"Okay... How was I supposed to figure that out?"

[bartholen_v1legacy]

I finished Dark Souls II for the first time today, and one particular thing stood out to me around the final hour of the game. There was one section where I had absolutely no idea where to go, and nothing in the game world seemed to even hint at anything.

Spoiler: Explained in greater detail, spoilered for those who fear spoilers (nothing severe)

Namely, after going to the Ancient Dragon and receiving the whateveritwas that allows you to enter the memories of the giants. At this point you have explored all mandatory locations in the game world, and there will be no new bonfire locations that further the story. No character says anything that even hints at what you're supposed to do, and not even the game's hint system can help you figure out what you're supposed to do next. The only hint you're given is that the new key allows you to visit "the memories of the withered". Dark Souls is known for being cryptic, but this was utterly impenetrable to me. Seeing as the entire world is basically withered in the game, it could have meant anything. Only after consulting a wiki did I find out what you're supposed to do with it, and then I went "Okay, that's bullshit".

How in the shit was I supposed to link some silver thingy to the long gone giants specifically? "Memories of the withered"... fucking everything's withered in that game!

In short, I received an item that I didn't know what it would do, at a place after which there will be no new places to go to, no characters revealed anything about it or my next step and the game's hint system can't provide info on this particular problem. What you're actually meant to do is to go back to a very early place you have no reason to go back to and then visit certain places that have been little more than set dressing and only then will the story advance. I do respect when a game expects me to figure things out for myself, but this was just nuts.

What examples of this phenomenon do you know? When were you so stuck in a game that you had to consult a wiki, and the answer was something that was basically impossible to figure out anyway? I think adventure games are particularly guilty of this happening.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Yeah a lot of point and click games had me flummuxed I dropped so many of them before I had the internet out of pure frustration and even ones I had a guide for when told the solution it made no sense or I had found I had broken the game because I did not pick up item X or used item Y when I shouldnt have.

I remember being stuck in Secret Of Mana where you had to swipe a sword through the wall at one point to hit an invisible switch I spent 18 hours in there literally using every weapon swatting at everything until I eventually got out although I must admit I was over levelled to hell when I (finally) got out.

 

[The Madman]

Yeah this is pretty common in point & click adventure games to the point there are a few terms for it: Moon logic, Developer logic, etc. Basically whenever a puzzle requires some obscure solution that must have made sense to 'someone' out there who made the game but really doesn't make much sense to anyone else or that only makes sense in hindsight.

One of the worst examples actually comes, sadly, from one of my all time favourite games out there: The Longest Journey.

Near the start of the game there's a puzzle involving a rubber ducky, a band aid, tongs, and a train that is just so bizarrely out of place and illogical it would almost be charming were it not so frustrating to have to figure out the first time through.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Ohhh yeah, I had to ask my mate about that one. The way the game progresses in the very last few areas makes some massive logic jumps. Lucky my mate is like the biggest Dark Souls fan ever so I was never stuck for where to go.

OT: I found it hard to know where to go in Okami sometimes, when the game opens up anyway. Granted I did take a month off the game then spent an hour looking around the town for a hint on where to go. Oh speaking of which, the Ace Attorney games have a habit of making you run around for ages trying to find the next plot button. You might have missed some evidence in one room at one point when you need to show it to one guy who then opens another room after a Psyche Lock puzzle, you also need to use previous evidence that you also may have missed to break the puzzle. Fuck that piece together the vase puzzle too, it's the first and last puzzle of its kind it was so annoying. It only takes like 3-4 moves to beat it from the starting position but if you start turning at random to get a feel for it you're at it for ages.

If you take time off the later cases of any AA game, you're totally fucked without a guide. I seriously don't blame anyone for looking up GameFAQs guides for Investigation sections.

 

[baddude1337]

A fair bit of Dark Souls 2 is basically either blind luck or requiring a wiki to progress in some areas, much more than the previous games.

Most modern point and click or find the item games are the same as well.

 

[Silvanus]

A Link to the Past gave no indication that I was expected to go pick up the Bow of Light from an unadvertised side-quest, because without it, killing Ganon is extremely difficult. That was a "how on earth?!" moment.

When first I tried to fight the beastie, the only thing I had that could harm him was the spin attack, so I thought that was what I had to use... killing him with that would take hundreds of hits, and is bloody hard to set up right to hurt him and not get hit right back.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

For the Dark Souls II thing, here's how I explain it.

If you recall, the merchant lady at the beginning tells you that all these tress grew from the bodies of fallen Giants. If you walk around, you spot several of these 'trees' and they do look rather sick and withered. You can also walk up and examine them, but the game says something along the lines of, "Nothing happens," or "The Giant is sleeping peacefully" which is a clue that you're going to need to come back. I know it's not the best, but that's how I look at it.

As for what games have left me completely confused, there have been a lot. I'm...not that great at puzzles I'm afraid. However, I just today got the platinum for Lords of the Fallen and there were a few moments in that game where I went, "Wait...what?" but that was more in terms of story than gameplay. There was one instance though that made me go, "Well, that would have been nice to know."
One boss, the one in the catacombs, has a charge attack that he will use rather frequently. I just kept dodging out of the way and baiting him, looking for that half-second opening. Him crashing into the wall certainly wasn't the opening, because he kept recovering near instantly. But I beat him finally. Didn't get the magic weapon from him, so on my next run I watched a video showing how to not enrage him (basically don't get hit and don't use poison).

And in the video it showed that you could plant your shield on the ground as he's charging and it stuns him. And I was like, "Where in the world did that come from?!" There was no hint that he could be stopped with a shield wall. It baffled me, but it made the next two fights much easier.

 

[MirenBainesUSMC]

Well I still haven't met anyone whom didn't get half way through ANY of the Myst games without some form of a handbook or Wiki, that game series is the king " HOW HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW?!?!". Literally. For instance....there is this god awful strange puzzle where first, you had to find the fire place which had some strange drop down panel...and the panel was blank in which you clicked and squares apeared. You had to form a bunch of complex rows and shapes in order for the 2nd part of a long puzzle to be solved....there was no way in god's green earth you could have figured it out lest you were either the Developer himself.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Tomb Raider The Last Revelations

The room in the third level with the checked board floor and the hourglass on the other side of the room. The floor had holes in it that light came through from the floor beneath. Everyone who I knew that had the game couldn't get past that point until we bought the strategy guide - Turns out you had to jump across the room only landing on the tiles with holes in them.

It was simple looking back, but I was stuck on that for months.

 

[Olrod]

This is a problem so common that it even has its own TV Tropes entry.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GuideDangIt

BTW: Enjoy (the loss of) the rest of your day.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finding out the warden's secret office in Arkham Asylum. No chance in HELL you could find that on your own, unless you spent the whole game dynamiting every walled inch of the asylum on a hunch (and even then there's a chance you'd completley miss it, since it doesn't work 100% of the time). In fact it was the devs who famously let out word on the secret about a year or so after the game's release.

Saving Cybil in Silent Hill.

1) Pick up Water Bottle at the Alchemilla Hospital kitchen (easy one)
2) Use it on the "unknown liquid" you find at the director's office (not terribly unintuitive but a bit of a stretch)
3) Use the liquid on Cybil during the fight (completely unintuitive: even if you know what's that liquid by now, even if you know what it's used for, and even if you know what's the matter with Cybil, at NO point in the game does a boss fight require you to do anything other than run and attack; nobody would instinctively go to the inventory menu, select the Aglaophotis-filled bottle and "use" it on Cybil. If anything they would trust the fight to play a different video at the end or something like that. But at no point is player input addressed during the fight)

Also the "Kaufmann Sidequest".

And on the subject of Silent Hill, there's the orange juice puzzle in Silent Hill 2.

Then on to adventure games: I remember being stumped at a Pink Panther game where you're in Stonehenge and you're supposed to use a mirror to reflect sunlight on a couple of baddies so you will temporarily blind them and do X. I never found out X for myself, and now I can't remember what it was. But it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

A fair bit of Dark Souls 2 is basically either blind luck or requiring a wiki to progress in some areas, much more than the previous games.

Yeah, that's true. I probably wouldn't have figured out how to progress into Huntsman's Copse had Yahtzee not mentioned that a certain character appears in a place you have no reason to go back to to further the story. The windmill in Earthen Peak was also guilty of this, apparently torches can now light metal on fire. And neither would I have figured out how to get into the Gutter had I not consulted a wiki.

For the Dark Souls II thing, here's how I explain it.

If you recall, the merchant lady at the beginning tells you that all these tress grew from the bodies of fallen Giants. If you walk around, you spot several of these 'trees' and they do look rather sick and withered. You can also walk up and examine them, but the game says something along the lines of, "Nothing happens," or "The Giant is sleeping peacefully" which is a clue that you're going to need to come back. I know it's not the best, but that's how I look at it.

Thing is, I did remember it, but I didn't have anything to go on that would have linked the silver thingy the dragon gives you to the giants specifically. If the item description had said "Memories of the fallen" or something like that, I probably would have thought "Fallen... Fallen Giants!". And the thing that appears when you examine the giants could have just as easily been something about DLC, like the Ivory/Old Iron/Sunken king shrines, which I also spent a hefty time trying to figure out what they meant.

 

[Just Ebola]

It's funny you should mention, because I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better example than that. It's that very section that caused me to give up on Dark Souls II for quite some time. Ridiculous as it may sound, I feel like I'm cheating if I consult the internet, but I had no choice in that instance.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I've had that with a lot of zelda games. (and adventure games) Keep in mind this was before the internet was a thing, so it was doubly frustrating.

Sierra adventure games did this sometimes, though they also did something much much worse. (and kept doing it for ages. Kings Quest 7 is the first adventure game they made that doesn't do it, and it's their last one...)

Basically, they have puzzles that can only be solved with a specific item, but you had to get that item earlier in the game. And if you missed it, you can't go back, because you've gone past some checkpoint in the game and the area the item you need is in you can no longer get to.
Meaning you have to reload an earlier save (or start over if you don't have a suitable save)


That reminds me though of the zelda thing.

I remember in Ocarina of time I got all the way into the final dungeon, and hit a situation where I had to set fire to something in the distance.

Now, sure, the fire arrows are an obvious solution, except you run into the 'clue' for them way back, and don't need the fire arrows prior to this point, and when you do first come across the clue it tells you to come back later. (and it's in a awkward spot that's relatively hard to get to)

So unless you have a good memory, you can easily forget to check the spot where you get them, then when you get to the spot you need them, you have forgotten all about their existence, or the cryptic clues that pointed out how to get them...

Maybe not as bad, but still, that one really got me the first time around...

Adventure game logic though? Pure evil... XD

 

[Ieyke]

Depending on what exactly it is, I love weird things that are insane to figure out.
They just can't be integral to the enjoyment and completion of the game.

 

[Kyrian007]

Sometimes it doesn't even impede progress... it just is bizarre. Take the Raccoon City Police station for instance...

Raccoon City Detective: "Hey rookie. Could you go grab me the gun from the Parker murder from evidence? Here's the Crank, you'll need that for the fountain in the courtyard to get the Blue Emblem for the statue outside the bullpen..."

 

[Guffe]

Mario and Rayman, but to be more specific, 2D sidescrollers. I never seem to figure out if I should go left or right :/

I face these situations in every game. Not the world beaters that take over 10 hours but I never seem to get through a game without being stuck at some point. Usually it's something really silly and I just haven't paid attention.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Oh man, have I got a doozy. That interactive demo/trailer for the Hideo Kojima's new Silent Hill: PT. The whole game is incredibly straightforward and basically involves simply walking down the same hallway until right near the end you hit a titanium wall in the form of a puzzle and are unable to progress. The solution to this puzzle is so nonsensical that for weeks after people had gotten the ending nobody knew how they had solved it.

Part of the way to find the solution is to collect pieces of a picture that the observant will have noticed is missing after a certain point in the game. Fine, but how do you collect the picture pieces (which are tiny) when you have no interact key? You have to zoom in on them. Okay. For several seconds... Oookay, but where is the last one? In the pause menu, of course! What, oh whatever, but collecting them did nothing, now what? Did you notice the weird phrases in a foreign language that pop up for a second whenever you collect a piece of a picture? You need to translate those, throw away about half, and put them in the proper order to get a cryptic message that kind of sort of hints at what you are supposed to be doing!

Okay, so you've gotten the message, but you also need to have your mic plugged in and speak into it as part of the puzzle solution, and how you are supposed to figure this out even with the cryptic hints I don't know. Then you need to go around to various spots in the house and look at things until a baby laughs. And then you can answer the phone and finally get the last piece of the mystery that resolves the whole plot that's been -- oh no wait, it's just a stupid trailer for the new Silent Hill, there's no actual resolution here, lol what what I thinking.

I was initially super annoyed about the piece of picture that was in the menu, because how the heck does that make any sense?? It doesn't fit into the narrative in any conceivable way! However, that was before I learned that the picture isn't actually very useful, or even needed, to finish the game. And if it wasn't bad enough how insane the solution to the puzzle was, they keep throwing you red herrings in the form of your flashlight color and layout of the house randomly changing.

The final puzzle in this game is akin to solving a jigsaw puzzle where half the puzzle is scattered around the neighborhood but nobody told you that there were any pieces missing.

 

[G00N3R7883]

Reminds me of pretty much every puzzle in the first 2 chapters of Divinity Original Sin, before I eventually decided "you know what, I've got more fun games to play". I'm still surprised that its got such good reviews from players/critics. I guess I'm just stupid.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

The first time I had one of the claw keys in Skyrim. I tried looking around the room with the door in it, I tried figuring out an order of "biggest to smallest", "Flying to swimming" etc. etc. I spent well over 40 minutes there until I lucked my way to the combination and got the door open. For the second claw key door I got to, I was not to keen on trial and error for another half hour so I did a google search for the combination... And all I had to do was turn the claw around in my inventory. Except the game never gave me any indication that I could do it or that I needed to do it. I later found out my dad had the same problem, which made me feel a little bit better.