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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
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.
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..?'
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
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.
There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is "Hellfire Citadel entrance."
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
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.
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.
The number of times I totally overshot distance based on the quest description and ended up in the Ashlands....
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
Fractal Block World
The old text adventures where being able to solve a puzzle required hitting the right words. "Oh, twist, not pull."
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
Myst, sometimes Max Payne, Doom 3, Tomb Raider
azrael's tear
I actually like those a lot. Just listing some in no particular order: