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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.
  • Many examples in the Resident Evil series, especially the first game and its remake.
  • Many of the Stray Beads in the PS2/Wii game, Okami are like this.
  • The creators of Kingdom Of Loathing have stated that they would be surprised if anyone has beaten the game without resorting to spoiler information.
  • In a parody of the Guide Dang It puzzles that infested the genre at the time (and, well, the series itself also), one of the puzzles in Space Quest 4 required the player to find (in game) the "Space Quest 4 Hint Book" and look up the solution - that single solution being the only actually useful hint in the book. The rest either referenced outlandish events that weren't in the game, gave some smartass one liners or parodied hint books themselves. You can find a transcript of the book's contents here (the genuine hint is the one about the timepod).
    • There is actually another useful hint - the "Super Computer" code hint is potentially useful at the end of the game. But, in order to take advantage of it, you have to have found the laptop (near the start of the game...), taken the battery from the energizer bunny (also near the start) and bought the correct plug adapter, thus making it pretty much a Guide Dang It moment itself.
      • Some really big Guide Dang Its: the Laser Hallway puzzle in the Super Computer dome. The only in-game hint is that the high-scores of the Ms. Astro Chicken arcade game happen to correspond to the values you need to set in the control panel, but how would a gamer figure that out by themselves? And there's the sewer slime that's unlikely one would think could be scooped up with the jar, a mission-critical item later in the game, and the Energizer Bunny, which looks unimportant, but contains another mission-critical object, the battery for the Pocketpal(and you have to examine it in your inventory to find the battery). So if you missed any of these(they are Lost Forever), you will find out near the end of the game that you are screwed over and can't complete the game.
    • In Space Quest II, you need to get a whistle by putting an order form(which you don't even know you have from the beginning unless you check your inventory) in a mailbox that looks more like a Star Wars robot. To cross the swamp you need to pick berries from an ordinary-looking bush (you see an alien doing something there but you don't know what), then rub them on yourself(also vaguely shown by the alien). Then in the deep area you need to HOLD BREATH before DIVE(ing) to get to the cavern with the gem. when you go down the chute to the bottom of the canyon(which requires the aforementioned gem), the aliens tell you to "say the word" or they will kill you. Turns out you just type THE WORD. When you enter the dark maze, you find that "you can't maneuver with the gem in your hand", and you need a leap of intuition to know to PUT GEM IN MOUTH. After the maze, in a room that seems to be just another dead end, you need to blow the whistle to call the Labion Terror Beast, who then opens up a passage for you. This troper got past him by going to another screen and thus making him disappear, but nowhere in-game was it hinted you could also distract him by throwing him the seemingly useless puzzle. God help you if you descended into the canyon without the whistle or the gem, because by then they're Lost Forever.
      • Space Quest III avoided the Unwinnable situations, but had even worse Guide Dang Its, most notoriously at the beginning of the game. The shuttle's computer shows a picture of a Warp Motivator which is right at the starting room, but you can't pick it up yourself. You need to use the claw on the grabber trolley(another guide dang it) to pick it up and drop it in the hole in the shuttle. In fact, to get into the shuttle itself, you need to grab the seemingly immovable ladder that is the exit from the rat's den!(which is accessed by entering the eye of the robot head, another guide dang it) BTW, the generator for the shuttle is hidden out of sight in said room. All you see is a wire connecting several lamps, no hints that it leads to the generator behind a pillar. Then you need to grab a set of insignificant looking wires from the wall of a hallway. After that, a rat will come and steal both wires and generator, and it appears they are Lost Forever. They're both back down in the same location in the rat's nest(the guide this troper referenced forgot to tell the wires were there too). If you go back down there without the ladder, though, it's Game Over(better than Unwinnable). Guide dang it, guide dang it, guide dang it!
  • In the original Colossal Cave Adventure, the final point could be obtained only by dropping a magazine on the floor in a particular room. In these days before guides, it was eventually discovered using a decompiler.
    • From the same game:
    >KILL DRAGON
    With what? Your bare hands?
    YES.
    Congratulations! You've just killed a dragon with your bare hands!
  • Try playing any Sierra game of the text-parser era without a hintbook, much less get a perfect score. Or something this side of Conquest of the Longbow without a hintbook. Of course Sierra had its own 900 number for hints, so if you wanted you could get mysterious charges on your parents' phone bill and tell them it was all in the interest of completing more games. Though there were a couple fake hints such as activating the Pizza shrine in Quest for Glory IV. This editor spent more than the price of the game on that silly 900-hint line.
  • This Irregular Webcomic strip cites a moment (among many) from Kings Quest V - a cat chases a rat across the screen early in the game. You are supposed to throw a boot at the cat (a boot that can only be found in an arbitrary part of the desert far to the west) so the rat can escape. What's that? You didn't? Well, the game is Unwinnable from that point on. As seen in the page for Unwinnable, Sierra is famous for that.
    • Kings Quest I. Ifnkovhgroghprm. Ifnkovhgroghprm.
      • For those who aren't familiar with Ifnkovhgroghprm, it's the solution to a puzzle in which a gnome asks Graham to guess his name. The whole scene is reminiscent of the fairytale Rumplestiltskien, and if you're not familiar with it the puzzle is even more of a Guide Dang It, but that's not his name. The only hint is in an otherwise unrelated area, which contains a note that says "Sometimes it is wise to think backwards". Even if you do make the connection between the note and the puzzle, Nikstlitselpmur is not his name either. What you're supposed to do is turn the alphabet backwards, mapping a onto z, b onto y, and so on up to m onto n. This will give you the gnome's name, Ifnkovhgroghprm. This one was so bad that when Sierra released an updated version a few years later, Nikstlitselpmur was an acceptable solution.
  • Who forgot Myst? One example of this: Getting out of the Mechanical Age requires you to rotate the main area of the age to get to two small islands that have part of the password leading out. The problem? There was a bug in the game when it was first released that prevented the area from rotating towards one of the islands. A patch was later released to fix this, but until then players had to use the guide to find out what the solution was.
    • Another one was the sound puzzle in the Selenitic Age. The water fountain and its microphone, as well as the blue page, are hidden in an area accessible only by a nearly invisible pathway off the main path. No wonder you can't find the water sound on the radio periscope device that tells you which order to play the sounds in, so you end up resorting to a guide or trial and error to find the solution.
    • And what about the ONE puzzle in the game which requires specific timing? (Exiting the elevator BEFORE the door closes so that it goes up by itself allowing you to walk under.) What a stupid puzzle!
    • The sequel, Riven contains a more egregious one in the form of the "Animals Puzzle", which precious few gamers can honestly claim to have solved without a walkthrough. It was inconsistent about the way it doled out information. But the real problem wasn't coming up with the solution; that was difficult but not entirely impossible. The real problem was that, once you knew the right animals in the right order, the "keypad" you had to enter them into was not well-labeled, and it took forever to try to enter one particular permutation. Imagine a 10-digit keypad that actually has 20 keys, but some of the digits 0-9 are repeated. Except that, even though it looks like there are three 9's, only one of them is the real 9, and the others are fake even though they look very much like a 9. And the only way to tell which is real is to enter all of the permutations of the correct code. And it takes 30 seconds to enter a 5-digit number.
      • This troper found the marble grid puzzle harder. Try finding the dome of Book Assembly Island.
      • In addition, you don't know what symbol the fifth island is(you have to solve the puzzle to reach it; catch 22 again), and the dome viewer on Survey Island is broken, so you can't clearly see the color symbol. And one of the marbles isn't used for any of the islands. So it becomes a game of trial and error.
    • The ending to the fan game D'ni Legacy. The player cannot know that the whole world of Amerak has fallen apart, leaving only airless asteroids, or that you need to take that key to Elanif if you don't want to be trapped.
  • On top of being one of the shining examples of Nintendo Hard, Solomon's Key was extremely fond of this trope. Not only does each group of levels have a secret level, each of those levels had a secret item that could only be found by making a brick and then destroying it in a certain spot of said room. There is never any indication as to which spot this might be. Beyond that, there are three extra rooms that are only accessible if you managed to find all twelve previous secret rooms and all twelve of Solomon's Seals. Not only is this never mentioned, but nobody even published a guide for the game. Nothing, and I swear nothing, is as bad as a Guide Dang It game that never gets a guide. Most gamers didn't even know of half of these hidden items until the advent of GameFAQs.
  • Many puzzles in the Tomb Raider series, particularly the Puzzle Boss fights.
  • The final puzzle in the game System's Twilight is near-impossible, even with the hints that the author has scattered throughout the game, unless one makes a very big leap of intuition. To add insult to injury, all of the guides that have been released will only obliquely reference the solution (because the puzzle is so good).
  • In Gakuensai no Oujisama, one of the Prince Of Tennis dating sims, some of the guys are horribly hard to hook up with. Genichirou Sanada is actually so hard to date that he's been nicknamed "Bastardchirou Sanada" by some players. And about some guys who are supposed to be easier catches, like Choutarou Ohtori and Takeshi Momoshiro... well, talk to another male at the wrong place and time, get caught by either of them, and watch your love meter completely go POOF out of jealousy. Oi.
  • Ghost in the Sheet, while funny (how many games start off by running you over with a bus?), features many Guide Dang It moments because what you can and can't muck around with isn't immediately apparent-this troper came to a complete standstill at one point because he had no idea that he could pick up a metal bar, and was further hampered by the fact that there was no obvious reason to sharpen it on the spinning, rubberless wheel of a suspended car; or rather, there was an obvious reason to do so, but no indication that doing so would accomplish this end. Funny game, but needs a little glowy aura around things you can pick up, and maybe some more NPCs hanging around to drop the occasional hint.
    • Even worse was an overly-convoluted puzzle that involved opening locker doors in a specific way, and a "No Smoking" sign that was actually a button you had to press! At least the titular Ghost didn't say this puzzle's solution was "obvious", like he did after inputting one of many numeric passcodes, this one which isn't stated out in the open and can only be figured out by determining a pattern out of previous codes found in a diary! And furthermore, how the hell are you supposed to figure out that you should electrify a bone in order to get a makeshift flute?! Granted, this was an amateur-made Adventure Game created by two people using the freeware Wintermute Engine, but you'd think they'd give more hints for these extremely-tough-even-for-an-adventure-game puzzles...
  • Example not directly related to the actual gameplay: Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love For Sail! included some graphics and dialogue that could be replaced at the player's whim, intended to allow players to place themselves physically in the game world. Sadly, the developers forgot to mention this feature in any of the game's documentation, and released the instructions through a patch later on.
  • Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic.
  • Somewhat a minor example: At one spot in Simon the Sorcerer (2?), you had to try wearing the dog to proceed. This troper cannot think a way of figuring this out except by trying each command with each item in the inventory.
  • The solution to a puzzle in The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is TO CLOSE THE DS. Not only non-intuitive but counter-intuitive, since normally you only do that to turn the dang thing off.
  • Trace Memory also features quite a lot of these. In order to get the perfect ending, you have to complete all possible tasks, and examine many objects around Blood Edward Island. However, you aren't given any hints to what these are, and I wasn't even aware some optional puzzles (such as clearing the rust off a plaque, or getting candies from the ship captain, and then exchanging them for a chocolate bar later in the game) until I read the guide. One particularly infuriating puzzle involves partially closing the DS so the screens reflect off each other, revealing the solution.
    • And of course, a lot of these take place outside in the first level, which you can't go back to after you've passed...One time I missed the perfect ending simply for failing to read the first sign you reach in the first level.
  • The first Discworld game was an egregious example of this. Most of the puzzles quasi-required you to have read the books to figure them out... Some even made little sense even when considered through an already Discworld-skewed logic. For example : to gain access to a secret society meeting, Rincewind needs a black robe. There is an NPC monk with a black robe. You'd think somehow interacting with him, perhaps Using Axe On Monk would do the trick. You sod. What you have to do is obviously go back in time through L-Space, put a frog in yesterday's yourself to mute the snoring so that you can catch a butterfly which, when used on a lamp (also yesterday) will cause a localized storm on the monk in the present. The monk will then vanish, but you'll find his robe on a clothesline in an alley. And no, there's not one bit of dialogue or hint towards this.
  • Super Mario Sunshine uses this trope in the form of blue coins, which 10 of them equals 1 shine in exchange with an NPC. While they are not needed to beat the game, it will drive 100% completionists batty as they will search every nook and cranny, squirt water at anything that moves or doesn't move, and do all this for EVERY LEVELS' EPISODE.
  • The falling floor tile puzzle in the chapel in The Seventh Guest stands out among all the puzzles in this game. You were supposed to find a path across the tiles by adding up groups of numbers. Unfortunately, these numbers were nowhere to be seen. In this troper's case, attempts to link the tile colours to different values bore no fruit, and eventually trial and error got there first. (The attic door lock puzzle and the dolls house windows puzzle in the attic also exhibited this trope, in this troper's opinion, but in these cases, trial and error got there fast.)
    • For this troper, it was the underground maze. All the corridors looked exactly the same, and the creepy voice asking "Feeling...lonely?" every time she reached a dead end was serious Nightmare Fuel.
      • The trick for that one is that it's a so-called "true" maze, composed entirely of contiguous walls, without any "free-floating" sections. If you hug one wall the whole time, you'll eventually get to the exit. If you specifically choose the left wall, which is often the one recommended in things discussing this property of mazes, you get there almost immediately, in fact.
      • Alternatively, you can find a map of the maze on the carpet of the room that is approximately above the kitchen. Then you only have to guess at which of the two entrances you start.
    • Hmm, if this troper remembers correctly, the falling floor tiles puzzle (in the chapel, right?) is "as easy as one, two, three" - you just had to cross in a number of steps evenly divisible by three. The doll house puzzle didn't exhibit a recognizable pattern even after being solved by trial and error, though.
  • The puzzles in Limbo of the Lost were the final nail on the coffin for this troper, as half the time they don't even begin to make sense. For example, early on in the game players are expected to put a worm into a flask of water to create tequila. Having never heard of such a recipe for intoxication, this troper went nearly mad with frustration after he read the walkthrough.
    • Even more egregious is the soul vial puzzle, where the player needs to fill an empty (green-tinted) vial with liquid to replace it with a vial containing a warrior's soul, which shines green in the vial. To do this, players are expected to fill the vial with water (which shines through as a blue colour, as opposed to clear as real-life water should) and mix some saffron into it to turn the water green (not that many players even know what saffron is or what it does in the first place, and those who do probably already know that saffron makes water yellow, not green). Or so this troper heard, since he's yet to even get past that level...
  • Point-and-click game KGB has the main character discover a clue leading him to a fishing boat about to leave town near the end of chapter two, but the game simply does not allow him to go to the docks unless he meets with an accomplice in the park and compares some rather unrelated information first - and said accomplice won't be in the park unless you talked to him earlier in the game and agreed on this meeting, even though there was no indication towards this being nessecary, and you even being told specifically NOT to contact him at that point by an ally you had no reason to distrust. The game has a few more such moments (including one where you need to be at a certain place at a certain time in order to see one of the villains drive off, letting you trail him to your next destination. The game never even remotely hints at what you're supposed to do at this point), but this one is the most game-breaking in that you know what you are supposed to do, but the game just won't let you actually do it before you've done something else you never knew you were supposed to have activated in the first place. The fact that you learn nothing important from this guy, and he never does anything particularly helpful after this point does not help the case.
  • Shadow of Memories (Shadow of Destiny in the US) has a bunch of them in the course of normal play, especially if you want to get the best endings: two or three conversation choices at different points in the game send you down different branches, which not only affects which ending you get, but also the backgrounds of the various characters! The game makes reference to the specific conversation choices being "important", but beyond that makes no mention as to WHY they're important. Then, of course, there's the problem of actually proceeding through the game, which, in later chapters, requires travelling to multiple time periods... Between that and trying to reconcile the various endings, a guide is definitely needed!!
    • A special mention goes out to the rope puzzle in Chapter... Seven? Not sure. Anyway, you're basically trying to avoid being pushed off a tower and killed. You're led to believe that the way to do it is to tie a rope to the tower railing so that you can grab onto it and, indeed, there is a rope about halfway up the tower that you can pick up and use with the railing. However, if you do this, the rope will break after you grab it and you will fall to your death. It turns out that the rope is too old and you need to travel back in time to when it was new There is one clue to this, but it is subtle and easily missed. This troper only knows one person who solved the puzzle without replaying the level, and she had previously told that person the solution. Fortunately, if you fail to solve the puzzle and get killed, you will be flat out told what you did wrong before you replay.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy adventure game. Ye gods. Not only are most of the clues found in the literal in-game "guide," but there's no index on the thing, so you have to keep guessing searches. How else are you going to figure out that the Brownian motion is used to power the improbability drive? But even this won't help you if, say, you forgot to feed a cheese sandwich to a small dog at the very beginning of the game or didn't pick up the screwdriver on your bedroom table. This game has been known to make grown men cry at the mere mention of the phrase "Babel Fish." And God Guide help you if you haven't read the book or are otherwise unfamiliar with the Hitchhiker's Guide story...
    • At some points, being overly familiar with the book will make things worse. If by some miracle you managed to guess that the dog was the one in the book, and so would later eat the microscopic space fleet, you might think it best not to give it the cheese sandwich as this would protect the Earth from invasion by making sure it was still hungry. Wrong!
  • Runaway: A Road Adventure. The game had it's puzzles mostly grounded in realism up until a moment about halfway through: you need to use a WW 2 machine gun, but it's out of ammo. Solution? Load it with tubes of lipstick mixed with gunpowder. That's just the developers being mean.
  • The Hamtaro Game Boy and GBA games fall into this trope rather well. Especially with the one character saying he'll only give you This if you give him That. You LITERALLY have to find an item named "That" for him. That confused the hell out of this troper.
  • Professor Layton And The Curious Village has a few of these, but which ones they are tend to depend on the player. This troper was completely stumped by the one involving a chocolate bar stamped with "GECY NW"; he figured out the gist of the puzzle without even looking at the in-game hints, but was unable to even guess at what the first word decoded to. Turns out that the bites in the candy bar, mentioned nowhere in the hints and so seemingly insignificant that this troper didn't even notice them, were actually involved in the solution. (And judging from a Google search, said troper wasn't the only one stumped.)
    • Oh, and to make matters worse, this one's entirely the localization team's fault. Not only are the bite marks larger and clearer in the illustration in the Japanese version, but they're mentioned in the very first hint in that version. ::facepalm::
  • The interactive fiction game Jigsaw