Games Where You Felt Totally Lost

[00slash00]

So I'm finally getting around to playing Dragon's Dogma. I'm not sure how I feel about it but what I am sure of is that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing or where I'm supposed to go. Maybe that was the point and I'm supposed to feel like an adventurer who has to find their own way, but I don't think I've ever had less direction. I have a bunch of quests but have no idea which ones are main quests and which ones are side quests. So far I've basically just been wandering around the map and hoping to stumble across where I'm supposed to go. I've played for at least 10 hours by the point and I feel like I've accomplished next to nothing.

I would be interested to hear you relate similar stories, of games where you felt like you had no idea where to go or what to do to move on, and how you eventually figured it out.

Also, if anyone has played Dragon's Dogma and has advice on progressing through the game, I'd love to hear it

 

[Colour Scientist]

Oh my God, I've done this in so many games that I've lost count!

I seem to have a special knack for getting totally lost in games, even ones where it's actually pretty difficult to get lost. So then I end up doing every available side quest hoping that one of them will send me on the right path.

Usually it's because I wasn't paying attention to a certain vital bit of dialogue and then proceed to bolt off into the wilderness with no sense of purpose or direction, waving my weapons around with wild abandon.

I have epic gaming skillz.

On the bright side, it usually means that I end up doing a lot of side missions or mini games that I may have otherwise missed.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

The only game that has made that happen to me is Dark Souls. I didn't understand what was going on, I didn't understand the story or why I was doing what I was doing, and I sure didn't understand where to go. Got so frustrated that I gave up on the game. It drove me nuts, because while I understood that the game was supposed to be hard, I still wanted to know why I was enduring the hardship and why I was supposed to care.

Of course, many years have since passed and I have now completed the game and understand it and its story thanks to the internet, but at the time I was so lost that I hated that game.

 

[Abb Tighe]

SaGa Frontier.
Maybe when it came out I was a little to young to understand it, but I dont remember there been any 'story' or any real clue in what you had to do. I just remember wandering around aimlessly and then getting killed (A LOT).

 

[Catfood220]

Skies of Arcadia, I finished all the starting area quests and was about to go chasing after my kidnapped dad and crew, but the game doesn't really give you any idea where to go. I flew that ship around for ages looking for the way out and all the clouds looked the same. Plus random encounters popping up every so often, it got really frustrating. So I proclaimed the game shit, took it out and vowed to trade it in for the next game I wanted.

Thankfully I was playing a Gamecube so decent releases, especially in the early days were few and far between. So I decided to give this another go, but beforehand, I decided to check the internet for where I should be going. I almost kicked myself when I realised what I was supposed to do. From then on point I fell in love with the game.

 

[johnnybleu]

Oddly enough, the games where I tend to FEEL lost are those with very linear paths/stories. There will be some dialogue, a cut-scene, and once I see the objective marker my gut reaction is "Wait, what? Why? What's going on? Why would I go there? This is stupid!". I suppose I'm not actually lost, as I only need to follow the blinking arrow, and there's no branching path for you to get lost in, but I still have no idea what's going on. Chalk that up to poor writing, rather than confusing gameplay.

Also, I played the ever-loving crap out of Dragon's Dogma (and Dark Arisen). One of my favorite games of all time. That said, I agree that it just throws you out there with little hand-holding. A lot of the quests require paying attention to NPCs and questlog entries (and maybe some google-fu). Ultimately, you just kind of have to do your own thing.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

Kingdom Hearts 1. Keep in mind though, I was really young, so that probably didn't help, but I could never get past the first 3 Disney Worlds in Kingdom Hearts. Since we lacked a Memory Card for our PS2, none of us could save. It didn't matter anyways, because we only rented KH1 from Blockbuster and would never beat it.

 

[lechat]

one of the old tomb raider games made me feel so lost i honestly had no idea what, why and where i was doing.
basically you would walk up to a huge door with massive locks on it and go right or left, after about a billion hours of puzzling and opening doors in that direction you would find yourself back at the original door with one of the locks open suddenly remembering why you went that way in the first place.

legacy of kain is another good example where the billions of litle things you have to do to get to somewhere to open a door to hit a switch you seen 10 hours earlier makes you forget what the hell you are meant to be doing.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Also, if anyone has played Dragon's Dogma and has advice on progressing through the game, I'd love to hear it

Well, the first question is... Where are you now? Have you already discovered Gran Soren (the capital)? What class are you playing as?

Traveling is a bit of a hassle because you won't exactly know where you're going untill you get there. There are a few shortcuts, though some are guarded by Ogres who will wreck your shit real good. There's also a couple of camps (resting areas) scattered here and there, but again, you won't know where untill you stumble across them. I'm sure you could find a guide online on where to find them if you're really desperate.

My advise... Go for the Ranger class (starting out as a Strider and filling up that vocation first). It basically turns you into the Terminator.

 

[FPLOON]

Kingdom Hearts 1. Keep in mind though, I was really young, so that probably didn't help, but I could never get past the first 3 Disney Worlds in Kingdom Hearts. Since we lacked a Memory Card for our PS2, none of us could save. It didn't matter anyways, because we only rented KH1 from Blockbuster and would never beat it.

I had a similar experience like that, since I would only be able to play Kingdom Hearts 1 off my cousin's PS2 without a memory card... In fact, every world leading up to Agrabah I would get lost in because I could never remember how I went passed said world in the first place... Actually, now that I think about it, my first time actually beating KH1 was filled with so much unnecessary backtracking because I would feel very easily lost in that game at the time... Nowadays, I know that game well enough to the point that I even know how to skip certain sections just to finish the game faster...

Other than that, feeling lost while playing Sonic Adventure 1 is definitely not one of my high points in gaming... >.>

 

[MetalDooley]

The original Legend of Zelda game on the NES and it's sequel.Those games just drop you on the map and say "off you go".That's it.No clues or hints about where to go or what to do.Playing those games was pretty much a case of trial and error as this was back in the days before the internet so there was no such thing as looking up Gamefaqs.The best you could hope for is a magazine might have some tips on what to do

 

[JonnyHG]

I feel pretty lost with the Resonance of Fate battle system and that stupid, stupid escort mission.

 

[Someone Depressing]

The first time I played Dark Souls, I was just so... lost.

First thing I dead after killing Crestfallen Warrior (mistake #1) by accident was going to the Ruins (mistake #2), getting halfway through before giving up (the first logical decision on my part), went to the graveyard, got fucked up by a bunch of skeletons, then I put the controller down, and I thought,

"So, that's it?"

The magnanimous aid of walkthroughs and fellow players alleviated this issue however, and I'm currently on my third playthrough. Still totally lost, though.

 

[C. Cain]

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. It kind of looked like Fallout set in a steampunk-fantasy hybrid world. It was even made by the same people.

Unfortunately it was not nearly as accessible as Fallout, especially if you were trying to play a tech based gunslinger. And if Fallout taught me something then it's that you want to get your hands on firearms as quickly as possible. So guess what sort of character I picked when I first started the game. Either way, succeeding with that kind of build was almost impossible if you had no idea how to balance your stats and when to pick which skills.

That said, by now it's one of my favourite RPGs of all time. One of my other favourite RPGs of all time, Planescape: Torment, also had a steep learning curve at first... what with the relative importance of pretty much every single conversation and examining every detail like those apparently interchangeable zombie workers...

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

This happened a lot in NES-era videogames, especially RPG-esque ones (it's hard to get lost in something like Super Mario Brothers or Duck Hunt). Some games just dropped you into the action with, if you were lucky, a few hints in the manual for what you should be doing. Some particularly bad offenders of this type were Ultima: Exodus (and, to a lesser extent, Quest of the Avatar) and Deadly Towers, two games in which I never did figure out what I was supposed to be doing beyond any sort of macro-level "Save the world, somehow" BS. As one poster above mentioned, The Legend of Zelda almost fell into this trap, and would have if the manual hadn't given directions to the first dungeon and a partial map of the world that included the second dungeon as well.

Other games of the same era were similar offenders, in that you often knew what you were supposed to do -- usually find object X or talk to person Y -- without any clue where in the massive world object X or person Y could be found. Dragon Warrior II comes to mind as the poster child for this type (I never did find the mirror that would turn my third party member back into a human) but there were others as well. It didn't help that games of this era would often tell you what you needed to do exactly once, so if you hit the dialog-advance button too fast or saved and came back a bit later, you'd find yourself only vaguely understanding what you were supposed to do next; sometimes there was no solution other than to load an old save or, in extreme cases, restart the game.

 

[Pyrian]

Half-Life. The original. I'm trying to turn on the oxygen to the rocket test, and there's this huge fan. I turn on the fan, which promptly kills me. Several tries later, I've finally turned it on! The oxygen is flowing now, right? Wrong. What the heck am I supposed to do now?

Turns out, I'm supposed to jump blithely out over the excessively lethal fan so it can blow me up to a tunnel way above that you can't even see because it's covered in destructible boards.

 

[rosac]

Final fantasy 6- I left it for a while then returned. No clue. At all.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

The original Legend of Zelda game on the NES and it's sequel.Those games just drop you on the map and say "off you go".That's it.No clues or hints about where to go or what to do.Playing those games was pretty much a case of trial and error as this was back in the days before the internet so there was no such thing as looking up Gamefaqs.The best you could hope for is a magazine might have some tips on what to do

This right here...I admired the original Zelda for what it was but I couldn't even make an attempt at trying to play through it without a relatively detailed walkthrough. I should probably be a bit ashamed that I used a walkthrough...but it was cathartic going through the game with the best sword and a ton of HP so very early on.

I remember having no idea what to do in Star Tropics when I was a kid. Now that I'm older, I figured it out and while I haven't beaten Star Tropics I've at least made it farther than I ever could have dreamed when I was a kid. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is another game from my childhood that I got to the point where I was utterly stuck, only to figure out that I could hop on ice-blocks as an adult...

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Echoing what many said, Dark Souls. After playing Demon's Souls, I sort of expected that the story wouldn't exactly be spelled out for you easily, but Demon's Souls was largely linear, so I got all sorts of lost in Dark Souls. How do I kill these ghosts? How do I kill these skeletons? I know this game is hard, but I'm getting my ass kicked here, am I supposed to be going this way?

As for lost just by the story, Bayonetta. I had no freakin' idea what was going on in that game. It's like she's some sort of kung-fu Witch, but Witches are good and Angels are evil, or maybe she's an anti-hero and Angels are still good, but she doesn't seem that bad, so I don't think she's evil, and there's some other girl who might be her daughter, except how's that possible because she's been buried in a coffin for like 5000 years. It made my head hurt.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

I don't get lost, I just explore until I find my way.That said some older games like tomb raider and soul reaver had some tricky spots. As far as stories/settings go I can infer and fill in the blanks well enough to mostly pans out in the end.