What games speak the universal language of...

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

... Go buy the hint guide?

Is there any you have bought or played that would be impossible to figure out if you didn't get one of those things?

While Sierra graphic adventures are infamous for this sort of thing, I actually think that LucasArts' "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" was the first game I tried out that absolutely demanded a guide to help me out of the first few rooms — it was remarkably punishing for a game made by the "saner" of the graphic adventure juggernauts.

What games can you add to this shit list?

 

[Majora Fi]

Toy Story 2?

 

[CSmith327]

I have a bunch of older MS-DOS and early Windows games that have sizable guide books, hint books, players guides, and strategy guides for them. I have a folder named DOS Manuals in my Documents folder just for them. Some of those games are very easy to get completely lost in without any sort of hint or help understanding it's systems from reading one of their guides.

The D&D Forgotten Realms and SSI Gold Box games are some that reading the included documentation helps a lot for understanding them compared to trying to go in blindly. Like the game Menzoberranzan for example. Some of them have page lengths that are equal to a novella. Like 80+ pages of lore and guides on the game system or a walkthrough for some areas and maps.

Amiga games are the same way too and I have a similar folder for manuals of those games. RPGs like Amberstar help if you read the manual. It's manual actually has a small novel that tells the backstory of the game.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Every game (most games to this day are either vague, have really bad maps that confuse you, or are a victim of me putting the game down for a while and needing to figure out where I last was, or I just genuinely didn't get the directions somehow)

 

[ArchienineZXAdventArchienineZXAdvent's icon]

I can think of RPG like Dragon Quest which have things unintuitive to the player like items mandatory to the story with weird ways to obtain.

 

[Nebulon_Galaxy]

Myst
any point and click game on PC back then was hell.

 

[CSmith327]

I can think of RPG like Dragon Quest which have things unintuitive to the player like items mandatory to the story with weird ways to obtain.

Final Fantasy IX has it so that it's pretty much impossible to find the ultimate equipment in the game without using a guide or walkthrough. You have to grind several hours into the Chocobo digging mini game to level up the Chocobo and get things that trigger you being able to pick up the equipment. But to pick up the equipment you have to go to specific exact spots on the world map that the NPC characters don't really give any hints about how to find them

 

[Macaulay Kong]

Old PC games and NES titles are really bad for this sort of stuff. When you have developers admitting they were afraid of rentals and there were incentives to sell strategy guides and gaming magazines, it's only natural that stuff like that would happen but a lot of them still went overboard.
I think when games transitioned to 3D, things started to slow down a bit and most of them became less cryptic but there's still some pretty obtuse ones out there.
Off the top of my head, I remember Alpha Polaris having some fairly tough and finicky puzzles, not helped by the fact the solution to some requires a text parser where you have to know and input the correct word instead of just picking the right one from choices
And when I played Evil Dead Fistful of Boomstick, I had to check a guide to figure out the game has a mechanic that actually lets you toss dynamite over walls to break the environment and solve a puzzle. Without knowing, the dynamite just functioned like a regular throwing weapon that didn't actually damage what it was supposed to. Granted, I suspect that might've been something that would've been mentioned in the manual but since I didn't have it.... welp