Guide Dang It / Other Games

• The tie-in 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa game has achievements requiring you to use specific teams, but unless you were a master of World Cup trivia, there's no way to figure it out which ones from the information in game. For example the achievement "Second Trip, First Goal" requires you to qualify with a team that has made it to the World Cup in the past without scoring once, and then score. ^{Give up?}Trinidad & Tobago, China, Canada, Greece, Congo, and Indonesia.
• Action 52's manual isn't just vague—it's flat-out wrong about the kinds of games on the cartridge. Meong needed a guide just to describe how to play the game. Said information is lacking.
• Spoofed in this Adventurers! strip, which explains what the clue "GNWG" is supposed to mean. And also see this one, where the Ultimate Blacksmith complains that the party hasn't paid visit to his out-of-the-way place despite being mentioned in the Player's Guide.
• Backyard Slateboarding has coins scattered across every level, and collecting all of them unlocks a shirt. The medieval level Merry Olde Englandland places a few of these on towers that look completely inaccessible, which is particularly bad because things like this are usually accessed with hard-to-see power lines. How do you access these? You jump into completely normal looking rocks that teleport you to the towers. There is absolutely no hint in the entire game that you are supposed to do this, and it doesn't even work on all of the rocks! If you don't know about this, your only other option is to exploit a Good Bad Bug that allows you to infinitely jump in mid-air.
• The Battle Cats has one Cat that has an incredibly convoluted way of getting. To put it simply: you have to slide the door in the main menu. If you hear a cat meowing, that means you’re doing it right. Doing this in rapid succession will yield you the Flower Cat. Its True Form is even more obscure: it’s available on 2:22 PM on the 2 or 22 of each month for two minutes. Thankfully, the stage itself is one of the easiest in the game, consisting of nothing more than Firework Guys.
• Bemani managed to avoid this for 14 PS2 iterations of beatmania IIDX. Then DJ TROOPERS came along with their Unknown Targets secretly hidden in the extra stage system. There is no way you would figure out that in order to unlock all of the Unknown Target songs (which, unless you know exactly what's going on, seem to appear randomly inside the Military Splash extra stage system) you'll need to fulfill any 5 of 6 criteria:
  • Clear a song with a MAX COMBO of 573 (which itself is a reference lost to anyone outside Japan; it's a Goroawase Number for Konami, the creators of the series)
  • Clear a song with an exact multiple of 1/9 of the song's maximum possible "EX SCORE" (with fractions rounded up on songs with a note count that isn't a multiple of 9), but not 1/9. This means there are 8 possible scores on each song to fulfill this requirement, and you have to hit one of them on the nose, with most songs having a maximum possible EX Score of well over 1,000.
  • Clear a song with a Border Bonus (i.e. finish with exactly 80% on your gauge, without HARD or HAZARD turned on)
  • Clear 40 songs
  • Full Combo 10 songs
  • Hit a total of at least 1,000 notes with a GREAT judgment or better in the Scratch column.
  • The song that requires you to know to spell FOREVER using the first letters of songs' titles to unlock, and doing so dumps you into the song without even highlighting it. What? You're missing a letter? Back to the Unknown Target songs for you!
  • Another song can only be unlocked by playing the 2-kyu course in Dan'inintei mode.
• The arcade version of beatmania IIDX 19: Lincle has the Lincle Kingdom unlock system/minigame, which managed to make the aforementioned DJ TROOPERS CS look downright straightforward, at least until an update was rolled out to loosen the requirements. Prior to the update, players had to earn Extra Stage while fulfilling a certain condition, then repeat this for a total of 5 games to unlock one boss song on one difficulty. The condition depended on the area selected by the player at the start of each game, with each area corresponding to a different boss song to unlock and the only feedback the game gave was whether or not you fulfilled the criteria at the end of the game. The aforementioned update changed the requirement to just getting Extra Stage, no additional condition needed. The requirements for each area were:
  • All songs played must be from the same Version category folder.
  • All songs played must be by the same artist.
  • All songs played must have the same listed genre.^note To further complicate things, this one is particularly odd in its detection. The genres "BIG BEAT" and "BIGBEAT" count as identical, yet "HARD CORE" and "HARDCORE" count as different genres. Additionally, the songs 532nm and Snake Stick can't be used for this condition due to a glitch in the game.
  • All songs played must have the same number of characters (including spaces and punctuation) in their titles.
  • All songs played must have the same note count when rounded down to the nearest 100.
  • The title of each song picked after the first one must start with the last character of the previous song's title. Additionally, your Extra Stage song must also end with the same character as the first character of your first song's title.
    • Additionally, no repeats. You must use a different folder/artist/genre/title length/note count each time for it to count. For the final one, no making more than one chain starting with the same letter for the first song title.
• Then the sequel to Lincle, beatmania IIDX 20 tricoro has the Astran Lights, certain pairs of which are necessary to unlock certain boss songs.
  • To unlock the song Sync-Anthem:
    • Clear the first year of Step Up Mode, and:
    • Clear a song with an EX Score of 573
  • To unlock EΛΠIΣ ^note ELPIS:
    • Get 1000 DJ Points for a song on Normal, 2000 for a song on Hyper, and 3000 for a song on Another, and:
    • Clear a song on 5.73x speed
  • To unlock rumrum triplets:
    • Clear 5 sets of "Today's choices" (a themed set of songs that changes each day), and:
    • Set your Pacemaker percentage (target score) as 573% (which is particularly confusing because you can't actually do this, it will give a message and you'll have to pick a different value)
  • To unlock S!ck:
    • Clear one course in Dan'inintei mode, and:
    • Use Hidden+, Sudden+, Hid-Sud+ or Lift and cover the playing field to the value 573
  • To unlock CONCEPTUAL:
    • Play on 20 different difficulties across different versions, and:
    • On your first stage, select a song with a 5 remaining in the time; on the second stage, select with a 7 remaining, and on the final, with a 3 remaining
• Brain Dead 13 is another example of this. If you go into one of the rooms belonging to some foes, you can't seem to know the correct moves or timing of the moves without dying a few times over and over (good thing you have unlimited lives). And sometimes if you accidentally run away from any one of the bosses, you won't see the ending without restarting the game, rendering it Unwinnable by Design. Guide Dang It, indeed!
  • Though you can try and subvert this in the iOS port by turning on the move guide in the "Settings" screen, which allows you to quickly press the appropriate button as soon as it lights up in certain areas, helping you to guide Lance in the right direction, it still counts as a Guide Dang It! if you press a lit button that turns out to be a wrong move, especially in The Maze and in certain boss battles that make the game Unwinnable by Design if you run away from them.
• Any game by cactus that involves puzzles or multiple endings.
  • The Mondo series (which is approaching a third game) are large offenders, Mondo Medicals being the most egregious of the two released games.
  • Another notable offender is Stench Mechanics, which can lock you out of two endings if you get the suit before inhaling the purple stench. That combined with some counter-intuitive moments ( turning on EVERY LIGHT despite captain's orders, for instance) makes for some headaches.
• There is a rather baroque puzzle built into a scenario in the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu Sourcebook Secrets of Japan. Basically, the PCs need to find a secret door in a maze. The only real hint of the door's location the player characters can get requires them to 1) be able to understand Japanese writing (not a big obstacle, seeing as how at least one of the PCs or NPCs within the party are expected to Japanese), 2) pick up one of the cultists' prayer books earlier (not as big a snag, it is loot after all), 3) explore enough of the maze to map out its layout without hitting any traps or monsters (thankfully, there's only one or two of each in the entire maze) and 4) compare the map and the first letter of each line in the prayer book for some random reason, thus learning the right directions for getting to the secret door from the entrance. Mercifully, despite the game's reputation, the scenario outline nevertheless offers alternate ways for the PCs to find the secret door, such as pure luck, the guidance of NPCs or successful Idea and Spot Hidden rolls.
• City of Heroes originally gave very little information about the combat mechanics: power strengths were rated with adjectives such as "moderate" or "extreme", and none of the underlying math of the combat system was known. The lead developer did this because he felt that players would have a better experience if they developed an "intuitive" feel for the mechanics, rather than number-crunching. However, the underlying mechanics were severely counter-intuitive, with nonlinearities and threshold effects all over the place: for example, adding the "increased defense to all attacks" from Weave to the "almost completely invulnerable" from Granite Armor doubles a Stone Armor tank's survivability, but if you then add the "increase defense of yourself and all nearby teammates" from Maneuvers, you gain nothing; at the same time, adding Weave to a Fiery Aura tank produces almost no benefit. A great deal of effort by the playerbase went into reverse-engineering the combat mechanics and quantifying power strengths: for example, the reason why intuition says that Maneuvers is useless is that enemies always have a 5% chance of hitting you, and since Granite + Weave drops the odds to 5%, Maneuvers adds nothing; the reason why Weave is highly variable in strength is that it reduces your chance of being hit by 8%: for a Granite tank, this drops the odds of being hit from 13% to 5%, a 2.5x increase in the number of attacks that miss, while a Fiery Aura tank only sees an almost-imperceptible drop from 50% to 42%. Several years and one new lead developer later, City of Heroes provides more numerical data than almost any other MMO, but until then, a good build guide was considered essential to creating a strong character.
  • In the process, the players found some developer oversights that made particular powersets much stronger or weaker than others. For example, damage done by attacks is balanced by recharge time (any attack, considered in isolation, provides the same DPS as any other attack). However, once you've got enough attacks that you've always got one ready to use, the cast time of the attack determines how much overall DPS you're doing, but cast times were picked for "what makes a good-looking animation", rather than for game-balance reasons. Without a build guide that lists damage-per-animation-time numbers, you'd never figure out why your flashy Martial Arts attacks are taking much longer to defeat enemies than the quick strikes of the other guy's Claws attacks.
  • In the City of Villains, some of the mission arcs are unlocked by doing various things. Some of them are obvious (at least in hindsight), such as the Television contact being unlocked by the Master of the Airwaves exploration badge; some are inevitable (for example, it's almost impossible to reach Ambassador Kuhr'Rekt's level range without earning 25 badges). But some will never be found without a guide: who would ever think to lure ten ghost pirates to a certain unobtrusive piece of machinery before defeating them?
• Cookie Run: Kingdom has three examples from the Holiday Cake Shop minigame:
  • An unusual example: some characters, such as Snow Sugar Cookie, the Cloudcuckoolander Poison Mushroom Cookie, and the prideful Raspberry Cookie, give you the option to ask for further clarification on their cake orders, since their prompts are pretty vague. Doing this will get you a lower rating. That's right: if you wanted to get a perfect score on the first try without a guide, you'd have to ‘’guess’’ based on the prompt. However, you can reinvite them to the bakery if you don't get five hearts on the first try and make another cake.
  • Sometimes, a character will request "at least" a certain number of layers on their cake. Despite this, you have to give them exactly that number. No more, no fewer.
  • Figuring out the cake orders of nonverbal characters can be tricky. For example, you have to infer Candy Diver Cookie's request based on the unicode symbols in their dialogue.
• Some Room Escape Games veer into this trope when the game is not clear when trying to guide the player. This post demonstrates the flaws of the genre-codifying Crimson Room:
  • There is no indication that you need to click at a very specific spot just to get the camera to pan in a way that shows you an object of interest.
  • Items are small and can be easily missed in this low-resolution game.
  • Getting one of the rings involves repeatedly opening and closing the curtains. Again, there is no indication that clues the player towards this step.
• Every song in Dance Central has its own "finishing move," which the game neglects to teach you in the Break Down. Because of this, it is impossible to get 100% on a song your first time unless you look up said move on youtube or are really good at guessing what exactly the move will be based on the flashcards.
• The infamous song "Memories" in DanceDanceRevolution Extreme US. The unlocking method is so cryptic that even hackers were unable to figure it out, and Konami didn't release the code until 2 years after the game's release.
• DELTAZEAL:
  • The game has two Stage 3's and two Stage 5's. The game doesn't inform you that the variant chosen is determined by which vertical half of the screen your ship is on when the end-of-stage transition in Stages 2 and 4 takes place (left half takes you to Stage 3A/5A, right half to Stage 3B/5B).
  • Every stage has alternate routes that are unlocked by meeting certain conditions, the exact conditions of which are not stated and usually involve destroying all of a specific type of enemy.
• Dicey Dungeons: The Wisp Rule in the Bonus Round inflicts permanent Vanish on you, causing any duplicate dice to disappear, but it doesn't tell you that it affects the enemy as well.
• Dimahoo is infamous for its treasures system. In order to get the best scores, you need to amass a collection of treasures over the course of the game. There are dozens of unique treasures, including some that require shooting a boss with a specific level of Charged Attack, shooting a boss with at least a certain number of bombs left, shooting a boss with enough bombs and a specific level of charged shot, destroying certain enemies, destroying certain enemy parts, and so on and so forth. None of which are hinted at in-game! A comprehensive guide of tresure drops can be found here.
• Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition actually has this in an adventure. Normally, Hags are creatures that PCs should immediately kill, however in this particular adventure the Hag is the only one who can inform the PCs of where to find their goal. The problems with this: DnD 4E tends to breed trigger happy gamers, the hag goes down with ANY attack against her, and the adventure IMMEDIATELY ends when she dies. The DM is specifically forbidden from letting the PCs try searching for the goal themselves.
• The seven tutorials and Alice's Guide in Game Builder Garage don't elaborate or use every single Nodon available, just those used to construct the example games. One particular example is the Marker and Bullseye Nodons, which get virtually no focus in any of the games and have extremely vague descriptions in the Nodonpedia.
• Groove Coaster has Ad-Lib notes, which are invisible notes that don't break chain if you don't hit them, but are required to achieve a Full Chain. Most Ad-Lib notes are fairly intuitive and fall on music cues, but one song in particular, "Spring to mind", has Ad-Libs that either fall on very, very subtle elements of the track or don't go with any part of the track at all. Unless you watch videos, or watch someone else play, you pretty much have to use the Visible item so you can find out where all of the Ad-Libs are.
• In The Guardian Legend for the NES, the gates to several of the Corridors (the space-shooter areas) are Guide Dang Its to open. One such message says a corridor is sealed permanently; to open it, you have to visit a certain Blue Lander three times in a row.
  • For another corridor, the message is to "ask the round creature for help several times." This is, as stated above, the Blue Lander. You have to enter and exit its room several times in a row (through the same door and without going through any other rooms) before it will unlock the corridor. But prior to the last time (when you get a message saying the door is open) there is no message given to suggest that what you're doing is right.
  • For one corridor, the hint is to shoot continuously at the door. It won't work if you happen to be using a controller with "turbo" turned on.
• Gundemonium Recollection is a Bullet Hell game in which one of the achievements is locked behind the form of the final boss. The problem is that the final form never seems to appear, no matter how hard you try. As it turns out, the final form of the final boss is dependant on an end-game point counter that keeps track of an invisible point total that typically won't exceed 200 and often will hover around 100. It drops and raises for specific actions such as killing bosses or dying, and getting a game-over resets it to 0, even if a player continues. The final form of the final boss requires 100 points exactly, and if you fail, which is likely the only way this scenario will play out, you just fight the final boss as normal. This means you have to keep a mental track of the points, which is downright near impossible, and never get a game over during your attempt, otherwise you just have to reset and start over. Even if you know how to get this final form, nothing except for a step-by-step explanation of how to do it is going to do anything except throw you into pure madness and make you decide to quit and do something else.
• The third faction /el is this in Hacknet. To get to them, the player needs to delete x-server.sys on Naix' root gateway and then following his missions. However, this is not possible anymore if "Aggression must be punished" has been completed.
• Much like its predecessor and successor, The Hex has a complex, multi-layered story, with the deeper layers hidden behind certain in-game puzzles and actions. Unlike its predecessor and successor, however, this process is so ludicrously overcomplicated and obtuse that even finding most of the pieces, let alone solving them, without an extensive walkthrough is an exercise in literal months of picking apart every last pixel of the game in search of even the tiniest breadcrumb. And even once you've found all of the pieces, good luck figuring out how to put them all together on your own!
• Homestuck has an in-universe example with Sburb. Much of the initial story is simply the protagonists- a group of new players- trying to make sense of its interface and figure out what the hell is going on. And the only reasons said protagonists survive for any length of time is that 1. they have help from a previous group of experienced players, and 2. they are very, very lucky.
  • For example: ascending to God Tier. Nothing in the game tells you it can even be done, and the method is extremely unintuitive: you have to die. But not just anywhere, no! On your Quest Bed. Bear in mind that Sburb generates enormous worlds, and that one's Quest Bed is the comparative size of a dust mite in a swimming pool. And that one's Quest Bed is not given any particular importance in the game. It's an ornate, personally designed spawn point for your avatar, and that's about it.
    • It later turns out that there actually is a second method of getting to god tier that is even more obscure, but if you know about it, is much easier. You have to die on your Sacrificial Slab. This is easier than the other method because the Sacrifical Slabs are much easier to find since they always in the same places in the game inside the moons of Prospit and Derse, and unlike the first method, it is not required that both your dreamself and your original body still be alive. This is much more of a Guide Dang It! because there are no hints at all of this, unlike the first method which does have a few hints the players can get from the consorts, and the inside of the moons is a place that players probably would not think of going to without this knowledge.
• House Party (2017): Many of the quests in-game require you to jump through several hoops if you want to succeed with any of the girls at the party. For example, Rachel's route requires you to retrieve a thermos full of liquor from the liquor cabinet and return it to her. Which would be easy if not for the fact that the cabinet is being closely guarded by Frank, who refuses to let anyone drink on his watch. In order to gain his trust, you must search the entire house high and low for hidden bottles of beer and steal a bottle of wine from Patrick (without letting Frank see you, because he will kill you if he catches you taking it) and after all of that, you still have to trick Rachel into having sex by getting Katherine to spoof text messages that dare Rachel to do increasingly sexual things with you, but before you do that you have to get not only Rachel's number and the number of her friend Vickie, but you have to get Patrick to sober up by making him drink coffee, and then take his cell phone. And as Arin Hanson of Game Grumps learned the hard way, you can't complete the final step unless you find the very small and very carefully hidden master bedroom key. All of that, just to have sex with one girl for one minute.
• Good luck getting through Knightmare without divining what you were supposed to do. The game was easily made unwinnable with the no backtracking rule.
• For a very cute game about fashion shows, Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen can have surprisingly hard to pass stages:
  • Kaja's challenges tend to be a HUGE wake-up call for newbies. Kaja is a bifauxnen rock singer and her stages require Nikki to wear "Unisex" clothes and accesories... which, considering how the major part of the potential clothing and items tend to be pretty girly looking, can be a bit of a drawback.
  • Level 8-2 in Princess difficulty. Unlike the corresponding level in Maiden, it requires a specific suit. Unlike most levels, where scores are maximized by piling on accessories, it penalizes adding almost anything besides that suit. There are a select few accessories that the level allows, but figuring out which ones is arguably an even bigger Guide Dang It!.
  • The Special Stages require very specific types of clothing, and not having them handy will lead the player to either losing BADLY or barely ace it. A good example is Level 4-12: the player must assemble what's basically a Playboy Bunny outfit, and the most important parts are the Bunny Girl suit, the Bunny Girl Heels and the Bunny Ears. The Suit is an absolute requirement to pass the stage (yay for having to craft it to even think of going forward!), and trying to replace the Ears and the Heels with anything similar will severely lower the final score (yay for also having to craft them to get at least a B or an A!).
• Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games:
  • The game falls very mildly to this trope, but it's susceptible all the same. One of Peach's missions requires her to perform a shout in the hammer throw three consecutive times, which nothing in the game or the guide tells you how to do even once. On the plus side, learning how to do it tends to give you extra distance.
  • One of the tips in the Dream Spacewalk event tells you that when your group is flying toward Dino Piranha, you can press the Spin to Deflect Stuff button when you hit him to do additional damage. It makes sense given the other events, but doing this still keeps the player well below the game's other competitors, let alone online records. The correct solution is to mash the spin button for the duration of your approach.
• Mario Party:
  • Mario Party 7: Getting to the game's credits is a very cryptic procedure, as neither completing Solo Mode (where the game's story wraps up) nor playing Party Mode in all boards will trigger it. First, you must buy King of the River, while making sure you have unlocked the 30 mini-games that are played in the mode, then play the Easy, Normal, and Hard courses; finally, view the Hard Course's prize in the Duty-Free Shop, while being aware of the Easter egg that activates souvenirs - namely, saying "Surprise" or the equivalent in other languages into the microphone. Players who are incapable of speech, don't have a microphone, and/or are unaware of the "Use Controller" setting, are out of luck.
  • Mario Party DS: Some of the collectible items have their unlocking conditions hidden, requiring you to figure out what to do to get them. And these conditions are often very cryptic, such as placing first in a board after collecting a specific badge, getting 50 Stars in DK's Stone Statue or playing multiple minigames as Toad.
• In Masters of the Universe: The Movie on C64, when you confront Skeletor, he gives you the choice to surrender or continue fighting. You have to have seen the movie to know that surrendering is the correct option. Choosing to fight results in a Nonstandard Game Over. And if you failed to collect every chord for the Cosmic Key, you're screwed no matter which option you pick. If you surrender without all the chords, He-Man's friends are trapped on Earth and they can't go to Castle Greyskull to help him, resulting in another Nonstandard Game Over.
• Max Payne 3 has Golden Gun Parts and Clues that are sometimes annoyingly hidden. Also, at one point in the campaign, you have to push over a cabinet to escape a burning room. What the game neglects to tell you is that you have to be in Bullet Time when you push on the cabinet, otherwise, it won't budge.
• Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage: In advertisements, there was a screenshot of Venom fighting inside the Statue of Liberty's crown. But you never see it, as choosing Venom partway through the game means he's stuck in a Cutscene Hell and only returns to gameplay before the final boss. Obviously a Dummied Out stage, right? Wrong. As it turns out, during that Cutscene Hell, you can actually get Venom freed earlier by rapidly hitting a button before the cutscene he actually gets freed in, thus getting the Statue of Liberty stage and a host of hero summons.
• Getting all the XOF patches in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is simply odious. Most of them are difficult to find even with a walkthrough telling you exactly where they are, but the one that takes the cake is the first one. It turns out one stuck to Snake's back as he climbed the cliff in the opening cinematic and you have to roll about to shake it off. Even knowing this it's difficult to shake the darned thing loose.
• The Winter section of the Woods in Mickey Mousecapade. The hidden door to the final section is in the tree right at the start, but won't open until you go all the way through and loop back to the start, so many players would think there is no door there at all and eventually admit defeat and consult the helpline after shooting every other tree to no avail.
  • Undercoverfilmer00v covered this in his review before taking it down, mocking the logic behind it:
  UCF00v: *gasp* There's that start sign! I guess I better shoot that same tree again that I know didn't do anything the first time. Maybe something has changed for no reason whatsoever. (shoots the tree in question to open the door) *gasp* Oh my God! It's a glitch in the matrix!
• Online Games by Motion Twin tend to fall into this territory more than often, mainly because they're not-so-perfectly translated from French, and all the official guides stop at the basics and a couple of FAQs. Good luck finding out what class build to use in Minitroopers or which way to build a town in Die2Nite without a player-made guide...
• The finished but still-current Neopets 'plot' quest in Altador is absolutely impossible without using a guide: Some of the requirements make you click A SINGLE PIXEL in an image which it was never specified to do so, and go to locations in a certain order which seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Some of the 'puzzle' varieties in the games consisted of pressing switches in the right combination— for the second-last combination puzzle, there were over 1,000 possible combinations and you had to try every single one. All this for some measly items per day while the plot is still relevant, which don't even amount to much cash right now (but will in, say, 10 years) so it's useless to most players of the game. The cool site theme is the only thing worth doing it for.
  • Not to mention when you had to take care of the sick petpet you found, which requires pressing a certain action for according facial expressions of the pet at the exact time the clock changes on a correct clock— ten times. If you made a mistake and didn't know, you would never know you made one and could've possibly been trying for hours. The fact that you must only press an action at the exact time the clock is :00 minutes was never specified, let alone which actions correspond to which facial expressions. A true example of this trope indeed.
• Night Trap: The split-second room changes the game requires from you are nearly impossible without playing the game multiple times or having a comprehensive walk-through. Even veterans who have played the 1992 game or its other 1990s console versions before while playing the 2017 edition (and going for a perfect run) will suddenly get treated to a Game Over scene of Danny getting captured and drained of blood in the downstairs hallway (which wasn't there in the previous console versions) and realize that they missed an extra Auger to trap!
• Nuclear Throne has the unlock requirements for Horror, Skeleton and Frog, in order of when they were released and how hard they are to unlock. Horror requires you to skip two consecutive radiation canisters; you'll find it at the third one and you need to defeat it to play as it. Skeleton requires that you play as Melting and get caught in a Necromancer's resurrection circle. Frog requires players to damage Mom, a loop-exclusive boss, with a Golden weapon, which causes her to drop a special weapon. You need to take this weapon to a Proto Chest, and then find it again with a different character, which allows you to start the game with that weapon. By selecting this weapon, you'll start the game as Frog.
• Pac-Man 99: Just like Tetris 99 and Super Mario Bros. 35, there are absolutely no tutorials whatsoever. This makes understanding mechanics specific to 99 very hands-on, and unlike Tetris, which reuses existing official mechanics, in Pac-Man many of the mechanics were created specifically for this game, making understanding them that much harder.
  • The power-ups to the left side of the screen function as a Stance System, but the game doesn't tell you how to activate them (eat a Power Pellet) or what they do.
  • While white Jammer Pac-Men are easy enough to understand, the game also has red Jammer Pac-Men, and does not tell you what they do until you collide with one. Which is instant death.
  • Specific Bonus Fruit have specific effects on the board, such as restoring all Pac-Dots, restoring 3/4 of the Pac-Dots, or only restoring the Power Pellets, but the game never specifies which fruit does what.
  • The game never tells you that clearing all Pac-Dots from the board increases Pac-Man's Speed counter by 1.
• Panic! has some of this. Every area has at least one button that warps you to another scene, and the ones that have more than that often have one to send you backwards. So unless you have a photographic memory pertaining to which button does what, be prepared to spend a long time repeating scenarios. Also, some buttons instantly end the game.
• The original Parodius on the MSX has a devious example of this. Some ways into the final stage, there's a giant wall of rock that covers the entire screen, and since it's part of the level geometry, it will always kill on contact. The average player may find themselves dying constantly trying to figure out what appears to be a completely impassable obstacle. The solution is only obvious if one knows what each bell powerup does, namely the white bell, which allows the player to teleport from one end of the screen to the other. Even after this is figured out, it's still hard to actually pull off, as the bell only appears in certain parts of the stage, and it only lasts for about 30 seconds.
• Augmenting in Phantasy Star Online 2 is notoriously obtuse to start with and one of the biggest walls new players will hit when trying to enhance their gear. The system itself is explained well enough: sacrifice equipment with Augments to move them to another piece of equipment, or potentially fuse better Augments. The game stops holding your hand there, however, as the game does not explain that individual Augment types follow different rules; some are intuitive enough (Stat Augments fuse into better Stat Augments when you have multiple copies), while some aren't (did you know you can fuse special Souls by combining Earth, Omega, or Ultra Souls with normal Free Field boss Souls?), and it's up to the player to figure it out themselves or find a guide online that explains what they do. Even worse is that Souls boost the success rate of other Augments, but the game doesn't tell you what Souls boost what, and there are "super" Augments that require multi-step fusion involving multiple Augments that are only hinted at by having some sort of relationship to each other (Astral Soul needing Soul Catalysts to fuse, which you get by fusing all five Falz Souls together in the same recipe).
• The Interactive Fiction Photopia has an infamous maze which quickly becomes this sort of puzzle for unlucky players. The layout of the maze is actually meaningless and there is no path out. The trick is that your character has WINGS and can fly out. The wings are mentioned once very casually in a single line early in the game which is extremely easy for players to miss. Since the player can't see the character (being this is a text game) if they missed that line, and the game of course won't remind them of it, they can spend hours trying to find their way around the maze attempting to unravel a meaningless pattern. The only hint the game gives is to try a "vertical approach". Of course, if they knew about the wings they wouldn't need the hint in the first place. If they didn't, they're more likely to try to climb the walls or look for a ladder than to guess they can fly.
• PlayStation Access: "6 Impossible Video Game Puzzles You'll Never Solve Without A Guide", as indicated by the title, is about how frustrating this can be.
• Ragnarok Online is a good example of an MMO.
  • Firstly, not researching your stat and skill build before you even start playing is one way to screw up your first character by level 60, and therefore the entirety of the end-game and player vs player. Coupled with the permanency, players unused to this end up scrapping their first character.
  • Second, quests. The game literally dumps you in and expects you to go and find them yourself. Players need to look up guides for the quest they want to find the trigger for the quest and find their way around. You would literally not know that two NPCs in two entirely different cities would turn out to be related to a quest unless you bothered to talk to everyone in the game - and there are a lot of both people and cities to cover.
• Looking to score high in the Raiden Fighters series? Then you'll need to know where all the hidden Micluses are, as they release medals that can make or break your score. Uncovering some are as simple (to put it very nicely) as hovering in a particular spot, and uncovering others requires destroying enemies in a particular order or way. There's no in-game hints pointing towards where to find any of them.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn can indeed be beaten through just the clues it gives you, but quite a few require you to be pretty knowledgeable about the era of Wooden Ships and Iron Men (for instance, being able to recognize which of the guys is wearing a French naval outfit) or just good at parsing out very hard-to-spot clues. The most infamously difficult one is probably identifying Huang Li, Wei Lee, Li Hong, and Jie Zhang: four Chinese topmen whose names are never said out loud by any character. The only evidence for their true identities is also incredibly innocuous and a bit hard to parse even when you do know the trick. One scene shows them sleeping in numbered hammocks with their faces covered but their feet poking out, making it possible to match the hammocks with their numbers in the crew manifest and therefore identify them by their differing footwear.
• Rhythm Heaven Megamix.
  • A minor one: quiz Show challenges you to hit the buttons the same number of times as the quiz show host. What it doesn't tell you is that the skill star for this game can only be earned by closely matching the host's rhythm. This is also the way to boost your score beyond 80.
  • There are also hidden goodies in each of the Endless Games that are made available in the museum by reaching particular scores. Not only does the game never once tell you of their existence, not even from a random tip from the Barista, the scores themselves are incredibly hard to reach and will escape the notice of anyone not that interested in the Endless Games. ^note The minimum scores needed are 30 for Coin Toss, 120 for Sick Beats, 20 for Chargin' Chicken, and 40 for Clap Trap.
• Rune Factory:
  • Rune Factory 2 has a few, the biggest one being what to do after getting every last stone tablet fragment in the second generation. The only hint as to what you're supposed to do comes from Barrett, who first tells you not to get any ideas to seal the dragon and then proceeds to make a small, seemingly insignificant remark about how there's no way to get under the town. What the player is supposed to do, is to expand their barn until it can no longer be expanded and then ask for one more level to be added, so the inside of the temple can be reached. Problem with that is, aside from a vague hint, nothing is done. And unless the player tames a ton of monsters, majority of the expansion levels won't be needed, since you end up with almost 30 of them.
  • Rune Factory 4 is a guide-dang-it when it comes to getting married. Easy enough, you'd think, give the love interest gifts, go on dates and get the ring. Nope! Each love interest has a specific randomly spawned scene that needs to be viewed, before the character will accept the engagement ring. The game randomly spawns which scene can be viewed upon waking up each day, so the player will have to either view all other sorts of random scenes before hopefully getting the love interest's scene or reload repeatedly until the scene is spawned.
• All of RPG Maker is this trope. The only people who would know what they’re doing without watching a tutorial on YouTube (or using the tutorials on rpgmaker.net) are those who are knowledgeable enough about programming that they could code a game themselves without it. Though there is a manual bundled with the engine, it fails to explain anything in a way a layman would understand.
• In the MSX version of Salamander, if you want the good ending you have to have a number of secret items PLUS a copy of Nemesis II (another game in the series) in the second cartridge slot...God help you if the MSX you're playing on doesn't HAVE a second cartridge slot. also, you have to go through a secret level that's...well, temperamental on anything but a MSX1.
• The NES version of Section Z, an early Capcom Shoot 'Em Up originally released for the arcade, consists of three stages with 20 "sections" each. The game requires you to memorize the layout of each stage and know which teleporter will take you to which section in order to find the two power generators in each stage and destroy them in order to reach the stage boss. This isn't a hard task to do, since you have to manually map the game if you have trouble remembering the correct path. However, the paths to the final two generators are hidden in warp gates which you can only find by shooting at the exact spot where they're located. If you don't know where the warp gates are located, you will spent an eternity flying through various sections in circle finding nothing.
• In Shadowverse, clicking on card description text boxes provides further information that explains keywords or elaborates on what special cards they create. Not with Prince of Darkness, where the contents of the Apocalypse Deck mentioned in the card is not elaborated on. Want to find out? Look online or experience the deck yourself.^note For the record, it replaces your deck with 10 cards: three 6PP 8/8 followers with Storm, three 5PP 13/13 followers, three of a 7PP spell that deals 7 damage and heals 7 defense, and a 10PP spell that sets the opponent's defense to 1.
• Shivers (1995) has quite a few. Fortunately, the earlier puzzles are in the manual, but others, such as the red door and Egyptian door puzzles, are almost impossible.
• While the good ending for Streets of Rage 1 is simple enough to get, the bad ending is a whole other story. Basically:
  • Step 1: There must be 2 players.
  • Step 2: One accepts the We Can Rule Together deal from Mr. X, while the other refuses.
  • Step 3: The "heroic" player loses the resulting fight.
  • Step 4: The "villainous" player then selects "No" when offered the choice again.
  • Step 5: The "villainous" player manages to defeat Mr. X all on their own.
  • Done all that? Enjoy your player character becoming Drunk with Power and taking over the Syndicate. Congratulations, You Bastard!!
• If you follow the directions you're given in the final mission of Solar Winds, the game becomes unwinnable (which is to be expected if you've been paying attention to the story). If you violate your instructions in the obvious way, your spaceship spontaneously blows up. Turns out you've been silently handed a MacGuffin that you need to get rid of, and to make matters worse, there's no "get rid of MacGuffin" command — you need to use the "transport" command (normally used to move cargo to another ship or a planet) to eject it into space.
• Achieving S rank in Thumper requires interacting with all elements on the track, which includes some airborne rings placed after corners. Normally, turning stops the flight. To continue flying, you have to jump (it's only mandatory to avoid spikes) after stomping on a prior thump for the increased flight, then perform a "perfect turn" right at the edge of a corner. This is mentioned in the manual, but not in the game itself.
• Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night has one particular spellcard in the Extra Stage, "Honest Man's Death", which consists of - among other things - a laser that quickly sweeps through the player's position and is effectively impossible to run away from, due to the walls of bullets limiting your play area. The solution is to move toward the laser as soon as it appears, as it won't kill you until it reaches the spot you were when it spawned. This is exactly as much of a Violation of Common Sense as you would think, as no other lasers in this game or any other Touhou game work this way, and despite Imperishable Night including comments from ZUN on each spell card, the comment on this spell card doesn't mention this mechanic in any way.
• The Tower of Druaga is probably the king of this trope, with the game itself being explicitly designed to encourage communication with other players in order to actually beat the game (and make them give up a ton of coins in the process). You progress through a 60-floor tower with the evil Druaga near the top, but every single floor in the game has a hidden exit, and almost every floor in the game has a hidden treasure. Nothing tells you how to unlock any door or treasure, and the solutions to every floor become increasingly obtuse and counterintuitive the farther you go up. Certain treasures are also required to beat the game at all, and some are harmful but give no indication as such until you collect them. To add insult to injury, making a mistake usually results in death, one way or another. Updated Rereleases added additional towers that are even more sadistic than the original, with even more horrible puzzle solutions; one floor in the Namco Musem port requires you to open the disc tray.
• Toy Story 2 started out with Rex playing a Buzz Lightyear game, which ended with the upper half of Buzz being blown off by Emperor Zurg. When the toys infiltrate a toy store later on, Rex runs across a Strategy Guide for the game, discovers there's another way into the facility than through the front door, and starts complaining that it's a Guide Dang It!. "They make it so you can't defeat Zurg unless you buy this book. It's extortion, that's what it is!"
• Vector Incremental: Some of the upgrades are not indicative to the average player what they do from just the name, and since there's no description for each one, it's all one has to go for. For example, what do you think "Dimensionality" does?
• You'd think that if Wii Fit is intended for people who are looking to get more exercise (i.e., aren't already working out), it would do a better job of explaining which muscles are your "core muscles" (the abdominals, side abdominals, and lower back), instead of just telling people to "use" them in keeping their balance during certain exercises.
• Yume Nikki is the epitome of this trope. No explanations, no plot, no storyline, no interactions with NPCs other than stabbing them, nothing. Many a person will wander the game's huge, mostly empty maps, looking for that one thing they need. Entire areas are only accessed by sitting in a particular position for a while. Then, when you get all your effects, there is no hint as to what you need to do to complete your game. It's actually counter intuitive. You drop ALL your effects in the main room, wake up, there will be a set of stairs on the balcony, and jump off the set of stairs.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction, obtaining the power of Ra's Phoenix Mode requires you to input a password at Grandpa's shop. The password is not hinted at at all in the game, and must be found online.
  • The Robot Monkey sidequest triggers by visiting the game shop, then Domino Pier, and finally visiting KaibaCorp. If you fail to activate it by the time you defeat the Paradox Brothers in China, you miss out on the sidequest for the rest of the game.

---