What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?
We've all played them. Backtracking, not knowing where to go. Going back and forth. Name some of these games from your memory. I'll start: Final Fantasy XIII-2, RE1
Chrono Cross. You can accidentally write out all the endings of the game if you try to play without a guide.
Also Mordor 2. Completely procedurally generated world. The game literally can't tell you where to go, it doesn't know.
Star Flight. I played it on Genesis, and it's still one of the greatest games I've ever played.
One space ship, 270 solar systems, and 800 planets. The manual included a captain's log that was sent back in time from the future, but without that you'd just be scouring the stars for clues, interrogating aliens, digging through ancient ruins, and watching slowly as a rash of planet-destroying solar flares spreads through the galaxy.
So fucking good.
Son, you’re talking to a guy who spoke no English when he first played the legend of Zelda for NES. Talk about playing a game that doesn’t tell you where to go next
Many of the early console and PC games were only solvable by finding answers in published magazines. Nintendo was notorious for this - they had their own magazine called Nintendo POWER and a hotline you could call to get tips. A few that come to mind:
Blaster Master / Goonies 2 / Mad Max / The Kings Quest games / The Black Caludron
Kings Quest? I played them on pc. They had stuff you needed the manual for but that was it. Did they change it for Nintendo?
Probably just a comment on the moon logic puzzles in some of the games. And yea, Sierra had their own hint line to call. Or write in
Riven
Beneath a Steel Sky, where literally half the game is going back and talking to everyone you’ve spoken to before for one extra dialog option that advances the plot
La Mulana for sure! It's a game where you play as professor Lemeza Kosugi (i.e. Japanese Indiana Jones) exploring an ancient temple. I admit that I did not have the patience for it. The map is huge and exploration is very non-linear. You also have to solve fairly obscure puzzles. If you really wanted to give it a go, I'd keep hand-written or typed notes separate from the in-game notes. They only let you save so much data at once, and you need more notes (or a good memory). I still kind of loved exploring the maps even partially though. It's pretty huge and ambitious in scope.
The combat and movement are not fantastic though. Not bad, but they feel very limiting compared to typical metroidvanias that let you style on enemies as you get better at the game. The game is not very shy about how it enjoys killing you too! I respect it, but it was tough for me to enjoy.
Came here to say this!
Myst 3 and hollow knight got me that way. Hollow knight was the worst, I simply couldn’t tell where I needed to go and where I’d already been 😅
I like hollow knight, but i don't think i can ever go back to that game. I had so much fun for a few hours and then i walked around for an hour or two, being beyond lost.
Interestingly that's the exact thing I loved about Hollow Knight. I got so immersed in the exploration specifically because I got lost. On my first playthrough I ended up sequence breaking the game and cleared out deepnest, ancient basin, hive and kingdoms end before the city of tears. I was way out of my depth and I loved every moment of it.
Myst 😭
I had the Old Ninja Gaiden i believe on some Collection for the PS3 growing up. Maybe it was just my age but i could never figure out what the hell i was supposed to do. There were a few games like that in the collection now that i think about it, like Echo the Dolphin and some top down rpg like thing
I remember playing echo the dolphin a lot as a kid. There wasn't a single moment where i knew what i was supposed to do.
I got echo the dolphin for Sega genesis when I was about 8. I don't know how much of the game I got through, but thinking back it couldn't have been more than a few percent. And I played that shit for hours trying to figure out where to go next.
I really need to try it again with a guide, I want to see the wild shit after that first damn level.
I still have the fond memory of the Ecco the Dolphin being called like game of the year by many magazines. So I begged my uncle to rented it from Blockbuster. First few days, I struggled. Then I asked to extend the rental. After a week, I gave up. Game was bs. I played Nintendo hard games.
A decade ago, I decided to read about Ecco and yeah, fuck that game.
I found the way to progress once, you have to like flip up out of the water and across to some other part of the level. I couldn't ever remember how I did it afterwards though.
Yeah you have to free Willy yourself but before that you have to … do some sort of katamari thing(?)
Holyshit I forgot this game existed! I had the exact same experience, no idea what I was doing but for some reason I kept playing
Unreal 1 (not Unreal Tournament), some level were a bit too labyrinthic
Currently playing through Rainworld for the first time, and "where the fuck do I go" has definitely crossed my mind more than a few times.
I will say I've mostly been enjoying just exploring, but it has been frustrating at times trying to figure out what to do or where to go when my little in-game helper suddenly decides to play coy at another crossroads.
Fractal Block World
azrael's tear
That game, bro, omg
You stumble around, find a key, a corpse gets up and you have no idea how to fight back, and then do it all over again.
Halo ce?
I got lost a few times in that game as a kid. I do not htink it is too bad these days. I think it was a matter of being put in a significantly larger world from what we were used to.
I've played it so many times at this point, I think I could navigate it without enemies or needing to click on consoles it with my eyes closed.
Morrowind, but in a good way
I still remember the first time playing morrowind and being blown away by the freedom. For some reason my clearest memory of that game is a dude falling from the sky and splatting. Then I stole his magic boots and died the same way.
Any metroid game.
Disco Elysium for me. Too many open directions. Too much player agency. I had no idea where I should go.
The funny thing about Disco Elsyium is that there's so much to do in the opening area and it builds such a rich picture of the city that you assume it's a much bigger world than it really is.
It really isn't that much bigger than the first part, but they did such a great job you don't end up minding.
I always took Disco as just a "stumble into the plot" kind of game. You're not supposed to go anywhere.
True, but the problem (at least for me) is that I was simultaneously going nowhere and running out of places to go. I legit wasn't sure how to progress literally any of the opened quests and felt like nothing was getting done.
The first 4 Tomb Raider games on PC/PS1
Digimon World on PS1, made worse by the fact that it's a tamagotchi roguelite RPG. I never played DW3, but I heard it can easily become a "where the fuck do I go now?" because of obtuse/asshole time sinking designs here and there
Most 90's and late 80's point and click games (Sam and Max, Full Throttle, Monkey Island, The Dig, Loom, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Zack McCraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Kings / Space quest, Dark Seed, Beneath a Steel Sky)
Dark Seed was old school hard and explained nothing. Gave up multiple times, wasn't playable for me. Sucked because I'm a huge fan of H.R. Giger.
All of fucking Bloodborne. Fast travel is great. Building into the narrative where you don’t tell the story directly? Fuck that.
Old DOOMs up till 64. Halo 1 was also very repetitive in its lookalike hallways and got me lost multiple times. I don't miss the get lost mechanics of these games. Especially in doom where the function of the many look alike chambers was unknown to me so the architecture made no sense.
Halo 1 was never difficult with Cortana telling you were to go and the waypoint on screen. Assault on the Control/Two Betrayals has arrows on the hallway floors and I never got turned around in The Library.
If you really want labyrinth level design from Bungie, the Marathon series is were it's at and completely explains why there's so much hand holding in Halo CE.
OMG! Yes! classic doom had some of the most frustrating level designs. I started to hate the game after being lost forever on some maps.
I think Hexen takes the cake among the "old Dooms", since it has a hub map and you have to revisit some levels to toggle switches that became accessible after toggling another switch in another map.
I remember playing Assault on the Control Room on Halo 1 and one of the doors glitched and didn't unlock. I must have walked around those hallways for hours trying to work out where I was supposed to go
I'm sure I can think of several examples but recently I was replaying the original Darksiders and boy howdy did I get lost all the fkn time
The original Bard's Tale
Me and my best friend literally spent a month of near nightly playing trying to get through the first in-town dungeon
Daggerfall also fits the bill
I would love to see a complete remake of Daggerfall with the same randomly generated dungeons; I'm not sure that the random landscape and dungeon generation would work with the way games are programmed now though.
Come to think of it, re-doing Morrowind, Arena, Battlespire, and Redquard would be neat, too.
The problem with Daggerfall is that the dungeons are procedurally generated. I have spent hours digging through a dungeon, hugging the right wall and spam clicking on every surface for a hidden door, to eventually give up and hotkey through all the spawn spots, to find the quest target in a disconnect glitched out dungeon segment.
A couple times in Linda Cubed Again. The game's next objectives are told to you by characters, or through the in-game voicemail system.
However, there is no "current quest" screen so if you take a break from the game, you can easily forget where you left off.
Also, it doesn't help that the game was only released in Japan (and fan translated only recently) so there's not a lot of walkthroughs you can follow.
I remember there being a few points like that in Megaman Legends 1 and 2.
Legends 1 certainly had more "exploration", as there was nothing to point you to where you should go. Legends 2 has neat red arrows on the overworld map, so you have a decent idea of where to fuck around, though the dungeons got much more elaborate. Fuck the Nino Ruins
Just started playing a simple isometric game called Tunic. It's cute, and you play as a little button mashing fox creature with a sword in a language that's gibberish as you find hidden paths in the isometric style. It's frustrating for being so simplistic, because the hidden paths are hidden. I kinda like it so far tho. Just simple, relaxing, chill music, and cute AF artwork.
Fantastic game. If you haven't been already, you can tilt the camera slightly to get a peek at some of the hidden paths.
Yeah with the lock on button? When I figured out that holding the dodge button let me sprint, it blew my mind haha
Absolutely adored that game! It's one of those that I wish I could replay without having remembers how I uncovered all the various secrets.
It is super, super cute. I started it on a whim and I love that it doesn't really give ya anything. Like a souls-like game, it's just 'figure it out as you go' but a cute fox and bug creatures.
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.
Lots of the vanilla WoW instances was like that. Often the way to the entrance was populated by the same level elites as the dungeon so you had to run a gauntlet just to get in.
The Deadmines and Uldaman comes to mind. And since you spawned at the entrance you had to dodge and sneak past patrols avoided on the run. Gnomereagan and Maraudon and parts of Dire Maul was very maze like if my memory serves me right
Maraudon was the worst of all imo, big empty rooms so not only did you get lost it just took forever to run everywhere. Good times.
Blackrock Depths was fucking big, too. Later on, with the LFG tool, it was separated into 2 or 3 parts, I think. I mean, running alone back in WotLK days, where you could easily kill everything side, would still take you 2 to 3 hours to fully clear the place
There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is "Hellfire Citadel entrance."
Control had me wandering around.
That's one of the best games I've played with one of the worst map designs I've ever seen.
Surely that's the point though. Isn't the map design part of the Tower of Babel madness vibe?
I actually gave up because I was lost in an office most of the time. It was just dull.
Myst, sometimes Max Payne, Doom 3, Tomb Raider
Jedi Fallen Order has no fast travel and the map sucks, do you often end up lost or backtracking.
Divinity Original Sin is also one that doesn't guide the player particularly well.
Jedi survivor is the exact same way
Ecco the Dolphin is literally impossible without a guide.
designed that way to make more money on people renting it over and over to try and beat it IIRC
That game was like an unforgiving crack rock
I am not really seeing it. I did finish it without a guide back then. It was the Windows 9x port, but I don't think it changes much.
Really in my case a guide would not help for the hardest parts, which were mostly the crazy moves needed to push those floating things to break rocks and to swim against currents with boulders.
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.
I gave up on point and click games when the solution to a problem in Monkey Island 2 was to put a fucking dog in your pocket. Even the look Guybrush gives when he stuffs the dog in is like "bet you didn't think to do that initially huh..?'
Yeah, basically every game that runs on scummvm is a good candidate here: leisure suit Larry, kings quest, police quest, the dig, sam and max, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, all the sierra and lucasarts ones
Myst series is another good one. Journeyman project trilogy. These all ruled when I was like 12 years old
I miss when games were confusing and aimless by default. I know there are still games like this but I feel like the default now is a game that’s like “oh hey, go down this hallway full of locked doors! Except one door is unlocked, that’s a secret area, good for you! But otherwise go down the hallway to the next hallway!”
Disco Elysium gave me this experience in a new context. But better, because it blurs the line between success and failure.
Also the end of the hallway is glowing, and there’s a pulsating dot on your minimap. And if you take 5 seconds longer than needed, your character says to himself: “maybe I should go to the end of this hallway”.
Oh man, king's quest. Those games were literally impossible without a guide and you needed to go to areas in very specific steps to not softlock the game.
When I played Day of the Tentacle I got stuck. Eventually I caved in and ordered the official hint book. Mind you, back then this entailed mailing a physical letter and the money somewhere. I guess my parents helped with that. And then you had to wait for your order to arrive. And the post was a lot slower than today.
I waited weeks for the book to arrive. And then, the day before it came, I finished the game. Use physics book with horse was the last puzzle I needed.
But the money wasn't wasted entirely. The game's story was written down from the pov of one of the characters. Pretty funny.
What a solid game and experience. I've played through it so many times, and I can't ever get over Bernard's voice actor being Les Nessman from WKRP in Cincinnatti
The worse is when a solution seems obvious but doesn't work. Then you lose your mind clicking everything until you get the actual solution.
Never had this issue with monkey island games...
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.
That's what I like about the game. The NPCs tell you where to go to the best of their ability, and you follow to the best of yours. I like it a hell of a lot more than quest markers.
There is at least one occasion where NPCs just straight up lie to you in quest directions though. I can't think of it off the top of my head but I remember it existing because I complained about it on a forum.
On one hand - great worldbuilding! "Local dumbass gives you bad directions" is a funny and memorable point on top of what might otherwise be a forgettable side quest. On the other hand, I spent the better part of four hours looking for whatever egg mine or ancestral tomb or whatever it was he asked me to find before getting fed up and having UESP tell me "lol no actually it's off in this complete other direction", and I'm pretty sure I assassinated that NPC after I turned in his quest.
Jesus, the finding people thing was tough, but finding the quest item that I had already looted from a grave and either dropped or sold to a random merchant? Game ending, man.
This was me lmao. On my first playthrough of Morrowind as a teenager I dicked around and did everything except the main quest for ages. Around level 18 I decided to actually progress the main quest. Hasphat, check. Arkngthand, no sweat. Talk to Sharn Gra-Muzgob, she says to fetch the Skull of Llevule Andrano. Cool, go to Andrano's tomb, looks kind of familiar. Where is the Skull of Llevule Andrano? Cause it sure ain't here in his tomb. Whoopsie.
Never found the skull, never progressed the quest, had to start a new character to actually experience the main story. I wonder how many potential Nerevarines failed to ascend due to missing minor quest items. Wish I could ask em that inside the Cavern of the Incarnate.
The number of times I totally overshot distance based on the quest description and ended up in the Ashlands....
Half Life 2 for me
Whaaat? I feel like most levels are really linear
Metroid and Legend of Zelda I and II for NES.
Metroid for sure.
Metroid 2 was really bad for this too. If I hadn't been on a very long and boring vacation all those years ago, I probably would have never finished it.
Everyone should feel free to start their Metroid journey with Super Metroid.
Try Platoon on the NES, you get bombarded by ennemies while you have to find your way through this abomination of a maze!
The old text adventures where being able to solve a puzzle required hitting the right words. "Oh, twist, not pull."
I don’t understand how anyone beat things like Zork or the Hitchhikers Guide without guides.
The Babel fish shit had me in tears.
Dear God those text parser adventures. I remember playing Hugo's House of Horrors and trying for the longest time to remove some screws from a grate.
Okay screws np.
UNSCREW SCREWS
I don't know how to do that.
REMOVE SCREWS
I don't know how to do that.
Reeeee... Turns out it only responded specifically to UNDO SCREWS
It is like a game designed by a bitter English teacher.
I would say many games with procedural generated worlds, like Minecraft, No Man's Sky, etc. Where the main task is deciding where do I go next, where do I settle down, maybe there is some better place over the next hill, next planet, etc.
There are other games, where it is also sometimes not quite clear what to do next. Like games have a lot of progression and rebuilding of stuff that was done before because of it. Like Satisfactory, Factorio, etc.
And on a more literal sense, where you actually redo the game over and over to progress, like The Stanley Parable or Outer Wilds.
Some games have a very labyrinthine level design, where it also isn't really clear what to do next, like Dark Souls, Subnautica, etc.
Or environment puzzles, where you have to figure out how to progress, like the Myst series, Riven, etc.
Came looking for someone to say Minecraft. If I'm not good about intentionally placing landmarks and the like I can get myself lost very easily. And sometimes even when I do place landmarks and write down the coordinates of my starting place! I have to tryhard on keeping directions, placing markers everywhere, on crafting maps with a little icon that shows where I am, to prevent getting lost when exploring. Admittedly I am not the greatest with directions in real life.
0 0 0 best place to build your base to not get lost x)
And as a bonus, you spawn there without needing a bed
Open ended games, like Minecraft and NMS , can be really hard for people who only play 'on rails' type games to wrap their minds around. 'Whats the point?', the same one as in living your life.
Also, personal opinion, Stanley Parable is NOT a game. It is a walking simulator with a bunch of bad philosophy thrown in.
Wherever Stanley Parable is a game or not, isn't really important. Someone could make the argument that open ended games, without a clear winning or completion state aren't games, but instead simulations.
Someone could argue that the winning or completion state of Stanley Parable is seeing all endings.
Other people say that to be a game, you need some kind of adversary or challenge to overcome, but that would depend on the definition of challenge. Is figuring out what to do in order to see a ending you haven't seen before a challenge? If not, that would exclude many other genres.
So I just do not want to down the road of making useless distinctions, and be liberal in my understanding of words, and just ask if something is not clear.
I just call Stanley Parable a game, because the creators call it a game, you can buy it and games similar to it for game consoles and on Steam under the game category. Wherever you can or cannot find enjoyment in experiencing it, does not depend on wherever it is a game or not.
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.
It's a secret to everyone!
Reminds me that Nintendo had help lines you could call for stuff like Zelda secrets, and they may have intentionally added things like secret caves to incentivize that lucrative service.
It’s in 1 where you find the item to avoid swamp damage
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.
I got stuck in the first dungeon, because one room required pushing two blocks together but I didn't even think any of these blocks could be pushed at all!
Bought the official guide book a bit later
I had a similar problem with ocarina of time (and lemme tell you having to run around in not one but multiple times was a… blast…)
It was the first Gannon fight where you shoot the paintings.. I’d never played a Zelda game before and it took me ages to give up and look it up (thankfully this was after the internet was born, and walkthrough sites were all over)
Some games really do depend on learned conventions from previous games which can feel a bit unfair to the uninitiated. It's a double edged sword of avoiding too much tutorializing vs alienating newcomers.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It's supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn't mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about "travelling far". Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.
When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother got a NES and three games. One was Crystalis.
Me and my two cousins played the game in turns, and we eventually got to the first boss, which was quite an achievement because there are puzzle elements to the game.
We could not beat this boss. Several years later, I have my own NES and I borrow Crystalis. I'm pretty sure I got to that boss again and realized something. Hitting him produced a sound that no other monster had. It sounded like hitting solid glass. I finally intuited that I wasn't strong enough and leveled up to level 3, and wouldn't you know it, I beat the boss.
It's one of my all time favorite retro games. It was so ahead of its time. Worth playing if you've never tried it.
I sorta had the same problem with Ocarina of Time. Was stuck in the Deku Tree basement. Didn’t know you had to use a stick with fire to burn cobweb. I thought the game was broken and was thinking about returning the game until I accidentally solved it by fucking around. Not sure if Navi explained it or not, but my English wasn’t very good when I was 10 and the game didn’t had my native language as an option.
Yeah Link's Awakening is the one that came to mind for me. Even after having beaten it, the next time I played it I would still get stuck.
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.
Back in the day I once timed out on the bombing mission escape because I couldn't find the right spot to climb the damn ladder near jesse
There is a setting you can enable to make entrance and exit visible if I remember correctly
in the development a lot of stuff got cut too so there was art meant to be interacted with that ended up not being
For me it's always been Zelda games.
I honestly cannot fathom how someone WITHOUT NINTENDO POWER would figure out East Peninsula is the Secret and to burn a specific bush
I spent so long on the 3DS in ocarina of time just running all over the entire map not sure how to progress, I eventually gave up. Those stupid boulders are supposed to give you tips but idk I just couldn't figure it out back then.
Subnautica and Hollow Knight spring to mind
Wait, open world, specific upgrades needed to access new areas and progress the story... I think Subnautica is a secret metroidvania. It's just most of the upgrades are "you can go deeper now".
That's what a lot of the upgrades boil down to, yeah. Air tanks increase endurance, fins and seaglide increase movement speed, rebreather eliminates an endurance draining effect at depth, seabases and submarines allow you to start your dive from greater than zero depth. Pretty much all of that boils down to "dives to this depth are now practicable."
Other than that, the knife allows you to harvest plate coral for making computer chips, kelp for making fabric, and seeds for plants. The scanner is required to obtain the blueprints for several other required buildables. The mobile vehicle bay is required to build the Cyclops. The Cyclops is required to make the shield module. A radiation suit...I think speedrunners don't use it and just tank the damage with medkits, but I consider it a requirement.
There is one straight-up key you have to craft; there are several others for required or optional doors but you only have to craft one to complete the game and two to unlock all doors.
There's a tool that is like Half-Life 2's gravity gun, which can be used to move heavy obstacles out of paths, but it's never outright required for anything. I usually don't bother with it.
The laser cutter is required, You have to cut through one of two doors in the Aurora to gain access to the Captain's Cabin.
Subnautica's art direction does give me Metroid Prime vibes.
DOOM
Fuck your Blue Key.
There is a really fun Doom mod called "my house" that seems totally absolutely normal artsy house recreation at first...
Until you discover the mirror universe and the downstairs (at the time this mod released multiple overlapping layers of level geometry was not technically possible).
still need to get around to beating doom 2. It just got so repetitive I had to take a break
Don't feel too bad about it, the best bits are the first half or so I'd argue.
I actually like those a lot. Just listing some in no particular order:
I wouldn't add hollow knight to the list. It is an exploration game, being lost is the point, the problem are linear games that you don't know where to go next.
Divinity: Original Sin 1. took about eighty odd hours to get to the door that says sorry mate, not enough magic stones
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.
Most recently it's Clair Obscur Expedition 33. There's an actual overworld map but you need to get your bearings in area maps and dungeons because there are none. You'll have to use local landmarks to get around, find clues for hidden areas, and the direction you actually need to go. I've spent hours in single areas just getting lost admiring the design and artwork.
So far for me the game has done a great job of having recognizable landmarks at least. I might not always know where I am, but I'll frequently come across something that orients me again.
I despise being lost in video games, but claire obscure has been fine because I never feel like I get lost for too long. Just long enough to appreciate the gorgeous and very weird world I'm in.
I still sometimes wish there was a map but it would probably be a net negative.
Myst.
Riven.
Myst III Exile
Hmm. I'm not sure these count.
A) they're supposed to be mysterious
B) the progression makes sense, even if the key is in one of several burned books on a bookshelf among many other similar keys, or given to you in one of the bad endings.
The information is there, you just have to work for it.
I haven't played Myst III, that was by a different company, right?
Myst III was made by Presto Studios in collaboration with Cyan, it does have a slightly different feel to the other games, but it is not bad
every Metroid or Castlevania game, to the point metroidvania is a genre.
The Outer Worlds is a perfect example of this in the best way possible.
Animal Well, but that's kinda the point
Space Quest
Came here to say the King's Quest games, but really it's any of the _ Quest titles.
