There's a difficult balance that a lot of games can fail to strike: We don't always need in-depth tutorials for every single mechanic, but nor do we always want to be thrown in at the deep end without any idea what to do or how to proceed. Either way lies frustration, typically, but those games that trust us to figure things out for ourselves and give us the tools to do so can be very satisfying.
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Even in great games like Destiny 2 and Fallout, many players ruin their own gaming experience with these bad habits, often without realizing it.
Sometimes, after all, trial and error and experimentation are a vital part of the process. In these games, there's very little in the way of guidance or a hint system (if anything at all in fact), but instead, you'll find something even more valuable: The chance to learn the rules, the mechanics, and your own playstyle independently.
Don't Starve
Spectacularly Sinister Survival
Survival games often have very steep learning curves because the central concept is the idea of improvising to survive as long as you can. If you don't keep up with the development of your base, or store enough food, tools, and resources for the long-term while taking care of your immediate needs, your run is bound to be tragically short. For a brand-new Don't Starve player, it's often difficult enough to remember to establish a light source in time to ward off Charlie, the Night Monster.
Your first several runs, then, will be all about trying things. You might find yourself chasing after rabbits and trying to bop them with a melee weapon as a source of food in a pinch, attacking those spiders' dens to try and clear them before you're prepared with combat gear, or striking a Beefalo only to find the whole herd is now furious with you. That's the beauty of the game, though: You learn what to do and what not to do right at the same time as you go. You discover the important function of certain mysterious items, a good order in which to craft essentials for smooth progression, and how to turn things from weather conditions to the behavior of wild creatures to your advantage. As you do, you'll find your runs lasting longer and longer.
Celeste
Adapt To Progress
Celeste is a beautiful pixel art platformer that sees a young woman, Madeline, face a series of stages on her journey to conquer a formidable mountain. New mechanics, such as the effects of wind, mysterious platforms that move as you shift direction, and Seeker enemies that must be avoided, are added to the mix as the game goes on. This ensures that each chapter is distinct not only in its visual style, but in the techniques you'll need to use to progress.
The developers make excellent use of level design, ensuring that there's a 'safe' place to experience a new mechanic and so learn how it works. You'd almost never notice that you'd just been given a mini tutorial, because it's organic and not intrusive at all. Binoculars are also placed around certain points in the stages, allowing the player to look around the entirety of a lengthy room at once, planning out how to approach the obstacles at hand before making that first jump. Using these techniques, the team ensures that, though it may take dozens of failed attempts in order to do so, the player knows everything they need to in order to succeed, without being led too directly.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
So Much Freedom
A lot of fans have lost count of how many times they've played The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim since its initial release back in 2011. They probably haven't forgotten their very first playthrough, though, and how comparatively inept it surely was. The tricky thing about a game in which you can largely do anything you want is that a lot of those things won't ultimately help you much, if at all. There's almost too much freedom, in a way, allowing you to enter somebody's home and take all sorts of things from shelves and desktops as you please. As inventory hoarders will attest, you can never quite tell when a certain item will come in handy, but there's the rub: In Skyrim, you can easily find yourself with an inventory full of nonsense and poorly invested Perk Points that don't really reflect your playstyle very well.
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All of this comes with experience, though. Bethesda allows you to experiment with all of Skyrim's diverse mechanics and its vast world, gradually learning the items to value, the skills to prioritize, and the most helpful companions depending on how you like to play. This is a huge part of why the game's still so beloved.
Tunic
A Dungeon-Delving Adventure In The Zelda Mold
2022's Tunic blends some of the greatest influences in the industry into a fantastic and atmospheric package. The isometric perspective and colorful art style are so reminiscent of classic The Legend of Zelda entries, such as A Link To The Past (and particularly the remade Link's Awakening), while the combat system is governed by the need to watch our fox friend's stamina a la Dark Souls. There's also a bonfire-esque system.
The unique touch with Tunic's storytelling and player guidance, though, is that it's largely visual-only. Quite a detailed in-game manual is on offer, but with the significant catch that the text is written in a partially unique language and separate pages must be found around the world to be added to the 'book.' Without engaging with the system, determined players can still piece together some context for where to go and what to do, and the unfolding story of a lost fox civilization that twisted time and manipulated souls in their efforts to avoid death is an intriguing and enigmatic one.
80 Days
Improvise Your Way Around The World
In Jules Verne's Around The World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg and his valet Jean Passepartout are tasked with circumnavigating the planet in the late nineteenth century, within that strict timeframe. Along the journey, of course, they take multiple different modes of transportation, meet some very colorful characters, and ultimately succeed. Inkle's 80 Days is a text-based take on the tale, a well-written odyssey that can end differently each time you play. As Passpartout, the aim is to manage funds, pick routes from an interactive globe of the world, and keep moving by any means necessary until you arrive back in London. If the attentive valet allows Fogg's health to deteriorate too much, or you run out of money to proceed, the game's over. What really makes the game so enthralling is that every movement is decided by the player.
You can see the possible routes, where they'll lead next, and the costs of a given journey, and then must weigh up the best route to take. At the same time, you have a small case of belongings that can help in different ways. It's all about the decisions you make, and there's a clever trading concept involved, too. Goods you purchase in one city might be worth a premium at another, but visiting that city to cash in might make you take a more expensive trip later. Pausing in a given town to gather information could earn you a valuable lead, but it could also cause you to miss a particular carriage ride. The story unfolds through text (and lots of it), and here, too, there are lots of narrative decisions to make that could change the course of your relationship with a particular character and so your whole journey. There's very little in-game guidance, meaning that repeated plays and your own experiences are the best teachers. Even then, 80 Days will continually surprise you.
Deus Ex
Your Objectives, Your Way
For some fans, 2000's original Deus Ex is still the series entry that gave the player the most freedom to experiment and achieve their goals. Protagonist JC Denton is a United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition operative in a near-future dystopian world as bleak as any: The Gray Death is ravaging the population, and supplies of the vaccine, Ambrosia, are targeted by different organizations for their own gains. Against this awful backdrop, Denton and the player have an array of awful decisions to make, the outcome of which can change the course of the narrative in various ways.
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The following games stand out for forcing players to make tough decisions that can drastically change the story.
The game gives players agency to dictate the experience in lots of ways beyond the narrative, too. Cybernetic enhancements allow the agent to be tweaked to perform best according to the player's preferences, and objectives can be achieved in various lethal or non-lethal ways. As with the likes of the Hitman series, the player is free to analyze the situation, deciding the best approach to neutralize enemies based on their preferences. You can potentially talk your way out of trouble, find a hackable device to mess with in order to overcome obstacles, or simply opt for an all-out assault. The game gives you all the freedom you could want in that regard.
Little Nightmares
Solve Macabre Mini-Mysteries
As with a lot of titles on this list, Little Nightmares keeps tutorials and direct guidance to an absolute minimum, instead opting for a strictly visual approach. This series has a way of telling utterly creepy stories without a single word spoken, and it's only by paying attention to every little action in the backgrounds of scenes that you can really grasp the horrors of what's happening. In the original game, Six is venturing through the bowels of a ship called The Maw, where hungry patrons seem to enjoy eating a rather young and sprightly type of meat that's provided by The Janitor from his Prison. Six survives all these encounters and, ultimately, meets the Lady who is in charge of The Maw, kills her, and escapes.
Little Nightmares is a horrifying adventure/puzzle game, typically challenging the player with examining the objects in a room and determining how they can be used to open a gate, reach a lever, or otherwise overcome an obstacle and progress. Subtle lighting cues may point you to significant objects in the environment, but otherwise, there's very little guidance forthcoming. Often, there's also the pressure of an enemy somewhere in the room, sending you back to a checkpoint instantly if you're captured. For example, in the kitchen with the twin chefs of The Maw, you need to go through a door opposite to them to escape, which involves carefully climbing around a mountain of plates and such, knowing exactly when to dive into a hidey-hole at floor level, dashing with that key, and carefully timed platforming once they see you and you're running for the next area. Each area is like a deviously designed escape room, and it's just you and your resourcefulness against the grisly denizens of The Maw. Developers Tarsier Studios certainly aren't about to help the player.
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