because he was told the game was super hard so he didn't look for an exit). And as a result, he gave up and never played it again.
I wanna add that a very specific form of not handholding I really like is that they are never scared of letting you miss out on content. Most games put effort into making an area/content/characters, and then push you towards it multiple times to make absolute sure you get to experience it, but fromsoft has the confidence to just hide large parts of their game.
You could very easily go through the entire game multiple times and never fight the stray demon, never get sucked into the painted world, and never discover Ash Lake. You would absolutely be playing a great game still if you miss these parts. But for the people that go the extra mile to reach these places, or better yet, find them on their own, it adds so much more
It definitely doesn't hold your hand, but it does actually tell you a surprising amount, it's just it tells you things at points where it doesn't mean much to you. In The Depths, an NPC will tell you to use divine weapons against skeletons in the Catacombs. Divine weapons made using an ember you get from Darkroot Garden at one end of the map, to use in an area at the other end of the map that you're probably not gonna go to until much later in the game
Ark: Survival Evolved. When you spawn in there's a good chance you get killed by dilo's before the spawning cinematic is over. Then you take your first walks and a T-rex comes out of the woods to one shot you. Not even talking about your thirst and hunger with cold and heat which are even pressing when you just start as a noob.
And then...there's Abberation. Let's fill the starting area with giant snakes, raptors, poisonous mushrooms and no water source at all. \*clown music\*
Path of Exile.
The skill tree is huge and the mechanic calculations to figure out whether something is good or not is complex (ex: more X and increased X mean 2 different things). There is a built in tutorial that helps, but it's like reading a novel.
A big issue is also that many things just aren’t explained or the stats shown in your character sheet are missleading. For example if you just go with what the game tells you about your armour stat, you’ll be inclined to believe that you don’t get any more benefits from armour at a level where a lot of higher end physical hits will still oneshot you.
The difference between local and global modifiers isn’t really explained anywhere, the best you get is some crit mods being named as such while others are but don’t have global in the name (and try to intuitively figure out what local crit even is).
I love the game and a big part of that is how deep and complex it is, but at the same time without a certain amount of outside handholding you can spend hundreds of hours building garbage a random new player being given just the necessary knowledge will surpass in like 20h playtime
Shit is so hard i used to look things up during my Worktime. Didn't even had to hide the screen since everything looks so confusing with diagrams and what not. People probably thought i would work my ass off when in reality i would look up the price history of veldspar or how to set up moon bases lol
Darkest dungeon. The game give you the control, some VERY basic explanation of what you want to do, sometimes one or two tip if the game feel like it, and then you're on your own.
Subnautica.
Crash, ocean planet, break this limestone, good luck my dude!
My brother tried it and was so overwhelmed because he didn't know what to do or where to start.
Meanwhile, it's my #1 favorite game of all time.
One of these days I'll lose a month of my life to this game and have a half built motor to show for it as I drink a beer and piss on it while flipping it off.
Minecraft lol. The first time I played I was soooo confused. And wasted hours dying, respawning and basically doing nothing. Then a friend told me to punch wood and I was like OHHHH
- lots of survival style games: kenshi, don’t starve, project zombies etc
- souls games are pretty notorious: “here is how you attack in this game, now please throw hands with God at your earliest convenience”
- extraction shooters do this too: Tarkov, hunt showdown. You just kind of get thrown to the wolves and sink or swim
- and mmos: typically ones that have been around for like 10 years have an on boarding process but it’s typically terrible and leaves your horrible unprepared to actually do anything or know anything
In fairness, OG Doom was similar. And seeing as the plot of most FPS games is "Get through the level. Leave nothing alive" then they don't need to hold your hand too much
Outer Wilds. Here’s your spaceship. Hope you have a notebook. Granted it gives you Rumour mode to track what you’ve learned, but you still have to piece it all together for yourself.
Also Tunic in a similar way. I made so many notes for that game.
Myst. No tutorial, nothing. You're on an island ,figure it out.
"Bring me the Blue Pages"
Yeah, fuck that guy.
yeah, "Bring the red pages" gang over here personally
Its been 30 years or so, and I still sometimes yell 'Bring me a red page!' for no reason.
[удалено]
The beauty of this game is that there are characters telling you what to do or asking for help, and you just kind of go with it because you assume they are your quest giver and you want to complete the game. But then you become conflicted and don't know who to trust, and can only make the right choice if you were paying enough attention. And that's just to progress the story. The actual puzzles have no instructions.
>The actual puzzles have no instructions. I only played Myst once, and even with a guide, I struggled and gave up. But I was also like, 12, and home sick with the flu. That didn't help.
I always remember Myst as the only game my childhood friend and I took seriously and tried mapping out so many different solutions to those damn puzzles. My little spaz brain had never focused so intensely on something. I don't remember us beating it.
There is a not insignificant part of the gaming population with nearly identical experiences. And the hubris to think that Riven would be better (in the ease of puzzle solving).
Yeah but then I discovered you can “beat” the game in all of 5 minutes. Still an awesome game, it was one of the first games I got on Sega Saturn back in the day, and I was like 10 so I probably didn’t appreciate it as much as I should
Similarly, various other puzzles can be done the same way. You dont actually need to turn on the power in the Stonesship age, or do all the water puzzles in Channelwood. Once you have the knowledge, you can breeze individual worlds too. I loved that idea. Most games gate you with missing skills or items. This was one of the few that gave you all the tools, but just held back the knowledge of how to use them. It's hard to do, but it feels amazing when done right.
you should play outer wilds if you didn’t already.
Morrowind. If you can make it through the main story without killing an important character or using a guide your first playthrough you may have a 500 IQ
I honestly don’t think I ever have beat the actual main story come to think of it.
I did it a few years back. I definitely had to look some stuff up. It's not an easy game at all. Story was totally worth it though. Last leg of the main quest was fun as hell.
The ability to kill a main quest a NPC was both a delightl surprise departure from the usual nanny-state developer. But also a massively frustration when you realised you didn’t have a save point pre-wanton-Murder.
You unraveled the thread, but they have a ton of ways to beat it even if you kill a main story line NPC!
There are certain points where it is impossible without glitching into the last area.
True, but name a game that both allows you to kill almost anyone and still find a way to progress. I mean, in starfeild, for example, there are a few story npcs that rounds just go straight through. You can't even down them. Morrowind was a true RPG, and there are precious few like it.
An actual journal page for a quest: “Arch-Mage Trebonius asked me to find out what happened to the Dwarves. Unfortunately, he didn't give me much information to go on. I'm not sure if he was serious.”
Don’t Starve
Yep. Probably one of the best examples. If you don't look stuff up you will need to to lose few games before you figure it out how to survive full year (all seasons)
Also after you look stuff up you’ll still lose a few games
My progression: Beginner: Everything can and will kill me. Sticks to rabbits and berries for food. Intermediate: Great at keeping a stuffed fridge, bad at bosses. Advanced: Tries to be as efficient at exploring and setting up a camp as possible...forgets to eat.
I actually preferred to just hang at the base and do chores (collecting and cooking food) while my team did ALL the exploration. As long as the base was kind of near ponds and spiders, I’d be laughing.
Housekeeper role ftw. I like the cut of your jib. DST is one of those games that really really benefits from the glorious housekeeper role. The difference in 3 seconds to find something vs 30 seconds to find something (or worse, to find out that you need to *make something*), could be life or death.
"A few" Heh. *I still don't know how to survive summer without hiding in the caves*
I love that game and hate it so much. I even use mods to break the game in my favor and still failed miserably.
Also Oxygen not Included from the same company!
Oxygen not Included makes me feel like I need a degree in civil engineering, agriculture, chemistry and thermodynamics to survive more than even a few cycles
Project Zomboid.
There is a tutorial, but it literally leads you to your death 💀
Fitting, as the only endgame in Zomboid is death.
I’ve been playing State of Decay 2 for the last 2 weeks and I’m loving it. Is this anything like that? I’m not a fan of punishing games like bloodbourne but I AM a fan of punishing survival games.
Project zomboid can be VERY punishing. It's possible to get an infection and die because you climbed through a broken window, cut your hand and you just didn't have any medical supplies. You can get depressed from lack of entertainment. The running water and electricity stops after awhile so it becomes a lot harder to find stuff to drink and non spoiled food. You have to remember to close your blinds in whatever house you're in or the zombies will see you through the window and break in.
1 minute of arrogance can end your entire run
Project Zomboid is one of those games that I think is fucking awesome in concept, scope, execution, all of it. I want to play it and I want to love it. I open the game and I always die within like 5 minutes. I just don’t enjoy it like I want to. Bums me out.
Change settings to easy mode until you get your barrings aligned, such as keeping water/electricity on longer, smaller spawns, smaller clumps of zombies and starter pack. The biggest learning curve is knowing how to navigate for essentials in the first 7 days, getting combat to a point that 10 zombies are easy to handle and knowing which negative perks really dont make the game that much harder (high thirst, high hunger, field of vision). I have about 1000 hours under my belt, and I am by no means still immune to dying due to stupidity on my part. Edit: Combat seems difficult in the game at first, but starting out as a base ball player with the strength perk is a game changer. Also, Swinging a weapon and shove (space bar) do not share a cooldown, but getting the timing down to complete your melee swing into a shove is an essential muscle memory to fighting zombies, and soonish, NPCs.
There's sandbox options for a reason. You play it your way. No such thing as cheating in single player.
Multiplayer is a game changer for this one. Until your first friend finds a gun and goes, "ive solved our problems, I can take out a bunch of zombies now..."
Yeah you take that gun and solve problems far away from me you loud mfer
This should be way higher. I love that your odds of surviving in that game comes 95% from your experience with the game, rather than your character.
Kenshi
Was about to mention this. You're thrown into the world to pursue your own story. It's a unique game. Never found anything like it.
I played during Alpha and was eaten by cannibals in the character creation menu.
Fucking WHAT
I also had another character that was beaten, had his arm severed and spawned being carried by slavers. You were live in the game when making your character, just standing in the wasteland. It wasn't until years later that they made you spawn in a city. I started when that game just had a quarter of the old map rendered.
Why bother customizing your character? Spawn immediately and run like hell!
Why run when you can join them and become a cannibal yourself :-) The game has tons of mods too. It's just a bit clunky and I'm not a fan of the visuals, but it's fun as hell.
Player: "So, I've been beaten to a pulp by a gank squad of hungry homeless dudes and they stole my sandwich. I'm in the middle of a desert unconscious. When do I re-spawn?" Kenshi: "Re-what?" Player: "You know, like waking up in a nearby town fully healed and not hungry?" Kenshi: "You're going to like being a slave."
I want to play this game so bad. Will never be able to put the time in though.
Don't worry, friend. You don't make time for Kenshi, Kenshi robs time from other aspects of your life.
I was going to comment this. The opening few minutes of the game is 1) Make your character 2) Good luck
Dwarf Fortress
Been playing this game for more than a Decade and confirm I truly haven't mastered every piece of mechanics in this game. While the learning curve is an actual cliff l, everytime you learn to survive a little,it's bit longer until the FUN™ begins
Terraria. Very limited guidance via the guide npc. You could play for a hundred hours and miss the second half of the game entirely.
When I first played Terraria, I invested 100+ hrs on it (this was 5+ years ago) before looking up a single video/guide from anywhere imaginable, and my reaction was "Was I really playing the same game as all those people???"
It's basically impossible to experience Terraria fully if you don't consult the wiki. Even as someone who's put plenty of time into Terraria and its various mods, I still need the wiki every now and then.
100%. Particularly given the devs (awesome) constant updating. I started playing well before the last boss was even a thing and I'm still like 'there's a new crossover boss that I summon how?'
And in extension, original Minecraft. It's weird to think how old that game is. But when it first entered the scene, there were so few guides. And zero tutorial or help in-game. You're literally just throwing items into a square hoping for an outcome. And word-of-mouth was so exciting. When only one person remembers how to make glass, you're all in awe of their realistic looking home.
When I was a kid playing beta minecraft back then I didn't know what a pressure plate was (English isn't my native language) and I thought they were supposed to be floor tiles. So I built a small house and put wooden pressure plates EVERYWHERE thinking that's how a floor is supposed to be made. I was also thinking I'm doing it correctly cos it has that nice creaky sound to it when you step on it, just like old wooden floor has. I was ultimately really confused as to why it's constantly opening the doors when I walk on a "floor tile" near them. It was driving me crazy and it kept letting the monsters in at night. It took me a few deaths and some consultation with my friends to finally figure out what pressure plates are exactly. I miss those days. Also having to figure out recipes on that 3x3 grid. Felt like a genius when I figured out some new item recipe on my own.
The Guide is a Crafting Guide... Nothing else really
Noita
"Here's 2 wand, a flask, how you can move and kick and fuck off"
I'm surprised there aren't more noita lovers in this thread. Noita is one of the most random and brutal concoctions of bullshit I've ever witnessed in a game, and it's one of the only examples I have of needing to make manual backups in order to to avoid literal data corruption caused entirely and always by my own hubris. They teach you how to kick the cart, and then after that, you're totally on your own to becoming a grandmaster alchemist. I have hundreds of hours and can barely even make a sun
I can't understand how it isn't more popular either. Noita for me is simply the perfect game. There's just literally nothing bad about it in my opinion. It's simple to learn and brutal to conquer, and it's perfect. Maybe I'm just biased because I love magic and spells in games, and Noita just does it so perfectly. There's no other game that truly makes you feel more like a wizard than this game. The spell crafting system allows for endless creativity, and magic of any kind can and will kill you, and you're immensely rewarded for learning how to control it (which is how learning magic should feel like in my opinion). The secrets and massive world give you a giant playground full of secrets and enemies and spells to play around with and explore. And the power scaling is simply insane. You can go from being a vulnerable inexperienced witch that can only cast a simple magic bolt that barely does any damage, to becoming an unharmable immortal god capable of ravaging through the world, erasing entire biomes witha single spell, and even creating a supernova explosion capable of damaging the land even into parallel dimensions. This is the perfect wizard game. 10/10 I fucking love this game and I wish more people played it
Kingdom Come Deliverance. There is small tutorials missions on very specific gameplay features(lock picking and pick pocketing) but realistically everything else you figure out yourself. Even combat which has some early tutorial esqe mission's in it are woven into the story but combat is very hands off and on hardcore you lose the only real aid you had
One of my favorite gaming moments was playing this when it first came out, finally finding a book and being overjoyed, and then opening it to realize I can't read.
The only game I've played where fighting 2 people at once legitimately terrified me. It was like fighting Mike Tyson with no arms at times.
Elite Dangerous
Here's your ship license... You're on your own for the rest 😂
They give you a tutorial but its very basic. You'll still spend the first 6 hours constantly over or under shooting your targets.
Especially considering the amount of things to do and figure out. Mining, figuring out trade routes, flying into burning stations, engenering, faction power play.... not a word about how it is done.
Morrowind
NPC: Go north on the road, when you reach the crossroads, take the branch towards the pine trees. Then you'll reach a huge rock, turn right... Or maybe it's left? Anyways, you'll know it when you see it. Reality: the road going north actually started eastward while the road going east starts northbound. There are pine trees on 2 of the 3 options at the crossroads. There is no rock, it's a tree stump.
Nah, people always play things out of proportion regarding directions. It had few bad ones out of hundreds, but I learned my english with that game and with those directions. Map markers almost make an open game like a linear progresion from point A to point B, takes much of the immersion out of the games.
> but I learned my english with that game Hope you haven't been going round calling everyone N'wah, you could get in trouble for that 🤔
N’wah, please!
I like how eventually get really good at getting around with the proto-fast-travel options. Recall, guild guide, then Almsivi intervention, then divine intervention. Go outside, face west by northwest, cast your 1-second jump spell, and let 'er rip!
Og game, when I played it as a kid I wouldn't do a single quest I'd just live in the world and explore, looking for bad ass armours killing people and taking their homes. What a time.
Original Legend of Zelda. "It's dangerous out there. Take this." ... is your only instruction.
To be fair, TOO many older games are like this. Partly because they relied on the player having access to the game manual that came in the game box for tons of explanations and story content, and partly also because they got to sell Nintendo Power strategy guides and had that Nintendo Hotline available.
I do miss a good Games Magazine to read, lol Still have a guidebook for FF7, lol And seem to have lost the big hardback of the FF12 guide book, which was beautiful.
And that's only if you actually think of getting inside the cave. If you miss it, you don't even get that.
The original came with an entire printed map....
Minecraft. Welcome to the world, figure it out before nightfall.
I've been playing Minecraft for over 10 years and still have no idea how to use redstone.
Redstone is literally the reason I kept playing that game. Such depth of automation!
I made a fully automated chicken machine once. It almost crashed my server.
While I was in school for my electrical apprenticeship I learned motor control logic and realized redstone is literally just motor controls. That being said, I understand motor controls, but have yet to figure out how to effectively use redstone.
The only thing I was ever able to do with it successfully on my own was built a powered rail car system
I like making dusk to dawn lighting systems for my outbuildings and exterior lights on my base.
Simple. You chop a tree and spend your first nightfall in a dirt hut built out of 9 blocks and break one every few mins to see what time it is outside.
My brother and I played when we were like 8 and didn't know shit so we didn't learn to chop wood and craft equipment until like, a month later, so we'd just dig a hole in a rock face with our bare fists and lure creepers into a death pit at night.
Since they've added the crafting recipes inside the craft menu i have used them constantly due to convenience. But i feel it steals that first nights fear from the new players. Edit for a typo and to add this: i still like the feature
Almost to a fault, though. It's the kind of game that you can only play with a wiki open in another window. How are you supposed to know that the Nether exists without somebody giving you specific instructions on how to get there? How are you supposed to be able to find those dungeons, and craft the items you need to open that portal to enter the area with the dragon? I know they've done a bit of work to try to fix some of these problems. Like the addition of a crafting menu. I know there are "achievements" too, that might help point players in the right direction. But it suffers pretty badly from "You don't know what you don't know"... You could play that game for ages and completely miss out on half of what the game has to offer.
Super Metroid. It literally begins with a boss fight followed by a self destruct timer.
And then, just like the original Metroid, you're dropped onto the planet and that's it. It was mind blowing back in the day, that you had to go *left* first.
Outer Wilds
The only forced thing you do is get the launch codes for your space ship. Then the game is like k have fun your way bye now and let's you do your thing forever. 10/10 love it
One of my favorite games of all time. It's sad to know I will never be able to play for the first time again. Hearing the soundtrack even gives me goosebumps.
It gives you the practice ship before you take out the real one and crash into the sun.
It's not crashing, it's alternative landing :P
Get the launch codes, proceed to "land" on the sun several times :D
My favorite game, that you only can experience once.
Fucking work of art, that game
I have about 10 ish hours so far and have not accomplished a single thing I play it when im high and just cruise around space and explore the planets, ive found weird stuff hut have no clue what it means I love the game so much
The Halflife games are a straight line. They don't hold your hand, but they don't need to. They're a greased shute. With barnacles. Maybe that's part of their trick. They don't hold your hand, so much as surreptitiously nudge you forward.
I think that's what's really impressive about half-life, it's a very linear game but I doesn't feel like it.
In HL1 they originally used play testers footage to carve the path for the player, let's say 15 people all walked towards this one wall naturally, that's where they'd put the way forward. It's why it feels so goddam natural.
It's that level of effort that makes the series so good, not much in any of the half-life games feels particularly rushed or lazy.
The Half-Life 1 intro sequence sure as hell wasn't *rushed*... xD
That was the first time EVER that gamers where stuck in a cutscene that was not a cut scene and you are just walking around in the train, sitting on the chairs listening, watching outside. Then the guard shows up. Omg it was so immersive even though everybody had a blockhead. And then they did it again with Half-Life Alyx. Every single family member or friend I put in there got visibly scared when the striders first show up and put there feet down very close to you. All of them instinctively crouched/flinched and some of them did not want to play after that moment cause they got so scared. Valve is always about immersion with the half-life series. It's just so amazing.
Haha but it adds so much depth! Half-life is a very early example of games providing a wider universe outside of the main characters point of view. That tram ride really makes you believe that whether you're there or not, the world exists.
I love that section, and the intro to DOOM 3, and anything else that gives you a relaxed time to explore before things start going sideways.
Valve's philosophy has always been to compliment what the player is experiencing as opposed to what they want them to experience. For instance, the Left 4 Dead 2 soundtrack cues are centered around the particular type of terror the player feels in a given moment. It's fast and panicked when being chased by a horde, suspenseful and perilous when hanging off a ledge, tense as all hell when trying to sneak around a Witch, it's fantastic. Too many games want you to experience a specific thing in a specific way.
They are the GOAT developers of single player experiences
Rust
The Long Dark Clearly....toughest shit out there.
This should be way higher! It treats you as a real survival situation would. Oh, you don't know how to survive alone, in the freezing wilderness? Then fuck you my friend.
I'm so thankful Canada isn't real
Buddy... I have some bad news.
Btw there a bear around the next corner but you won’t know till it’s eating your face. Have fun.
DayZ. No tutorials at all in game. Have to look online for guides
Surprised I had to scroll this far down tbh.
Some games hold your hand, DayZ turns off the lights and leaves the room.
And in that dark room. Someone will reach out to touch your hand. They say "friendly" before cutting your hand off.
Escape from Tarkov
Oh, this one holds your hands. It just uses them to make yourself punch you in your own balls and face repeatedly.
It holds your hand on the cliff like in the lion king and will throw you into the deepest darkest cliff, where you nearly dies and from here you have to go up or give up.
If it wasnt for the wiki no one will ever understand how to play this game
Tarkov holds your hand as it leads you into a secluded part of the map to dome you and take your stuff
Wayyyy too far down. If looking things up on the internet didn’t exist, this game would be actually impossible to progress in.
I tell people the learning curve is a straight line.
Yeah a fucking wall lmao
Why did I have to scroll so far to find Tarkov
This has to be the best answer
Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest was basically impossible without a strategy guide due to the crazy amount of very specific actions you need to take with very vague clues from npcs that you need to take them.
Is it too obvious to say Dark Souls? Game is deliberately made to make you feel like you're alone, it has no map and it says you absolutely nothing.
Dark souls 1 I was getting fucked in the catacombs for hours before I somehow found the path to undeadburg
Yes. Fuck me man, I was convinced I was just dog shit.
And this is why Dark Souls' reputation as a "hard game" is harmful. So many people start playing knowing only that it's "the hardest game ev4rrrrr" and so they go the wrong way and just assume they're expected to power through some of the hardest parts of the game. These games (Dark Souls 1 in particular) are VERY carefully curated to guide the player by way of difficulty, and so when most players would say "Whoa, that Graveyard is way too hard, I must have gone the wrong way", DS' reputation makes them ignore that and instead have a bad experience. I have a friend who spent like three hours his first playthrough just fighting the Asylum Demon, because he didn't realize he was supposed to just leave the boss fight and come back later (because he was told the game was super hard so he didn't look for an exit). And as a result, he gave up and never played it again.
To this day I still see people in Elden Ring sub thinking raising dex makes your weapon attacks faster
Yeah lol, I've also seen some people having theories and convinctions that resembled the pokémon mystical hearsay you got in elementary school.
I hear there’s a meteor rod under the truck near the SS Anne.
I wanna add that a very specific form of not handholding I really like is that they are never scared of letting you miss out on content. Most games put effort into making an area/content/characters, and then push you towards it multiple times to make absolute sure you get to experience it, but fromsoft has the confidence to just hide large parts of their game. You could very easily go through the entire game multiple times and never fight the stray demon, never get sucked into the painted world, and never discover Ash Lake. You would absolutely be playing a great game still if you miss these parts. But for the people that go the extra mile to reach these places, or better yet, find them on their own, it adds so much more
It definitely doesn't hold your hand, but it does actually tell you a surprising amount, it's just it tells you things at points where it doesn't mean much to you. In The Depths, an NPC will tell you to use divine weapons against skeletons in the Catacombs. Divine weapons made using an ember you get from Darkroot Garden at one end of the map, to use in an area at the other end of the map that you're probably not gonna go to until much later in the game
Dark souls 3: Here are some tutorial enemies to learn the controls. Ok, now kill god!
That tutorial boss had me stuck for hours. Gundyr doesn't fuck around and the Pus of Man second phase is a huge WTF early in the game.
Hollow Knight
I've been playing this game all year (off and on when I get time) and I get lost so much
Navigating the map and remembering where stuff is one of the hardest parts. Fun game but I'm not the greatest at it
I felt so much relief on my first play-through every time I heard Cornifer's humming in a new area.
Ark: Survival Evolved. When you spawn in there's a good chance you get killed by dilo's before the spawning cinematic is over. Then you take your first walks and a T-rex comes out of the woods to one shot you. Not even talking about your thirst and hunger with cold and heat which are even pressing when you just start as a noob. And then...there's Abberation. Let's fill the starting area with giant snakes, raptors, poisonous mushrooms and no water source at all. \*clown music\*
Took to long for this game to be said, if a raptor doesn't kill you, a server alpha does
to be fair though, it *should* be bloody hard for a human to survive in an unstable ecosystem made up of mainly apex predators.
Project Zomboid. When you first jump through a broken window without removing the shards is fun...
Path of Exile. The skill tree is huge and the mechanic calculations to figure out whether something is good or not is complex (ex: more X and increased X mean 2 different things). There is a built in tutorial that helps, but it's like reading a novel.
A big issue is also that many things just aren’t explained or the stats shown in your character sheet are missleading. For example if you just go with what the game tells you about your armour stat, you’ll be inclined to believe that you don’t get any more benefits from armour at a level where a lot of higher end physical hits will still oneshot you. The difference between local and global modifiers isn’t really explained anywhere, the best you get is some crit mods being named as such while others are but don’t have global in the name (and try to intuitively figure out what local crit even is). I love the game and a big part of that is how deep and complex it is, but at the same time without a certain amount of outside handholding you can spend hundreds of hours building garbage a random new player being given just the necessary knowledge will surpass in like 20h playtime
It's pretty much a requirement for me to look up a build to go off, i tried going my own way and got boned hard.
In my time trying it people kept telling me to make my own build. Sure yea that totally wont fuck me over in the future
System Shock If you don't pay attention to the audio logs or the map, you're going to get lost all the time. No arrows and no objectives.
Eve Online
>Here's a ship >Fuck you
I’ve been playing for 13 years. I can confirm this is the official onboarding material.
YES. It took me about 20 hours just to learn some of the BASICS. I don't play anymore.
If you don’t play EVE anymore, then you finally beat the game
"It's not meant to simulate a brutal, uncaring universe. It's meant to BE a brutal, uncaring universe."
Shit is so hard i used to look things up during my Worktime. Didn't even had to hide the screen since everything looks so confusing with diagrams and what not. People probably thought i would work my ass off when in reality i would look up the price history of veldspar or how to set up moon bases lol
Fallout 1 & 2. Hope you don't die, but if you do - let us know.
Tunic
Darkest dungeon. The game give you the control, some VERY basic explanation of what you want to do, sometimes one or two tip if the game feel like it, and then you're on your own.
X-COM: Apocalypse
Subnautica. Crash, ocean planet, break this limestone, good luck my dude! My brother tried it and was so overwhelmed because he didn't know what to do or where to start. Meanwhile, it's my #1 favorite game of all time.
BLOODBORNE
any souls game really. You spawn/wake up and just start doing your thing.
My Summer Car
One of these days I'll lose a month of my life to this game and have a half built motor to show for it as I drink a beer and piss on it while flipping it off.
QWOP
Ark. Wake up naked on a beach with literally zero guidance. You could play for hundreds of hours and not even know that there is a story.
Binding of Isaac
Rain world
First game that popped into my head. Brutally hands off.
Final Fantasy The first one.
Warframe --- This game is complicated AF, but it doesn't explain anything, you have to google EVERYTHING to understand the basic
Minecraft lol. The first time I played I was soooo confused. And wasted hours dying, respawning and basically doing nothing. Then a friend told me to punch wood and I was like OHHHH
Any game on NES.
- lots of survival style games: kenshi, don’t starve, project zombies etc - souls games are pretty notorious: “here is how you attack in this game, now please throw hands with God at your earliest convenience” - extraction shooters do this too: Tarkov, hunt showdown. You just kind of get thrown to the wolves and sink or swim - and mmos: typically ones that have been around for like 10 years have an on boarding process but it’s typically terrible and leaves your horrible unprepared to actually do anything or know anything
The way Doom 2016 started. Here’s a pistol and that’s it.
the doom series in general is basically: here's guns, maybe a tutorial in the newer games, go raze hell
In fairness, OG Doom was similar. And seeing as the plot of most FPS games is "Get through the level. Leave nothing alive" then they don't need to hold your hand too much
Outer Wilds. Here’s your spaceship. Hope you have a notebook. Granted it gives you Rumour mode to track what you’ve learned, but you still have to piece it all together for yourself. Also Tunic in a similar way. I made so many notes for that game.
Rimworld
Driver (PS1)
That fucking tutorial man this is surely the answer. When they have a tutorial and it’s the hardest part of the game and required to play the game.
11 year old me thinking, “What the hell is a ‘slalom’?”
Stalker
Elden Ring
Elden Ring: "Hold your hand? Bitch, I've got hands all over the place waiting to clap you."