Games

Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It's like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.

The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let's you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it's easy to forget the right button combination for it. It's very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won't even pop up. An experienced player won't notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.

Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn't help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.

All a game like this would need is the ability to disable the feature.

It's like developers are so obsessed and occupied with making it as accessible to everyone, that they seem to forget that there is also an entire playerbase out there not looking to be handheld through everything (including children). I'd get a bigger sense of achievement if I managed to do it on my own.

I remember playing Mario on the NES and it was completely unforgiving as a child, like insta-deaths, limited amount of lives, no save games, hidden secrets, etc. But it was pure bliss when I finally beat the game.

Either a shit article or shit website. The article gives a summary of the game then says the developers don't trust their customers. That's it. No reasons given. Am I missing something?

How hard is it to have a tutorial on/off option at game start?

I like the game, but agree with the over-tutorialed complaints. They have two difficulty modes, I wish only story mode got all the handholding. I think there’s enough obvious indicators to get you through all the game mechanics.

This is less a sign of "the devs don't trust the player" and more just plain out bad game design. Maybe the game itself is very obvious (I don't know, i haven't played nor do I intend to), but this kind of thing is usually done when the game is obtuse and the developer wants a quickfix instead of actually reworking the entire thing. Then again, if your game is for little children and they can't figure out how to play it, then there's something fundamentally wrong with it and maybe you should go back to the drawing board.

I haven’t played Plucky yet, but this is what I liked about Tunic. It gives you a hint, and then trusts the player to experiment with the hint they’re given. It makes it feel like your own adventure.

It looks so cool but I can't play it if it's not challenging.

That’s kind of the definition of a video game: a game in which the rules are enforced by an unconsciously intelligent mechanism.

A normal game requires trusting the players; a video game does not.