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
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 😅
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.
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.
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
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
Any metroid game.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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
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
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.
