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

 

[Bakuma1997]

Any adventure game of old, but the ones that takes the entire bakery must go to Sierra's games, a mistake and you can literally make the game unwinnable

 

[4C374552A1CA2638]

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

Final Fantasy IX deserves special mention because the guide you bought was intentionally left incomplete.
For more information, please consult PlayOnline with keyword XXXXX!
I forget how long the guide site was left alive, but if there was a better, more complete guide published (outside of GameFAQs), I never saw it.

Final Fantasy X-2 gets my vote if you're looking to do 100% or get the best ending, whichever it was. I know that qualifier would nominate a lot of games, but X-2 had a lot of pitfalls where you could screw yourself out of the ending for that loop. And I know this because I was following a guide and still fell short.

Spoiler: Minor endings spoiler.

At least I consider the 'good but not best' ending to be superior to the actual best because it prevents Final Fantasy X-2.5 from happening!

 

[Vexicrypt]

Mizzurna Falls of PS1. Mostly because all NPCs have schedules and change their patterns due to your actions. So to progress the story you have to know who, where and when to find and finding it out by trial and error will take hours, if not days of your life. Also if you don't buy a lighter early in the game (which doen't even tell you its an option) you'll get locked out of the good ending (or something like that, its been a long time since I played it).

 

[Sfjeov]

I think that I used a walkthrough while playing Grim Fandango because the puzzles are tough. Stopped playing cuz of this. I actually like playing Blade Runner because i never had to use a walkthrough until near the end of this game. Feels more like an rpg with no stats in a good way.

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

Final Fantasy IX deserves special mention because the guide you bought was intentionally left incomplete.
For more information, please consult PlayOnline with keyword XXXXX!

What a bunch of bullshit!

I'd have been livid (and I did grow up with magazines that half-assed their walkthroughs to save space and/or get you to buy the next issue).

 

[4C374552A1CA2638]

What a bunch of bullshit!

I'd have been livid (and I did grow up with magazines that half-assed their walkthroughs to save space and/or get you to buy the next issue).

I have never seen a guide pull that before and haven't since, but I also haven't looked at them for a very long time.

I think the the aggravating part was the site going dark only a couple of years after the guide was published, so if you waited to buy the guide, it'd be pretty useless (or would anyway if you had no access to the Internet back in ~2000).

I went looking to see when the site went down and found... someone actually revived it. With keywords! Which you can still grab from the official guide.

 

[Graw]

I never really used strategy guides because it's not really something my parents ever got us so I'd mostly just keep banging my head against the game until I either figured it out or got too frustrated and just played something else. I did use online guides for things like unlocking all of GoldenEye's cheats and other unlockable stuff like that.

A couple modern games I feel kind of fall into the category of unbeatable without a guide would be Fez and Animal Well. Both of those games contain puzzles that are impossible to solve without multiple copies of the game or a guide telling you the solution.

Animal Well has this puzzle:

Spoiler

Which can only be solved using by collaborating and sharing the unique hints provided by your specific playthrough of the game with other people and combining them. This puzzle also locks access to the entire second 'layer' of the game. I liked Animal Well but it got too frustrating trying to solve the puzzles without a guide and the game basically became boring using a guide so I ended up just never finishing it.

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

I never really used strategy guides because it's not really something my parents ever got us so I'd mostly just keep banging my head against the game until I either figured it out or got too frustrated and just played something else.

I feel you there.

My parents would NEVER buy something like that, but I managed to snatch some .TXT walkthroughs to help me with some of the stupider examples... too bad most were in English and I didn't speak the language all that well xD

 

[lestagio]

View attachment 208251
Myst
any point and click game on PC back then was hell.

I'd argue Riven more specifically. Myst was definitely difficult, but the puzzles are more contained (though it's a puzzle in itself for you to realize that!). Riven goes "Here's this huge ass world with cryptic ass symbols and things that affect each other with literally no correlation."

Or worse yet, The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour... the puzzles in those games are dumb as hell. FMV acting sucks too, lol.

 

[KamakoKamako's icon]

Spoiler

- The fingerprint scanner puzzle in Dino Crisis if you get bad RNG
- The optional puzzles in Animal Well
- The mountain door in TUNIC
- A few of the Mudoken locations in Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
-

 

[Noon]

Terranigma had a some easy to miss entrances and needle in a hay stack quest NPCs.

 

[Bakuma1997]

Terranigma had a some easy to miss entrances and needle in a hay stack quest NPCs.

I remember getting stuck in the Vote mission because i never figured how to get into the ballots

Spoiler: How in the name of (Flip)

I was supposed to realize by myself all i needed to do to trigger the event was to STAND BETWEEN SOME NPCS!?

 

[beefbowl]

I was supposed to realize by myself all i needed to do to trigger the event was to STAND BETWEEN SOME NPCS!?

My man, you're cutting in line to participate in democracy. Whenever there's a line that happens, main characters do that.

Ultima is the game I needed a guide for, nothing was explained in the game. I'm not complaining because it's a very early RPG game but you need a guide nonetheless (I know I did)

 

[CSmith327]

I never really used strategy guides because it's not really something my parents ever got us so I'd mostly just keep banging my head against the game until I either figured it out or got too frustrated and just played something else. I did use online guides for things like unlocking all of GoldenEye's cheats and other unlockable stuff like that.

A couple modern games I feel kind of fall into the category of unbeatable without a guide would be Fez and Animal Well. Both of those games contain puzzles that are impossible to solve without multiple copies of the game or a guide telling you the solution.

Animal Well has this puzzle:

Spoiler

View attachment 208302

Which can only be solved using by collaborating and sharing the unique hints provided by your specific playthrough of the game with other people and combining them. This puzzle also locks access to the entire second 'layer' of the game. I liked Animal Well but it got too frustrating trying to solve the puzzles without a guide and the game basically became boring using a guide so I ended up just never finishing it.

oh god FEZ. That fake original language you had to figure out and translate stuff with. All those tuning fork puzzles and tricks you to do with alternating the perspective. I enjoyed that game when I played it, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get a full 100%. I had to literally write down notes to try to figure out some of the puzzles for getting those cube things.

It's a shame the creator of that game was such a dick that when people complained a bit about something on social media he went and decided to retaliate by completely cancelling Fez 2. Fez 2 is one of the great could of beens of indie gaming. I wish he could be persuaded to go back and finish it, but that'll probably never happen

 

[Rocket2049]

NES Castlevania 2 with the orb that makes a hurricane where you have to equip it and crouch on a cliffside for like 10 seconds, nothing in-game says you can do this (the only ONLY hint is extremely vague like pray at the cliff, but nothing about a red hurricane orb or which cliff, there are several)

SNES Earthbound where you have to stand still for about 5 minutes in front of a door, if you move at all the timer resets, so literally stand still for 5 minutes... it's way too long to just guess

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

SNES Earthbound where you have to stand still for about 5 minutes in front of a door, if you move at all the timer resets, so literally stand still for 5 minutes... it's way too long to just guess

Really? I had expected better!