Games

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.

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.

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 to 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.

Ecco the Dolphin is literally impossible without a guide.

DOOM

Fuck your Blue Key.

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

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.

every Metroid or Castlevania game, to the point metroidvania is a genre.

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.

Myst.

Riven.

Myst III Exile

Divinity: Original Sin 1. took about eighty odd hours to get to the door that says sorry mate, not enough magic stones

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.

Bro nothing will ever beat fucking metroid for the nes.

Main progression literally behind random wall tiles you have to bomb

I'm gonna have to go super old school on this, because I think gradually games have gotten progressively better about this as the art form advanced. The absolute worst for this that I know of for this has to be "Below The Root" which, despite this point of criticism was a mind-blowingly advanced game for its time, arguably the first real open world CRPG. I have no idea how anyone could've legitimately completed the game without either using a guide or playing it over and over for years to learn every possible route of progress. I think the confusing nature of the world was in fact simply because nothing of that scale had ever really been attempted before and there was absolutely no precedent for how to adequately guide players through it.

The world was, for its time, truly immense and sprawling with a multiple screen interiors for most buildings, a full cave system hidden underground, ladders and secret platforms aplenty. You could converse and trade with various NPCs in houses and wandering around on many of the screens. And when I say "screens" you have to keep in mind I'm talking about something this size. That is not a lot of context to work with for navigation.

It's also full of secrets and hidden things, and like many games of the time you will need to find and use pretty much all of them, in pretty much a specific order, to actually complete the game. I can't even describe how insane the sequence of events you need to do to actually complete the game is, this guy uses a guide and save states but I think it illustrates the general lack of clear guidance in almost all cases. Combine that with the fact that you "die" easily, your inventory is extremely limited capacity, and did I mention you're on a time limit? Because the "goal" of the game is to rescue a guy and if you take too long, he dies and you can't win anymore!

Many naive players (myself included) weren't even convinced it HAD an ending and just kind of played it endlessly like it was some early version of The Sims.

Subnautica and Hollow Knight spring to mind

Control had me wandering around.

Animal Well, but that's kinda the point

The old text adventures where being able to solve a puzzle required hitting the right words. "Oh, twist, not pull."

I've just finished Turok for the first time. Some of these levels are absurd.

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.

Antichamber

Serious headfuck of a puzzle game.

For me it's always been Zelda games.

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.

Metroid and Legend of Zelda I and II for NES.

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.

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.

I’ve probably played a bunch, but the one that most comes to mind is Antechamber. Super weird FPS puzzle game ala portal but with a lot of mindbending illusions, non-Euclidean geometry, etc.

It’s got a metroidvania structure but without much guidance and a lot of stuff will just loop you back to where you’ve been if you’re not getting things right. At some point I was just completely lost. I couldn’t possibly think of where I haven’t tried to go or do. Worst part if I tried to look up a guide I don’t even know where I’d begin to look.

Every

Single

Old

Game.

I hate it

Daggerfall

Zork. God forbid you forget to look mailbox