Trial And Error Gameplay - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Curse You Sierra

"A Gygaxian dungeon is like the world's most fucked up game show. Behind door number one: INSTANT DEATH! Behind door number 2: A magic crown! Behind door number 3: ten pounds of sugar being guarded by six giant KILLER BEES!"

SteveD, RPGnet forums

A popular variety of Fake Difficulty, Trial And Error Gameplay is what happens when a game developer cannot think of a better method to punish a player's incorrect action than to kill his character off, end the mission in failure, or otherwise penalize him in some way. And, in the most egregious manner possible, this occurs whether or not it was readily apparent that it was a bad move at all. In the end, the only thing the player can do about it is reload the area and/or savepoint, play through that section again, and remember not to do that next time. In essence, Trial And Error Gameplay is whenever it is necessary for the player to fail before realizing what is necessary to succeed.

This is not limited to Nintendo Hard games. It does not necessarily result from Everything Trying To Kill You. Even ordinary games can abuse the non-permanence of death.

Take heart. As annoying as this trope can be, it's far better than the game becoming Unwinnable.

Ron Gilbert of LucasArts fame rants about this trend here

. LucasArts, it should be noted, became so opposed toward this trope in their adventure games that they often erred on the side of deathlessness. Others who've decried the trend include this IGN blogger

and Shamus Young

(of DM Of The Rings fame).

Also known as Curse You Sierra, a lament directed toward the company most prone to putting such puzzles in their games. Save early, save often, and don't overwrite saves.

Examples

3D Action Games

The Half Quake series of Half Life mods is full of this, along with at least one instance of Unwinnable. This is quite bluntly lampshaded in the first of them with the Hazard Course being replaced with an object lesson in sadism, and justified by the game being intended to punish the player character, torturing and eventually killing them.
This is a complaint sometimes leveled at Stealth Based Games, such as Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell. Getting through an area undetected may require several specific actions performed consecutively, which can often only be discovered through trial-and-error.
- Fortunately, most of these (especially first person stealth games) allow you to go on a cathartic orgy of violent rampage whenever you blow your cover. Unacceptable for special playthroughs (like MGS4's famous Big Boss Run), but if you're just trying to clear the game, this usually works as a backup.
Defcon 5 invokes this trope due to massive use of Guide Dang It; you're plopped down in the game's setting (a Mars colony ready to be opened) with no idea of what you're supposed to do, a map that only lets you cover your immediate area, and the requirement of picking up data pads scattered around the compound for items and info on your next mission (which are so vague you practically need a strategy guide to make heads or tails of).
The Tomb Raider series dips in and out of this trope a lot, even between levels; some levels have many dangerous traps but are fair as long as you don't blindly run into everything (or show some haste when you do) and pay a modicum of attention to the surroundings, while others spring fatal (or at least very damaging) traps that are near-unavoidable with very little warning. TR 3 is probably the peak of this, with some levels having a seemingly sadistic desire to throw death-traps at you around every corner (the limited save system if you are on the PlayStation version also doesn't help).
At the Legendary difficulty level of Halo 2, the Jackal snipers kill you in a single shot and are surprisingly accurate. Thus you are usually not aware of them until you have been killed. The best strategy for dealing with them involves memorising the places they appear in the level...

Adventure Games

As mentioned above, almost every Sierra adventure game ever made.
- The developers of the Space Quest series have said that they adopted Have A Nice Death messages as a response to this trope. After all, they reasoned, if you're going to die a lot, you might as well get a laugh out of it.
- A seasoned player of Sierra adventure games will be ready to save at every opportunity while playing the first Gabriel Knight game, until realizing that your character won't die no matter how haplessly he stumbles into secret voodoo conspiracies. That is, up until about the fifth day, after they've successfully thrown you off.
- Lucasarts, however, thanks to being unable to die, just has Guide Dang It elements.
  - To be fair, numerous Lucasarts adventures, like Monkey Island, have ways to die, but they're so unlikely that they qualify as Easter Eggs.
ICOM adventure games such as Shadowgate, Deja Vu and Uninvited are also prone to this. It's somewhat mitigated by restarting the game one screen back.
The Darkseed games, although those are more susceptible to Unwinnable issues than is normal for this trope.
Infocom tends to do this a lot as well.
- Their take on Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy is particularly blatant, whether due to "follow the script" sequences that punish errors, or things as arbitrary as not giving a sandwich to a dog near the beginning of the game.
Played with in Star Trek: Borg, in which the process of dying and "reloading" actually occurs in-game, courtesy of Q. Completing the game requires making one particular "wrong" choice, dying, "reloading", making a different choice (which was previously just as fatal as the "wrong" choice) and having your character use the knowledge he'd acquired in his previous try to solve the next puzzle.
Waxworks and the Elvira games are notorious for this kind of game play. The players are often given little clue as to how to solve some of the puzzles, with all sorts of deathtraps from nowhere, and too many ways to render the games unwinnable.
One of Ron Gilbert's complaints in the rant linked above, time limits, is played straight in RAMA. Although your explorations of the titular ship have hitherto been fairly leisurely and forgiving in constraints of time, and death has been a minor setback-a return to a point shortly prior to your death after a few remarks from Arthur C. Clarke that basically boil down to "We put this here, it's pretty apparently dangerous, you screwed with it anyway, try to be more careful in the future". Even after you've crossed the frozen sea and entered the city, things have been undemanding at worst. Through all this your play has been trial-and-error gameplay, but it's justified because you're a scientist studying this ship and you know about as much about it as any other character. Then, the Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal happens and you have six real-time hours to solve the problem...while you're standing still. When you move, the game deducts a couple of minutes from this timer to simulate the time it takes for movement. Same for performing an action. So you have significantly less than six hours to get the fuck off the ship, to do it you have to go to a completely new area of the ship, and you're so severely limited for time that the only way to get out in anything like a reasonable number of tries is with guide in hand. Thanks a lot, you bastards.
Demonophobia consists of trial and error gameplay in the truest sense of the word. Roughly half of the game consists of trying things out to see if they will kill you — the other half consists of trying not to die now that you know what ends up killing you. Given the incredibly graphic scenes of death and grievous injury to young female lead character, the developer is quite likely literally sadistic.
The Immortal is practically a Gygaxian dungeon in 3D video game form.
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney can fall under this if you are totally clueless during a cross examination. Some testimonies are so well said or near air tight in what seems to be truth that players who can't spot a contradiction will literally present every evidence on every part of a testimony until they get it right. Cue in lots of Save Scumming, Try Everything, and for some players, Guide Mother Funking Dang It.
While the FMV-heavy Dragon's Lair did not make use of this trope (if you died, it was because you missed the visible signal), at least one computer version does. There were numerous sequences where Dirk had to react to dangers at the right time, and these were not telegraphed. Memorization was necessary in the end.
- Even more oddly, the cartoon invoked this trope. During a commercial break, the viewer was asked to choose Dirk's next move. When the show came back, it was revealed whether or not each choice resulted in his death. (Admittedly, this is a clever way of invoking the beautiful death animations from the game.)

Driving Games

In the very first race of Midnight Club, there is absolutely no way to tell that you need to use a certain rock as a ramp to reach the finish point. The only way to possibly discover this is to watch one of the computer racers do it, which by definition means placing 2nd or worst. Of course, you need to place 1st in order to proceed in the game, so you must fail the mission at least once just to see how it's done.
- Midnight Club 2 is even worse, stretching this trope throughout the entire game in very annoying ways. Possibly the best example is in the third race of the game where the player spends the majority of it racing along the long, wide open highway, traveling at top speed. Near the end of the race the player must navigate an off-ramp while still going full-throttle, and of course a semi truck will pull right in front of you and block your path when you get close. The only way to get through unscathed is to drive precisely between the gap in the truck's wheels. This troper remembers having to repeat that race over and over because the AI would often mindlessly crash into the truck and knock it over, making it impossible to get past the off-ramp part without taking a header into something. Add to this the need to memorize the precise route needed to win the race. The game gives the player almost no indication of which path to take, with an overhead arrow pointing directly at the next checkpoint, regardless of the actual layout of the streets. Blindly following the arrow will inevitably cause a player to crash into buildings or concrete dividers.
In the dragster wheelie competition in Need for Speed Pro Street some of the cars cannot pull a wheelie no matter how many upgrades you buy. Some of the cars are much easier to use for drifting too, and the game doesn't give many clues about what to buy. It's not a massive problem since the wheelie competition only comes along when the player will probably have enough credits to buy the 'right' car. But it's irritating to spend ages tinkering with car set-up and driving style in a vain attempt to get the nose of a Supra or RX-7 to lift when the game should mention somewhere that it's a waste of time.

Horror Games

In Alone In The Dark 1, there are two "evil books" in the library's secret room(which is a Guide Dang It to find). The first, "Fragments of the Book of Abdul", hurts you, while the second, "De Vermis Mysteriis", instantly kills you if you so much as look at the front page. Unless, that is, you are standing on the pentagram symbol in the room, Guide Dang It.
- If you accidentally bump into a ghost(touching the one by the fireplace is almost certain on the first try), they come to life as a nightmare-fueling spinning pillar of psychedelic death that chases you around the house until it kills you.
- Another unavoidable first time death occurs in the hallway leading to the library, the woodsman painting starts throwing axes at you. Further down the hallway, a painting of an Indian starts shooting arrows that home in on you, at which point death is inevitable. The player learns the hard way to put the Old Indian Cover on the woodsman painting, and to shoot the Indian painting with the bow and arrows.
Fear Effect, a Playstation Survival Horror game, embodies this to a tee. Given the mechanics of the health system (and the really arbitrary way of healing yourself), anything you try, be it solving a puzzle or duking it out with enemies, will usually result in a "special" death scene (which ranges from being shot to death, immolated, asphyxiation, and other bizarre ways to die). Many, many, times. It stops being funny when this happens 10 times in a row.
- See some of the many deaths here — [1]
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has a scene (pretty directly lifted from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth) where you have to escape from some Innsmouth goons. There is one, and only one, correct escape route, and it is not very obvious. Taking a wrong turn will usually get your (unarmed) character gunned down.
- Gunned down? More like hacked to pieces with an axe. God, I hate that part.
- There's also a sequence (which may be the same one, it's pretty vague) where if you go to sleep without performing a specific action, you don't wake up because you're dead. If you perform the action, you'll wake up, and almost immediately be killed because you didn't perform another action. And so on. Ad nauseum.
  - It's an earlier part of the same one, if it's what I think you're talking about. However, to be fair, this is actually pretty obvious. the series of actions is making sure to lock every door leading into your hotel room... after you're earlier shown in hallucinatory premonitions that the hotel owner is a murderous madman.

Literature

Depending on how charitable, fair, or even consistent the writer is feeling, this can be the only possible way to win at a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Fortunately, it's not hard to flip back to the previous page.
- This Troper always made it through unscathed by avoiding any choices that seemed cool or heroic, it never fails. Let's say page 68 has you stand up and fend off an attacker, while page 43 has you wet your pants and run away; go to page 43 immediately if you want to survive.
  - This Troper would, if she still had it, be happy to give you the one she once had which didn't seem to have a good end - I did give up in despair after being killed in the upteenth weird way and actually flick through to reassure myself there was one. There didn't seem to be.

Role Playing Games

Variation: Pokemon Emerald features an obstacle course where you must go through a series of rooms, choosing one of three corridors to go down from each room to the next. They all lead to the exit eventually, but the corridors can contain random battles, trainer battles, random status effects, random healing, and... nothing. The catch is, you can't save. You just have to keep going, or quit and not get the rewards for completing it.
- Don't you mean the Battle Pike where it's mostly about luck. It's actually the easiest of all the Battle Frontier facilities.

Side-Scrollers

Battletoads is much, much easier once you've memorized every obstacle instead of needing to react to everything as it comes.
- Up to avoid the the lower barrier, down to avoid the upper barrier, jump the low wall, up, up, down, down, jump, down, up, down, crash into the lower wall for the warp point! This troper hasn't played the game in years, and can still vaguely remember the sequence for that third level horror show.
The C64 shoot-em-up Delta is pretty much the embodiment of this trope. Enemy waves will quickly scroll across the screen, usually before the player can hope to kill them with their pea-shooter of a gun, and will inevitably destroy the One Hit Point Wonder player ship. This Troper remembers a post on a C64 forum that described it as an "interactive memory test disguised as a game".
Mega Man X5 had a motor-bike stage which is basically all trial and error. What makes this noteworthy, though, is that this stage and this stage alone requires the player to jump while the "Ready!" stage start animation is still playing. In all other stages, the player can't move while the animation is playing. The only way to realize that this stage is special is by dying once. The rest of the level is also an effort in trial and error, as you're often required to make decisions (upper path or lower path?) with no way of knowing what's ahead.
- Worse, in this troopers opinion, is the first of the final 3 levels. After somewhat of an easy romp, you encounter 1 hit death green lasers. That shoot from the wall and move insanely fast. Truly a painful task in memorization.
- You're meant to freeze them with Dark Hold. However, it's possible to run out of Dark Hold ammo, or enter the level before getting Dark Hold.
The whole of Mega Man X6. Specific portions of levels are simply completely impassable if your character can't double jump or air dash.
Mega Man 9 also had its "you will die with no warning" moments. On passage in Plug Man's stage looks safe, until a block suddenly materializes in its entrance, sending anyone trying to jump into it to the Spikes Of Doom below. One set of spikes in Splash Woman's stage cannot be seen until you've take the jump, and if you're now aimed for them, the games Jump Physics aren't enough to let you steer away in time.

Tabletop Games

As displayed in the page quote, Tabletop Games players have a term for a dungeon with particularly random ways to inflict instant death: Gygaxian. One of the most famous modules of this type is the Tomb of Horrors. People who survived that module largely did so by searching everything for traps, and sending Mooks to open every door in the dungeon. (It should be noted that it takes more effort to roll up a new character than to load a saved game.)

Other

Particularly sadistic fanmade platformers tend to punish the player for jumping or running to the wrong spot, with no clue that it was in fact dangerous beforehand. Popular examples include I Wanna Be The Guy, La Mulana's Hell Temple, Syoban/Shobon Action, and a large number of ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros games. (Hey, you've gotta make them hard for the people who use savestates!) In these platformers, Jump Physics is often the only way to protect yourself from things that prefer to kill you just when you've launched yourself into the air. Even then, you'll probably hit your head on an invisible block or something. (Remember, kiddies: invisible blocks are usually not an ingenious way of invoking Fake Difficulty, it'll only invoke the wrath of anyone playing your romhack.)
Some MUDs, a form of text-based proto-MMO popular in the '80s and '90s, had "deathtraps" — rooms which killed your character instantly upon entering them and deleted all your equipment. The only reasonable way to avoid this was to use a spell or ability that lets you see what's in neighboring rooms and check every single one before entering. Understandably, some MUDs removed deathtraps to avoid driving players insane.
Ragnarok (also called Valhalla) is a surprisingly expansive roguelike game, with an insanely high number of ways to die or screw up royally. While there are a minimum of in-game warnings (don't eat speckled mushrooms, the gods can't be killed, etc.), most of the time, it will be down to player experience to determine things like turning into a plant is near-instant death, to survive Niflheim, you need to be cold resistant, sentinel gaze attacks are incredibly dangerous, petrification resistance is a very good idea, randomly mixing potions at low levels (and low HP) is risky...
- In fact, this is incredibly common in almost all roguelikes; for example, in Nethack, by the time you've learned not to eat kobold corpses, not to drink unidentified potions, not to attack floating eyes in melee, not to read unidentified scrolls, not to kick sinks at a low level, not to put on unidentified armor or weapons unless it's not cursed or you can uncurse it, not to drink from fountains indiscriminately, not to attack acid blobs with valuable weapons, not to combine potions, not to go downstairs burdened, not to pray too often, not to eat old corpses, not to eat your own race, and not to eat pets, you might be able to live long enough to learn not to attack a cockatrice in melee, not to pick up a cockatrice corpse barehanded, not to walk over cockatrice corpses while blind and barehanded, not to attack cockatrices while polymorphed, and a lot, lot more.
  - There are at least 200 known unique ways of dying in Nethack.
  - See here for another list of things not to do in Nethack.
Minesweeper. Experts can talk about probability management all they like, but now and again it'll come down to something like 1 mine, with only a few unclicked squares left, around a 1 square, with no other numbered squares around to help figure out which is the one mine.
The legendary Cinematic-Platformer-cum- Survival Horror game Another World, AKA Out of this World, combines this sort of level design with Everything Trying To Kill You, and, to add insult to injury, makes your character a One Hit Point Wonder. Fortunately, Eric Chahi, the game's designer, acknowledged making one of the most Nintendo Hard games of his time, and provided unlimited continues, somewhat easing the players' frustration.
Many of the newer Sonic The Hedgehog 2-D games are like this. Try running full speed ahead (the whole point of the damn series) only to run into an enemy as a result of having mere milliseconds to react to it once it appears.
- The Rushes had the boost, which threw this out of the way. But Sonic Unleashed is plauged with this, enemies are a minor annoyance at most. Nintendo Hard, anyone?
If you've played the SNES game The Lost Vikings, you know this one so well. As awesome as the game is, if you mess up even ONCE, you are DOOMED to repeat the level, almost inevitably. Use the wrong viking? Level is unwinnable. Go down the wrong pit? Level is unwinnable. One of the vikings dies? Level is unwinnable. At least you get an unlimited amount of retries on the level, but this troper, in over 10 years of playing the game, has never managed to beat one of the levels because he always messes up...
Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 's Ghost Battle mode. When you select a ghost to battle, you are only told the starting ramp, and not what route the ghost take, which gets annoying if, say, you select a ghost that starts on one of the faster routes (i.e. Wangan or Yokohane), and thus put all your tuning points into power and leave nothing for handling, but the race ends on the curvier C1 loop and you keep crashing into walls because your car has no handling whatsoever. The only way to know the route for sure is to have already battled the ghost or watch someone else race it.
The House of the Dead series loves doing this by throwing zombies in mid-attack at you, though this doesn't happen in House of the Dead 4. And don't get me started with when civilians, who take off lives if shot, suddenly appear.
This is the point of The Impossible Quiz. WRONG! -1 LIFE
- While we're talking about flash games, lets not forget The Unfair Platformer!
A Robot Chicken sketch takes this idea and applies to to a game show. Contestants had to avoid a series of death traps based solely on their ability to remember what happened to all the previous ones. (The first contestant never had a chance)
Chips Challenge has several of these, mostly involving Frictionless Ice. Level 140, ICEDEATH, relies on guessing which direction to take at every point on the ice of which typically only one of the four directions leads to safe ground, while the other three lead to a watery grave. Of course, you could always map the stage out manually.

Trauma Inn

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