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"Golden Chocobo Corollary: The magic formula for acquiring the supreme upgrade will be only vaguely alluded to in the game itself. Ideally, you're supposed to shell out $19.95 for the strategy guide instead."
"Too bad Game FA Qs won't be invented for another three years." Cousin to the Soup Cans, a Guide Dang It is any part of a video game in which it is extremely unlikely one would be able to intuitively figure out or discover by oneself. In fact, the only way to know what to do is via a Strategy Guide or an online Walkthrough. Particularlywarrior necessary when dealing with random maze sections, determining Relationship Values, or trying to achieve Hundred Percent Completion.
Combine this with a Lost Forever, and you have something that gamers gnash their teeth over, as it is viewed as extremely cheap on the part of the game designers. It is Fake Difficulty created either through carelessness or it is a more diabolical move to make purchasing a Strategy Guide necessary. The fact that most strategy guides are not made by the game companies makes this last one less likely, though. It might be possible that due to the recent proliferation of walkthrough-based websites such as GameFAQs, game designers are actually expecting gamers to be using guides.
Though it should be noted that more and more often, "Officially Licensed" guides are showing up on shelves, up to and including guide-producing companies that obviously have exclusivity deals with game companies. (Ex.: Brady Games and Square-Enix.) Meanwhile, "Unofficial" guidebooks have almost disappeared, either litigated out of existence or simply replaced by free fan-made guides online. Considering that the guidebook companies are now paying for official licensing, it no longer seems all that far-fetched to believe the game programmers are asked to slip in a few "incentives" to get people to buy the guide
Of course, one might notice that obviously, it has to be possible to solve it on your own, otherwise the walkthrough couldn't tell you how to get it. This is true in several cases, but other times the solutions might have been found through hacking, or a message board (or a wiki!) of hundreds of people trying different things reporting their findings, or through info gotten straight from the game company, or through someone actually buying the manual and posting the tricky bits online.
Especially frustrating if you get stuck because of an Unwinnable scenario; nothing incites rage quite like being told you can't win because of a mistake you made three hours ago.
In any case, this can cause hardcore gamers who swear to never use a guide to pull their hair out.
Examples:
Action
- The two Puzzle Boss fights in Syphon Filter 2. In the first, you have to sneak up on Gregorov(who is really an imposter) and tase him, which players will find impossible unless you know the lights can be destroyed. The second, with the Immune To Bullets traitor Chance, involves a gun that pushes him backwards, which seems insignificant at first. Who would figure it could be used to push him into the spinning tail rotor blades? Even worse, since his armor is shrapnel/explosion proof as well, players might think he would also be impervious to the tail rotor. That armor reminds this troper of a guy on TV who developed an "anti-bear suit" and tested it out by being hit with a truck, etc.
- That would be Project Grizzly
- La Mulana tops the list in this trope: switches that only affect a distant room at the far end of the map, treasures that only appear when a particular enemy is defeated, secret walls that only open when hit with just the right weapon... several times...
- Depressingly, the worst instance is the climactic puzzle, which requires you to read several tablets scattered all over the game, and use the mantras that are written on them. Not too bad, given that you can find a reasonable hint towards their location if you're paying attention. However, what the game doesn't tell you is that said tablets don't appear until you're near the end of the game, AND each tablet only appears after using the previous mantra, AND you have to use the mantras in specific rooms, with next to no clues about where those rooms might be and nothing descript to recognize them when you get there.
- Man, it's simple to find the rooms to use the mantras. You just find the room with the compass rose in both sides of the stage, calculate the relative position of the boss room from the compass rose, then go to the room on the same relative position off the compass rose on the other side!
- And then there are quite a few cases where there are no monuments to give out hints. For instance, an elevator platform takes you to a button in plain sight, but said platform also goes into the above screen for a split second, long enough for you to spot a treasure chest. What you may not spot in that same room is the button necessary to open it, with it being camouflaged by the background and all. The button itself can be hard to trigger without the proper weapon. To top it off, you have to perform a tricky set of jumps to even collect the item. What does it do? Let you damage a previously Nigh Invulnerable monster outside of the ruins. In fairness, this did lead to the double-jump ability, but this troper only managed to spot the button through sheer luck. Also, two sets of two words: Key Fairies and ROM combos.
- And how about the steps to unlocking the Hell Temple? One particular step requires you to go to an area in the Inferno Cavern and drop down 20 screens of a bottomless pool of lava, then go back up to the surface, then go down 19 screens and hit the breakable wall on your right. The in-game hint that you are given for this step is completely irrelevant.
- The 1984 Namco arcade game Tower Of Druaga (adapted to an anime in 2008) is one of the worst examples of this trope, unusual in an arcade game. The hero adventures through a 60 floor tower; each randomly generated level contains a hidden treasure whose properties cannot be discerned until obtained (the item for each level remains the same on multiple playthroughs). Some treasures are essential to beating the game, and failing to obtain them on, say, level 4 makes the game Unwinnable, though this fact may not be discovered until level 38. By contrast, some treasures are traps, and obtaining them makes the game Unwinnable, though again this may not be discovered until many levels later. In the pre-Internet era, and without official guidebooks, the only way to beat the game was with many playthroughs (and quarters), making your own guide. To make things even more "hilarious", simply progressing through the game is already Nintendo Hard anyway; like most arcade games of the time, getting to a level in double digits means you're really, really, good at the game, and merely reaching level 20 requires an intense level of dedication.
- Another Guide Dang It arcade game(and an RPG arcade game to boot): Wonderboy in Monster Land. To get either of the special items near the end of the game, you have to complete a series of fetch quests, which often involve hidden rooms which there are no in-gmae hints alluding to, for example, the first stop is the hidden shop in Baraboro, which is accessed by pushing Up in front of a mundane window. To rack up a large amount of gold, essential for getting the higher-level equipment, you need to use the undocumented technique of waggling the joystick in midair at gold coin locations. And the Legendary Sword is hidden in an invisible room which there are absolutely no hints about(not even a ? in the door location). The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is a repeating hallway maze combined with a Boss Rush. The only way to find the right path other than painstaking Trial And Error Gameplay and quarter-munching is to have the Bell obtained from the Guide Dang It fetch quest, or look up a Game FAQ (which didn't exist back in the day except maybe on some BBSes); there were no printed guides as far as I know. And if you die here, "There are no continues, my friend". The SMS version, while less difficult enemy-wise, still had the Guide Dang Its, and no continues whatsoever.
- Some of the various collectibles spread throughout the Grand Theft Auto games are so tucked away and well-hidden that locating them all by oneself seems like a near-impossible task. One particularly egregious example appears in San Andreas, which has a sidequest in which you must take pictures of photograph icons spread throughout the game. While several of these are damned well-hidden, the most ridiculous one is located on the roof of a random, innocuous building. You can only see the photograph icon by flying an airplane on the roof itself, and not from on the ground or from any nearby buildings, although a player in the know can take the picture itself from the ground.
- While many of the numerous secret doors in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night can be found just by 'rapping on the walls' with your weapon or puzzling out visible switches, one in particular must be opened by passing through a tunnel in one animal form, and then switching to another animal form to backtrack. There is no practical reason to do this, no hint included in the course of play, and the opening door isn't even visible from the tunnel's end.
- Similarly, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is filled with obstacles that are nigh-impossible to figure out just by playing the game itself. While this may be chalked up to the game's Nintendo Hard status, subscribers of Nintendo Power at the time were given the distinct advantage of actually knowing how to progress through the game. The Angry Video Game Nerd laments this in his debut video
 .
- Most of the secrets in Castlevania 64 require the player to locate insanely-placed invisible platforms that are usually exactly halfway between the nearest savepoints and / or right before the end of the level. There is never any indication of the platform's position, and one even has a gap deliberately placed right before the nearest visible platform to kill you on the way back.
- All the spells in Circle of the Moon do make the game easier, but first you have to find the right cards. And they're randomly dropped by certain enemies, most of which you have to complete parts of the game to even have access to.
- It has been long debated as to whether Net Hack is possible to beat in its current form without recourse to spoilers or sourcediving. Arguments end up focusing on what exactly constitutes a spoiler and whether price-based identification of items is actually cheating or not, but the general suspicion is: yes, it is theoretically possible, but it's seriously hard work — and proving such an achievement is even harder.
- Seems to be endemic in Roguelikes, where dying a lot, learning from mistakes and restarting is somehow part of the attraction. ADOM has a quest as part of the main plot where you encounter Khelavaster, the sage that is mentioned in the introduction. It isn't mentioned anywhere except in oblique hints that he is the key to obtaining the artefact that unlocks an Ultra ending. Yet he blocks the down staircase, preventing progress until you talk to him. When you do, he automatically dies, which lets you go on but also removes the possibility of him summoning the Trident at the end of the game. What you actually have to do is find an Amulet of Life Saving, which are incredibly rare (some people have spent several real-time days trying), and give him one before you speak to him. (Just don't accidentally talk to him when you have one in your hands, like this editor did.)
- Similarly, in Alpha Man, even if you seriously try to complete the missions (it's tempting to explore every lair and house you come across), you still only have a 7 day limit before the nerve gas is released. Added to that, the castles are significant distances away from each other, most transportation has limited range, each boss needs a special technique to destroy, and you have to make sure you have enough to eat.
- Yes, it is possible. A few years back, someone posted in rec.games.roguelike.nethack that they'd beaten the game for the first time, without the use of spoilers — after twelve years of trying.
- This editor certainly found the secret to getting to the true final level of the freeware game Cave Story to be extremely contrived; it required you to ignore one of your friends falling into a pit and make an almost impossible jump over the chasm, as well as finding an item inside a boss room before consulting your partner who has found something of interest (what any natural person would do first, surely). One slip-up and no true ending for you... If you can even finish the extremely difficult final secret level.
- And to add to this, you've not only got to rescue her, drain her of water, recover her memory, drag her through a quite literal Hell, AND beat (ideally) the penultimate bossES without any healing, but also ideally get every powerup in the game. Several players have beaten Hell without the lattermost step. This troper is NOT one of them, though not for lack of trying...
- Finally, if you can make it through the game without collecting any missiles whatsoever, the chest in Hell that would normally contain a larger-than-normal amount of them contains well in excess of 100 of them, far more than you could get normally even if you collected every single missile upgrade.
- But they're normal missiles, not Super Missiles. And given that the chest is just before the first of two bosses, you can't even safely level them up to Level 3 in time.
- Although rather minor compared to the others, most techniques for high-level play in Devil May Cry 3 are not stated in official help files and videos involving them invariably receive questions from newbies.
- In the first part of Eternal Darkness, you are required to choose the Big Bad which you will fight against for the remainder of the game by choosing a representative gem. The game makes it obvious that this choice is important, but what the game doesn't tell you is that this also affects the difficulty of the game too. Oh, you picked the red one on your first play? Sure sucks to be you, then, because not only will you have to wait a long while to use the Restore Health spell, but Chattur'gha's monsters are the toughest in the game, and you'll have to face them a lot.
- Don't forget that the strongest magicks can only be obtained in one specific chapter by activating a few certain (albeit very visible) switches, and then going through a hole in a wall by using a spell which is only needed to be used twice in the game.
- Also, to get the Infinity Plus One Sword, you need to pick up three statuettes which can each be found in different chapters and get increasingly hard to find, along with placing these statuettes in the correct places (which the order is only hinted at) and then finding the sword itself. Each of these things are one-time-only and in separate chapters, except for the placing of the statuettes, which when done incorrectly just results in them returning to your inventory and one of the strongest minion enemies of the game appearing right next to you.
- Due to the game nature, most of the solutions of those puzzle become obvious on the second playthrough. As for the statuette puzzle, most people who don't find the answer by themselves simply forgot to read the descriptions of the various objects.
- Prince Of Persia 2 (the original DOS game, not Warrior Within) had several of these and they weren't optional. At one point, to continue, the player must touch a sword that kills him, then stare at his corpse and not hit any key to reload for a minute, while the game pretends to be over. Later on, the game does this again, but this time the player must die in a mundane way, killed by an easy-to-defeat Mook at a specific spot, while there are several, much more extravagant ways to die around (such as falling into this level's Bottomless Pits, which are unusual in Prince Of Persia games). A lot of people never figure this out and skip the level using cheats. Also, beating the final boss requires the use of an esoteric move, that isn't available, needed, or particularly useful for most of the game. This might be an attempt to make players buy an original copy, because without a manual, it's unlikely that anyone would figure out how to even perform the move.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 pulled the fake death prank during the "battle" with the Sorrow. Having waded up a river filled with the souls of guards you've killed, reaching the corpse at the end kills you, bringing up the familiar game over screen. The solution requires you to bring up the inventory and use the "revive" pill inside Snake's tooth that is actually supposed to be used after swallowing a fake death pill. Admittedly not one of the most annoying gameplay walls, but this troper certainly selected "continue" at least twice before finding the solution.
- Near the end of Pathways Into Darkness, there's a teleporter maze, where all the rooms look exactly the same, square with a teleporter on each wall. There is nothing in the frickin' game that remotely hints at the path. Many other Guide Dang Its were also present, including the bomb code if you don't have the manual, the suffocation room; hint:use an item that speeds up time, the Violet Crystal(which is at the center of the randomly-generated Labyrinth), and opening the exit door, for which you needed to take the health-draining Artifact Of Doom out of its box.
- X-Men for the Sega Genesis had a level in the Danger Room where a countdown starts and Professor X tells you to "reset the computer". At no point do they tell you how to go about doing this. The solution most people discovered? HIT THE RESET BUTTON ON YOUR SEGA GENESIS, which causes the last level to load.
- What makes this more of a Guide-Dangit moment is the fact that the normal solution involves WAITING AT THE END OF THE LEVEL until Professor X gives you the cue to ATTACK THE COMPUTER. (Counter-intuitive logic, anyone?) This troper seriously believes the reset-button-method was there as a backup method in case people couldn't figure that solution.
- Metal Gear Solid had a similar, if better known, gag in the fight with Psycho Mantis that required you to switch the controller to the other port to avoid his mind-reading perfect defense. Of course, Psycho Mantis breaks the fourth wall from the moment you meet him, so it's perhaps a little less of a Guide Dang It. That, and Colonel would outright tell you to swap controller ports if you bothered him enough.
- [MGS 4=] also have two puzzle bosses. Vamp can semingly regenerate indefinitely, and you'll have to wait quite some time for Otacon to give you the answer if you didn't pay attention to the cutscenes. Screaming Mantis works on the same principle. Either you are genre savvvy enough to understand why Johnny is unnaffected by Mantis power, and you quickly deduce the answer, or you'll need to wait for Otacon brain power. Note that if you try to replicate the Psycho Mantis "controller trick, you won't be able to move... assuming that you call Rose, the Colonel finds out that it's not working because you're on the Play Station 3. Whoops!
- Even the official Halo 3 strategy guide won't tell you how to get the Skulls (at the behest of Bungie). While most of the Skulls are just inconvenient to track down, the "IWHBYD Skull" requires jumping through glowing rings in an order that plays the Halo theme, which is hinted at nowhere in the game, and then going back to the body of Truth.
- This troper was extremely pissed after shelling out the money for the damn guide only to not find the skulls, and only finding in its place the equivelant of "Well, you probably bought this guide to find the skulls, but um, we're not going to you. Thanks for the cash."
- This troper was offered a free Halo 3 strategy (or it may have been at an extremely low price; been a while) upon returning a broken X-Box 360 for a new one. So hah, take that Bungie!
- Several of the weapons in Drakengard require extremely specific circumstances to unlock. One in particular involves looking at certain paintings in a certain stage in a certain order, and this is a game in which you never have to look at anything that you don't intend to kill or maim in some way.
- On that note, Metal Gear Solid (and the remake) has the codec number for Meryl on the back of the box. Baker and the Colonel tell you to look at the back of the box for the number. This troper rented the game. Guess what rental places don't give you?
- Parodied in the ending of Metal Gear Awesome.
- It didn't help that you receive a data disk just before you have to call Meryl. I spent ten minutes trying to find a way to get the number from that item.
- This troper's friend called her at 3 AM because he rented the game and had exhausted all other avenues of inquiry regarding the "CD case". He was lucky I still had my copy of MGS.
- Fun fact: if you never figure that much out on your own, Meryl will eventually call you herself.
- Other fun fact: If you bother Campell enough, he'll give you the codec number himself.
- Getting a character's second ending in Bushido Blade requires that you run to the well, during the battle with the first opponent, and leap into it... and then do a No Damage Run. It's not immediately obvious that you can even leave the starting screen, and the only map the game ever gives you of the castle all the fights take place around has no sign of any such well.
- Because of Sturgeon's Law, Game Mods can sometimes suffer from this. One example is Eternal Doom Level 20: Silures, a puzzle level, which has a spectacular Guide Dang It moment near the end: To open the path leading to the exit, you must activate a specific tree like a switch, with no indication that this is even possible.
- In the obscure NES game Mystery Quest, there was a point in the first where you had to jump onto a springboard to get to the top level. This troper tried many times in vain, hitting his head on the ceiling and coming up short every time. Not until the age of Game FA Qs was it discovered that the protagonist had the ability to run by tapping the b-button(as opposed to holding it), which was required to get enough distance off the springboard. Maybe it was described in the manual, but none of the copies this troper rented had one.
- In Doom 3, there are two special storage cabinets sent from a company called "Martian Buddy" that contain free stuff for personnel, and the codes to them are nowhere in the game. To find the code, you actually have to go to the website www.martianbuddy.com. One of these allows you to obtain the chaingun early, big help for clearing out the Demonic Spiders at the end of Alpha Labs Sector 2 on higher difficulty levels.
- As the illustration atop the page shows, Sonic The Hedgehog 3, the barrel in Carnival Night Zone (solution: treat not as a platform but as an elevator). Made worse by the fact that all but one of the barrels on the level will bounce high enough to get past if you jump up and down on them with careful timing, and the one that won't is only a very few pixels short. This troper first got to GameFAQs searching how to solve it.
- This troper vaguely remembers looking for the solution on GameFAQs and not finding it. It definitely wasn't explained in the official strategy guide! I had to give up on beating the game for years.
- Believe it or not, this troper actually lucked out and stumbled onto the solution...on about the fifteenth playthrough, with the realization "Huh. I seem to go down farther if I press down..."
- This troper discovered it was just possible to force the barrel down far enough with the bubble shield's ability. If he got there without the shield? Wait until the timer ran out.
- This troper was fortunate to have the issue of UK Sonic the Comic in which the Q Zone (cheats section) answered a reader question on that exact problem. Even after reading it twice, this troper and still didn't believe it was the answer until trying it in the game.
- This troper eventually managed to get past by jumping off the barrel as it approached its highest point and rolling underneath as it came back down.
- This troper didn't know whether to laugh or cry when he saw that image. He ended up using the same method as the above throper. It wasn't till many years later he discovered the real method.
- The "Find the Lost Chao" in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle are crafted from a vein of the purest Guide Dang It this troper has ever seen. Not only do you have to find an gimmicky, often hard to find powerup for each character to even think about beating them, you also have to find the shrine in each level, 99% of which are hidden in bizarre places that the player doesn't even think of going.
- The glass tube in Super Metroid has prematurely ended nearly as many games as Sonic's barrel. Drop a super bomb inside it. The solution for this problem was actually in the commercial for the game, as Nintendo has a long history of hiding secrets in their advertisements.
- Several later Metroid games have made a reference to this by having a similar tunnel that must be broken to get an item expansion.
- On the plus side, however, there was an official release made with a guidebook in the place of a manual, which either stated or properly hinted how to deal with this and other puzzles.
- Metroid Prime tends to have fewer Guide Dang It's since you have the Scan Visor, and anyone who's familiar with the game knows instinctively that the solution to just about any problem not solvable by scanning is to try hitting it with every weapon you have.
- Maximo had a boss, a giant pirate ghost, who could only be harmed by attacking while crouching. Nowhere else in the game is there any use for crouching, and most players had probably forgotten that there even is a crouch button by the time they reach him. The only reason this editor figured it out was because it was the only thing left he hadn't tried.
- Using a guide in Siren is extremely helpful, to the point of nearly being a necessity. It has a branching storyline... but certain branches require you to do something on another level first to perform them — and this isn't always obvious until it's too late... or ever — this troper only discovered after the fact that the reason it took her so many tries to complete one alternate path was because she hadn't set it up so it should be possible, rather than just because it was a really hard path, resulting in her performing an unintentional Sequence Break — and it doesn't give an indication of which stage unlocks the branch. If you're on a stage that unlocks the alternate path for another stage you have unlocked, it will give you a hint about what you have to do, but these are extremely vague, especially considering the sometimes downright bizarre requirements. For a particularly egregious example, "Search the Yoshimura house and well" means... find a radio in the house, then put it in the bucket in the well, to lure a wandering shibito over to the well, so that when you kill it, it will fall into the well. I Am Not Making This Up.
- And there's one point where a guide is essentially necessary; when lighting the lanterns with Reiko Takato to get the good ending. The in-game hint tells you to watch the praying shibito... but it starts the level praying at the last lantern in the sequence, so listening to the game will probably lead to you failing.
- Some of the life upgrades in Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within were nearly impossible to find. One is found early in the game through a hole in the ceiling. The box which can be used to access it is behind a breakable gate - except that you don't have the gate-breaking sword yet, and if you haven't played the previous game, you wouldn't know this gate might be breakable. Instead, you would have to backtrack to that part of the game when you get the sword. Another life upgrade can only be accessed by descending down a very deep chasm, which seems bottomless from above.
- By the way, you need every life upgrade for the Good Ending.
- Jet Force Gemini has instances of this, particularly the need to search for the many ship parts, only one of which you are told how to acquire. The rest are hidden in such ways and behind such puzzles that it seems completely unfeasable that you could find them without a guide. Among the most jarring are the need to find a certain minigame hidden in a series of out of the way air ducts, then get a perfect score at the game in order to receive a set of ear muffs, then find a frigging polar bear on a planet that also requires you to find an out of the way ship pad to reach it, in order to give the muffs to the bear in exchange for a ship part. You are given no hints whatsoever that this is what you need to do.
- Not exactly. The room which ultimately lead to the landing pad to that planet has a jetpack pad. This one is obvious. The bear tell you he has problem sleeping. Now the real problem is that no one ever say that you get the ear muffs by playing this minigame and getting a high score.
- The first game in the Jak And Daxter series required the player to do a roll-jump attack to gain the necessary distance to leap across a pool of a substance which will kill you on contact. It is in the manual, but most people never used it. It never comes in handy again.
- The Marathon series had some obscure secrets, but in the original, if you wanted to get the Flamethrower at an early level, you had to walk into a random corner of a maze to activate an invisible, soundless trigger to lower an elevator, sprint back to the starting point, fall down the shaft, grab the flamethrower and sprint back to the elevator before it reset. Failure to do so will trap you in the hole, with a terminal that says nothing more than 'And here you are, stuck in a hole. We could have done a lot together!'.
- Every Legend Of Zelda game is almost contractually obliged to have a Guide Dang It in it somewhere. The most massive of these is possibly the Kafei and Anju sidequest in Majora's Mask, which requires a long string of specific actions performed at specific times, and which must be completed no less than twice in order to get every possible item from it. The trading sequence required to get the Infinity Plus One Sword (well, one of them, anyway) is pretty bad too. In fact, much of Majora's Mask in general is brimming with Guide Dang It moments.
- Mitigated significantly by the fact that the game gives you a schedule of when you have to do the things (though it doesn't specify what must be done). The hardest part of the quest for this troper was finding Kafei in the first place so you could see his schedule.
- Mention must also be made of the infamous Water Temple from Ocarina of Time. Scrappy Level at its finest, the Water Temple incorporates a baffling, groan-inducing water raising and lowering puzzle that has caused the early demise of many controllers.
- The water raising and lowering? How about the hidden block of time behind the longshot!? This troper literally spent hours trying to find away into that one room on the map that he hadn't gone to until he just gave up and looked for his strategy guide. He also had to tell one person doing a live Let's Play where to go, which led to that Let's Player to call that puzzle complete bullcrap.
- The Poacher's Saw in the Biggoron Sword sidequest. The only hints you get about who to give it to are that the carpenter boss says "my own son sits around all day", vaguely telling that his son the gray-skinned guy who actually only appears at night in Child Link's time, and that said man left his saw behind after he turned into a Stalfos. Yet another guide-dang-it is the blue chicken, which gives hardly any indication that you are supposed to use it on the carpenter's son, who is in a location you wouldn't think to go back to as adult Link.
- And how about the second quest of the original? Items get moved around, and every level's entrance is now hidden, with the exception of Levels 1 and 5.
- I managed to find every one except for one RIDICULOUS example: Dungeon 8. Seriously, how would anyone find that on their own!?
- Level 5 in the first quest, where you have to go through a looping screen(the Lost Hills) several times. Level 8 is accessed by burning a conspicuous tree with the candle. And Level 7, how would they know the whistle does more than just warp you around? There's also a tombstone in the second quest graveyard that is opened with the whistle.
- In The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, there is a Great Fairy Fountain in the Pyramid of Power, where the Golden Sword and Silver Arrow upgrades(required for Ganon) are obtained, which can only be accessed with the Superbomb. The Bomb Shop doesn't carry the Superbomb until you rescue all 7 maidens, and there's nothing in the game that hints at this, so the average player wouldn't think of any reason to go back after seeing only regular bombs there. Biggest Guide Dang It in the series other than Zelda 1.
- Banjo-Tooie has several unduely annoying Jiggies. The worst and most infamous of these is Canary Mary's race in the final level, Cloud Cuckooland. It's a button-mashing race. The Guide Dang It part? You're not actually supposed to mash the buttons. Canary Mary has Rubber Band AI, and if you speed up, she speeds up proportionally—meaning that if you get too fast, she becomes impossible to beat. Making this even more fun is that you raced her before in an earlier level, where you could mash your way to victory somewhat easily.
- That's not even the end of it. The Nintendo Power guide doesn't tell you about the Rubber Band AI, it simply tells you that this new race "requires faster fingers" than the previous one, which is a lie, plain and simple. Only the internet tells you the true way.
- A well-known Guide Dang It from Beyond Good And Evil is the location of the Ignis ingifera, "The Animal Everyone Misses." It's tucked away in a secret room whose location is not immediately obvious (it lies in the complete opposite of the direction you normally need to go). While it makes sense once you know where you're going, it can be a head-scratcher. The location of the "shy amoebas" in the Black Isle is similarly puzzling (until you realize that a bridge you lowered in fact had something hidden behind it.)
- What's hard is taking a picture of Domz Sarcophagii, which you only see twice between getting the camera and the endboss fight, and both times you are in instant combat with them. Stopping in the middle of a fight for a Kodak Moment is both non-intuitive and, if you haven't distributed your PAL-1s correctly, suicidal. And without taking the snap as early as possible on Hillys, you won't be able to [1] and get the Photo Album m-disc.
- To acquire the most powerful armor in Megaman X5, you are required to drop X down what appears to be a bottomless pit in one of the final stages; if you're on the correct side of the shaft, you'll fall through a false wall into the room with the armor in it. The kicker is that the armor won't be there at all if you played through the stage with any of X's other armors, and there's nothing in-game to suggest this is the case. To be fair, the game will allow you to collect the armor with Zero regardless (although if you complete the stage with either character and neglect to pick up the armor, it's Lost Forever).
- The hidden ultimate upgrades in X1-X3 (The Hadoken, Shoryuken, and Gold Armor) are all likewise obtuse. And except for the Hadoken, they are also lost forever once you complete that level.
- Many of the Secret Bonus Points in Dynamite Headdy require you to perform extremely counterintuitive or un-obvious actions, and there are no hints anywhere.
- Goldeneye007 falls under this in the Egyptian level. One of your objectives is to retrieve the Golden Gun. However, if you try approaching it directly, bullet proof glass seals it and indestructible gun turrets appear and tear you to shreds. The solution? You're supposed to walk across the floor in a certain path in order to get the gun without setting off the trap. The kicker? There is nothing in the game that even remotely hints at the solution! Even if you were to do the All Guns cheat and complete the other objective, you still need to go and collect the Golden Gun.
- Silent Hill 3. Let's put it this way: when the game gives you the option to set puzzles to "Hard", it is not fucking around. You're either spending five minutes with a guide or five hours with the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
- IMO, the most frustrating puzzle on hard: the keypad puzzle in the hospital, where the solution is cryptically explained in a poem about mutilating someone's face.
- Same goes with Silent Hill 2 on the higher riddle difficulties.
- And the clogged garbage chute in SH 2, which you have to drop a case of soda down to dislodge a critical puzzle item(see Soup Cans)
- A Guide Dang It on all difficulties: the scene where Heather holds Claudia at gunpoint. If you shoot her, the God will possess Heather, resulting in a Non Standard Game Over. The solution is to ingest the Held Back Phlebotinum pill inside the pendant she's been carrying since the beginning of the game. You only know of its existence by examining the pendant, and like in SH 1, the in-game hints only vaguely reference its use.
- Silent Hill 1: To get the Good+ ending, you must collect the red liquid(later revealed to be Aglaophotis, a form of Applied Phlebotinum) from the broken vial in a plastic bottle, then, during the fight with the Puppet Cybil, throw it on her to exorcise the demonic parasite from her. The few in-game hints only remotely reference this substance's power, and not until it's too late to save Cybil. Since it's unlikely a player would get the Good+ ending on their first playthough without a guide, and Cybil is absent from later games, the regular Good ending, where she is killed, is considered by many to be canon.
- Also, the astrological sign puzzle in the Nowhere dimension was, in the beta, solved by putting the signs in numerical order, which the strategy guide showed, but in the final version, they changed it to counting the number of appendages of the animals. Guide dang it!.
- Many Mega Man bosses are weak to a particular weapon. The catch? You're not told the weakness, and new weapons are only acquired through beating bosses, so you have to beat the bosses in a particular order unless you want a (unnecessary) Self Imposed Challenge. And then in Mega Man 9, the first area of Dr. Wily's fortress has a room with three horizontal tubes that shoot instant-kill lava from one side of the screen to the other, and you need to get from bottom to top. You'll need to figure out how to get up there, and without having really fast reflexes, how would you guess that using Concrete Shot on a lava beam freezes it temporarily, making it safe to step on?
- There is an alternate way past said trap in Mega Man 9, but the timing is rather precise, and most players find the method outlined above first.
- How would I know that? I watched the trailer.
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Final level. NUFF said . . .
- Jumping into the hole is a weird idea too.
- Getting access to many of the secret areas from Painkiller are Guide Dang It moments. Requiring taking a Leap Of Faith or exploiting the jump physics to reach otherwise unreachable areas, with the game not giving you any hints about where and when to do either to reach a secret area. Most times its better to leave well enough alone except to unlock the final difficulty requires earning collectable card powerups for meeting specific requirements when completing a level. Some levels require either finding all secret areas, or looting the contents of said secret areas to meet the card requirements. The people on Game Faqs have gone to great lenghs to find every secret in the game, however for the rest of us, as Yahtzee put it in his review of Painkiller "If more than a minute goes by without a dude and a murder you're not playing it right."
- Wario Master Of Disguise. In the final level you come across a room with a blue door, some green mushrooms, and a blue mushroom. To open the blue door you have to turn it green, by stepping on all of the green mushrooms. The blue mushroom is not required and only serves to hinder you, by un-pressing all of the green mushrooms. But there's nothing to suggest this is the case. (And since you don't have to press the green mushrooms in order, you just have to have them all pressed, there's no real reason for that blue mushroom to even be that.) Even worse is when you realize that one of the green mushrooms is invisible and you need Genius Wario to step on it. Again, there's nothing to suggest this would be the case. But hey, at least they only make you do that puzzle in the one room. Oh, wait, no. It's in every room.
- Astro Boy: Omega Factor makes getting to the end of the game much harder than it has to be. To begin, if you skip the credits after playing through the first go-round of the game, you miss one of the entries in the Omega Factor and screw yourself out of a power-up. One key event requires you to jet straight up four times (impossible without having maxed out your Jets or a full EX stock) to reach a hidden character, with no hint that there's anything up there. Another one requires you to destroy a specific door on a background object that gives no indication it's anything other than scenery (in an area filled with rolling statues that kill in a single hit), and another one necessitates you going left at the very start of the stage and destroying a trash can - in a stage that scrolls right, thus giving you no apparent reason to go left. Having maxed-out Sensors only partially helps, because Astro Boy will declare he senses a hidden character but doesn't tell you anything about how to find them.
- Fantastic game, but the order you have to go through the levels is also very unintuitive. You have to backtrack to several levels, upon which certain plot elements will resolve themselves. Those who skip the cutscenes (with their minor clues) are screwed.
- Another too-cleverly hidden character (needed to continue the plot) is hidden behind a wall in an elevator scene. So once you miss him, you have to start the stage over again. And again, there's no hint to his location, you just have to know it. Although it's not that hard to access him accidentally.
- And one This Troper forgot on first listing this entry: once you complete the first playthrough, in order to open up Dr. Tenma's house, you have to play through the tutorial again, so that Astro can confront Dr. O'Shay. The problem here is that the game discourages you from doing this, because Dr. O'Shay mocks you by wondering if you've forgotten the basic controls.
- Unlocking Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat Deception is next to impossible to do accidentally. In order to unlock him, you must be in a specific realm, during a specific hour on a specific day of the month, behind a tent that you seemingly never have any other reason to go to after you beat Jade. Even worse, the game gives you no indication that it's even possible to go around the tent. His alternate outfit is unlocked in very similar fashion, but fortunately in its case it is there for longer than an hour, lies in a more obvious location, and appears once a week instead of once a month.
Adventure
- The Maze on Mars in The Journeyman Project. You have a limited oxygen supply, making the Left-Hand Rule out of the question, and there's nothing in-game that hints at the path(unlike The Seventh Guest). So the only way to solve it is to painstakingly map the maze, or consult the hint sheet included with the game(god help you if it got lost).
- Too many to count in the original Alone In The Dark trilogy, as well as The New Nightmare, but some examples from the first game:
You find a fake book in Jeremy's study, which seems useless at first. Turns out you have to put it in an almost unnoticeable niche in one of the bookshelves in the library, to access a secret room that contains a crucial item. God knows who would figure this out on their own.
After you grab the arrows from the planter, the way back into the ballroom is blocked by a horde of literal Demonic Spiders. The other way in is guarded by a zombie pirate, which at first seemed invincible to this troper.
Also Pregzt, the final boss, what in the game hints at burning him with the lamp?
- The book found in the attic talks about using shields as mirrors to reflect Medusa's gaze of death. This just barely hints at the solution for the demons blocking the stairway. And to obtain the mirrors, you have to unlock the dresser using a key hidden inside a vase, which you have to throw and break to obtain said key.
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