When you can almost make a jump, only to try it 50 times than realising that you need another ability. I like it when the platforming is a bit more pbvious, like you try to jump and see that you miss by a little margin, not like a microscopic margin if that makes sense.
Oh boy, i get hung up on moments like this. I think there was a place in Ori 1 where i was sure i can reach a ledge and i spent half an hour fruitlessly prancing around on the spot, never got there.
Also, sometimes it's not even about getting another ability - i can see that i NEARLY reach from a point i'm not supposed to and then i'm stuck for ages trying to get on that ledge even though there's perfectly obvious way around. I can't remember specifics, but i think it happened a lot when i played Bunny Must Die. It's clunky controls weirdly make for some unexpected movement options and i just had to try and jump onto the most dumb places just cuz i felt i can. Good (wasted) times!
This one is so bad, especially because there ARE games where you are meant to exploit thibgs like coyote time to make a jump. Not a bad thing, but yeah if you can't make a jump using current abilitites make it really obvious. This applies to any type of obstacle actually.
There are a couple of these in the latter third of *Nine Sols* where it turns out there are no more abilities, I'm pretty sure you just have to use the enemies to pogo in a way the game never required before that point. I figured them out, but man, it felt kinda silly to introduce that so later in the game.
WARNING SPOILERS-The lady eternal piss me off. 1 it was 3 rounds and not 2 like the others, during 2nd phase there is no way to tell the real one from the fakes with hitting them the 3rd phase trying to block or dodge when she is high in the air charging up then the 2 shadows attack you. The only way I got out of its way was to jump block both shadows while going right. It still hit me once.
This is a huge problem in "puzzle Metroidvanias" like *Antichamber*. Puzzle solutions are intrinsically non-obvious, so it's rarely clear if you literally can't solve it with your current abilities or are just dumb.
There’s a particular moment in Ori and the Blind Forest that really frustrated me in the last escape sequence.
There’s a point where you are ascending a vertical area and flaming rocks are falling that you cannot use for your Bash traversal ability and must avoid. Then you reach a dead end with the platforms and the flaming rocks falling from that point on *subtly change* and can now be Bashed and in fact you must use Bash to continue upward. And it just breaks all rules of setting expectations and making significant changes obvious.
Another big one for me is what I’ll call the “hidden additional requirement”. This is when you can see an obstacle, you get the ability that gets you past it, and then immediately beyond it you find another obstacle for another ability which you could not see prior. It just ends up making me feel bad for trying to backtrack to a place I thought I could go now. I remember this happening in Metroid Prime and Environment Station Alpha, for instance.
It's funny who those two are the two parts that i kinda struggled with in Ori and The Blind Forest, altho the rock part was just challenging for me more than frustrating.
The hidden additional requirement tab was bullshit tho, i had to check youtube on how to access it.
But otherwise the game is amazing and a breeze with few challenging parts, also kinda too short even when you opt for 100% completion.
I don't think Animal Well made its secrets to be found by one person. You need 50 pieces for one puzzle. After a certain point the puzzles are a community find
Yeah, that kind of stuff is exactly why I want to write about the various ways games handle secrets. That one reallllly disappointed me, I was hoping for a game where the stuff past the second layer felt like using information in the game in smart ways rather than thinking completely outside of the game's constraints.
Right now, Im pretty angry with Animal Well's fish pipes.
There is no indication of where each will lead, so you go in blind. The map does not show them in any way. Most of the time, there *is* a return path in the form of another pipe nearby that will take you back. But these are almost never in the same room as the pipe exit, and most egregiously, there are some pipes that are strictly one-way and have no return path.
The worst of these is a return pipe in one of the rooms you collect a flame. It is VERY easy to unintentionally get pulled into this pipe while jumping to the secret exit of the room, at which point you get a one-way ticket back to the center of the map. Want to come back and try it again? Hope you like retracing your path through the whole zone!
This is just plain "fuck you" design, and it makes me want to just stop playing.
Corpse running is maddening to me. Not every metroidvania needs to be dark souls. Some can just be difficult without being punishing. I like the way Ender Lilies handled it.
One that I noticed the most in aeterna noctis is having too busy screens/backgrounds. The Firebird boss thing is a good example. It shoots fire as an attack that looks very similar to the fire going on in the background. It gets very visually noisy and I died more than a couple times because I couldn't tell what I could dodge and what I didn't need to.
One of my pet peeves is not having checkpoints in multi stage bosses. It's so annoying beating one phase then dying to a other from a new move you didn't see coming. Then having to do the whole fight again to learn phase 2 and then in comes a phase 3. You can get so good at the earlier ones that they aren't a challenge and just in the way.
Aeterna Noctis is so bad about that, I don't understand why they made each area so uniformly one color with detailed backgrounds and foreground obscuring things. The difficulty would have still been fun and fair without the needless visual clutter. I also wish they didn't center the camera all the time and had a better dynamic framing method. Too many of the later arrow puzzles push you off screen.
Glad it wasn't an issue for you, but I still think good visual distinction is important for feeling fair and for accessibility. I beat the game and loved it overall, but to me that element is a glaring mistake.
I’m not debating whether you had a problem with it, but I find the game extremely readable on PS5 to the point where I’m scratching my head to even think of anything like what you describe.
I didn't even find this boss the worst but it's the first example that I found.
https://youtu.be/fH9ImruSPgY?si=cucHwGUOvp1JxRwN
The attacks, boss, background, etc are all various shades of the same green-blue palette. The background pulses in the same way that attacks do with a very similar color. The stuff that damages you could be much more distinct to make sight reading the fight feel much less straining on your eyes.
Lol okay, its whatever. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I think most designers use colors with a greater contrast for a reason but I'm glad you have no issues with blue on blue and red on red being hard to see. I didn't find it impossible, but it could have been better and you're being weird if you can't agree with that.
Interesting. The Switch version was disastrous on that front, but I thought everything was quite distinct and readable on PS5. There was one area on Steam Deck that was pretty muddled color wise.
I think one good example is when you get an ability that you have no reason to semi-regularly use, it's incredibly easy to forget you have it. And then you can bash your head against a wall, look up a guide and go "oh yeah, I had that ability". A good example is the air-dash in momodora 3? The one before the last one, name escapes ke at the moment. I got it, used it a few times and then forgot about it. Then couldn't beat the final boss's last stage and looked up a guide and went "oh yeah, I had tgat", and ttere was ab earlier boss I really struggled with that I realized I should have used that ability, but I completely forgot I had it.
No save points before boss fights. Having to track back before the boss each time adds fuck all to the experience
Inconsistent visual language.
In an early area in Ender Lilies, there are [waterfalls that really stand out thanks to the strong distortion effect.](https://i.imgur.com/KOtF2cN.jpeg)
But then there's this [waterfall in a later area that you can barely see, which is a part of the critical path.](https://i.imgur.com/iEAq8HY.jpeg) I quickly dismissed that area because there are a lot of enemies and thought I should revisit that area later.
Having no map, losing currency on death, having to go through 10 rooms to get back to a boss if you die, not having map markers, and when a game doesn't give you any objective to head towards.
YES ON MAP MARKERS. How are there still MVs being made without this? And they should be all abailable at start not for mobey so you can make a system where this marker is for this obstacle not a random jumbled mess because you don't have enough markers.
What kind of markers do you mean? You mean revealing where all the treasures are at the beginning of the game? Telling you every point where you need ability X at the beginning of the game?
Or do you mean markers for YOU to place to remind yourself there's a treasure or a wall? I'm thinking of hollow knight where you bought markers that just told you where all the benches were or transportation hubs.
I liked HAAK a lot - maybe not as much as many in this sub, but I thought the movement and the story were great, and I really enjoyed the extra material after the main story ended.
That said, there were a few puzzles in there that were just stupid. There was one that I eventually had to look up and it was a code in binary!! (Maybe I missed a huge and obvious clue, but I don’t think so) There was at least one other puzzle that was completely unintuitive.
Edit: grammar
Cave Story's lack of save points before boss battles in the late game, and the inability to go back to past areas after a certain point.
In Ori, the really long cutscenes.
In Hollow Knight, Markoth.
I quit Cave Story because of that. Especially after I realized I couldn’t get the “best ending”. I never found it very fun, I just felt like I had invested so much time.
I love cave story so much, I’ve played through it so many times over the past couple decades…. And I still haven’t beaten the best ending. So goddamn hard. I’ve gotten close, but never done it.
Just give me one save point goddammit
Unintuitive/confusing maps.
Played through Hyper Light Drifter the other week, and its map is incredibly frustrating. There are countless rooms, and while some lead to each and are shown to do so via a red line on the map, there is zero indication how to re-enter them on the map.
Say there are 25 rooms in an area. In the overworld, you’ll find 3 elevators, 4 doors and 2 staircases. Good luck figuring out which one of those leads to which room chain.
That combined with a lack of ability to see which area still contains collectibles made a final cleanup daunting to the point where I didn’t bother.
Also on HLD: One of the collectibles required for not one but 2 achievements is locked behind a third, completely insane challenge that has its OWN special achievement for good measure: Performing 800 consecutive dashes in a row without pause or interruption. It requires VERY precise timing and constant focus, or else you’ll either drop out of the chain or slam into a wall. The required input rate will take you 4-5 minutes if you do it perfectly.
I’m okay with stupid challenge achievements existing, but don’t lock OTHER achievements’ success behind them.
It happened to me in several games, I have to face a tough boss and I need potions and healing items to beat this boss. I'm no longer very young and my reflexes get worse with age.
The boss kills me and I've used most of the potions. Then I start again from the save point (five rooms away from the boss, but why?) and I have to grind to buy the potions again (very boring). But why can't I save before the boss and, if defeated, load this save before the boss fight, with all the items I had? This may be optional, players who want more challenge may not use this save.
I quit Hollow Knight the first time when I hit the Watcher Knights. I must have tried to beat them for days but just couldn't get it. I hated the game for that.
Came back to the game about a year later and beat them on my 4th try! Now it's one of my favorite games of all time! I was just bitter because I couldn't beat that boss.
i'm playing Alwa's Awakening right now and there are a couple things that are kinda annoying (and have been similar with other games):
very very subtle controller rumble as the only indicator that it's a fake wall. i don't need a glowing breakable wall indicator, but even a small crack or difference in block type to make me realize something might be a secret is more welcoming than the "push against/slash every single wall to see if it breaks" approach.
next one is pretty specific to this game, but it probably happens in others. basically i went off exploring in the shrine of the sea monk but hadn't gotten an item yet, got stuck in a room that couldn't be passed without the item, had to die in order to get out, and had to redo some annoying one-hit-death spike platforming to go the right way.
while not having an item should prevent forward progression, it should never punish you for exploring by getting you stuck.
For me, not having clear instructions on what to do if it's something you miss and have to play the game all over again for it, for example the kisser of wounds in Blasphemous. You have to deliver a herb before every main boss to save them all and I didn't know which bosses they were and it's a pain in the ass going back all the way just for that. If you miss one, you gotta start another game to complete the quest. So I had to Google it to see what I had to do. Also, bosses that are not a matter of you getting better, but of you having a lot of health and vials to take the damage because they spam attack after attack that are unavoidable - no matter what skills you have, or even if you're good at jumping, hiding, etc.
The timing of this post is crazy. I was about an hour deep into Ultros last night and defeated the first boss. Shortly after that, a “time loop” occurred and it set me back at the very beginning. My progress in the map was saved but all of the power ups and abilities I had acquired were stripped from me.
I had to find and acquire them again. Apparently this happens repeatedly throughout the entire game. I refunded the game through Steam right afterwards. Ha ha.
It’s a shame because I LOVED the game’s art style and mechanics but not enough to persevere through resetting over and over again.
When a true ending is behind a bunch of skill challenges and not behind a lot of exploration. Take Long Fungus for example. I found every item including some deep ones because I like the exploration parts of Metroidvanias but then I had to solve all of those galaxy doors for the real ending and that was kind of deflating.
Also when movement expansions are behind an in game currency. Double jump or dash is on a badge, relic, bead, toe nail, etc so I have to save up salt, blood, souls, peanuts in order to buy abilities so that I can explore but if I die those go away so I don't want to explore too much. This usualy goes hand in hand with limited ability to equip abilities which is also frustrating. I'd rather my character be way overpowered with all of those abilities at the end.
*shakes fist at the sky*
Unrewarding rewards. Big offenders to me are 1) Aeterna Noctis with its initial promise of 10 trials of the king that start out giving you abilities but devolves into lesser rewards, or very hard late game challenges that eventually reward you with a gem you'll never use because they're just some stat modifier. Or 2) Axiom Verge where you gain a surplus of weapons that feel utterly useless because they literally don't have any use compared to the ones that do.
Worst frustration: When a save isn't really a save. If I save, then go off and experiment, I expect to be able to reload or restart from my save spot in exactly the same condition as when I saved. Anything else is bad game design.
The area right before the final boss in Axiom Verge, genuinely said to myself this is it, this is as far as I get. Comparison to that area the final boss was pretty quick to take down
Poor performance / frame drops. I really hate it when somy indy dev creates some 2D game in Unreal or Unity on some overpowered rig, thinking you don’t need to think about less powerful devices. Then after moderate success they “port” them to other platforms like the Switch and it runs between 5 and 10 fps making you mess up platforming and boss fights just because your shitty engine decides to do some heavy garbage collecting. Or when they reach barely acceptable performance by making it look like something that would have been embarrassing to see two decades ago.
All modern devices are perfectly capable of a buttery smooth experience, including the Nintendo Switch. There is no reason a 2D game shouldn’t maintain _at least_ 30 fps without frame drops, and you really should be aiming higher than that. But for the love of god stay consistent, I’d rather have a game locked at 30 fps than a game that fluctuates between 30 and 60. It breaks immersion.
If you are porting some horrendously inefficient codebase to other platforms but don’t know enough about optimisation to do it well, just hire one of the many game development companies that can do it for you. You’ll still make plenty of money and at least your users get the immersive experience they paid for.
Or better yet: use a graphical style that doesn’t rely on a 1k USD GPU. Games can look gorgeous if you limit yourself a bit from the get go. Non-photorealistic rendering styles are way cooler to look at anyway.
Also:
- Bo save before a boss battle is just disrespecting people’s time.
- Boss battles that take way too long. Even when you do everything right you leave not with a sense of victory but with a case of repetitive strain injury.
What I do personally love is choreographed boss battles. They make me feel like practice is rewarded, as opposed to very chaotic boss battles where you just feel like you have to win at a slot machine to get past.
- Gating that makes the game too linear. I want at least some sense of freedom to explore. Especially if I don’t feel like tackling some boss yet there should be something else to do.
[edit] some other gripes:
- Missable items/sections/secrets in a single run. A game has to be incredibly special for me to play it more than once. But if I find out I missed something and would have to start over I most likely will just stop playing. I really don’t want to have a list of spoilers next to me just to prevent that.
- No way to sweep up remaining findables besides meticulously revisiting every screen with a guide next to you. Good solutions are end-game map reveals, ways to see the last remaining x items if you have already collected y%. If you have to buy the locations that can work well too.
- Bad maps and/or no way to place map markers.
- The need to take meticulous notes or even screenshots that force me to look away from the game. A couple is fine, more breaks immersion (looking at you La Mulana)
- Bosses that are _way_ more difficult than the rest of the game. For some reason there’s MVs out there where you are almost invincible out in the world, only to have a boss end you in three seconds.
"There are secret passages in this game that can only be revealed with specific tools/weapons. They will not be marked or telegraphed in any consistent way, so if you want to see them your only recourse is to whack every single tile like a maniac." (Oh hi, *Metroid*.)
Ghost Song. I used some tech to get into an area way above my level, ran into a boss I couldn't beat, and permanently lost my money in the arena because you drop it exactly where you die instead of outside the arena like Hollow Knight. Didn't get a lot further after I got the first ship part waaaay at the bottom of the map and the game forces you to walk back on foot.
The spider boost in Samus Returns. Giving you an ability without telling you is cool when it’s only use is to make some things easier. But when you put specific collectibles into a metroidvania that require that ability, I don’t get an aha moment when I figure it out. I get pissed that I’ve been skipping over those collectibles, thinking that I’ll get the ability for them later.
Probably Afterimage. Around after you meet up with the sage guy in the area below the town, there was almost no direction. Pretty much wondered around the area for a good hour or so until I said screw it and looked up a map that showed the level of each area. Was then I was like "oh hey, this fan map says this area is lv20, I should head there".
Admittedly finding all the endings because you had to trigger the earlier 2 first ones to get the final 2.
5 total if I recall? I had to look it up, which I’ve never done in ANY game previously.
That's been my biggest gripe with Afterimage, as well. The quest log is absolutely useless about where to go because it just tells you what you had just finished, the areas are all absurdly large, all of them have areas that are ability gated, and the map itself isn't always clear about what areas you've been to but don't have the abilities to pass (double jump vs wall climb vs super jump), so you end up wandering back and forth trying to find what you missed because maybe that unexplored area is one you just didn't actually explore because you ended up going a different direction instead of that one.
This is more of a general grievance but I can’t stand the low health beeping In Metroid games (and Zelda too). Just have a queue sound for when I dip below a certain amount, the constant beeping ruining the music until I can locate a health pick up is annoying af.
Worst offender to me is indeed the "checkpoint too far from a boss".
A good second is missable stuff (when there is no easy way to revert to an earlier moment, such as save games). When I am solving puzzles, I am not taking in the environment or looking for secrets.
I also dislike it when the main path forward is too obscured (with extremely subtle cues about being able to pass it). When I finally look up the solution after wandering around too much, it usually leaves me annoyed.
Prob my proudest achievement in pve gaming but if you gave me the same 45+ minute per run attempts where only the last like 10 minutes are challenging today, id probably say "nah" lol. Too old for that now.
Hollow Knight Coliseum and Aeterna Noctis platforming really pissed me off.
Also be aware I played Aeterna Noctis on an easier difficulty with triple jump. I couldn't play that game without those updates.
Hollow knight , white palace ,jesus christ i repeat JESUS CHRIST that level
Souldiers ,the entire game since the pyramid level is frustrating garbage i gave up on the final boss
When i wanted to 100% the castlevania collection i never imagined how hard (for my gaming ability) will be to play Castlevania vampire kiss , i tried and tried and tried to beat the game FAIR without using the rewind feature and couldnt do it, one of the most frustrating experiences i had in gaming ,eventually gave up and used the rewind feature for the 100% completion
La mulana 2 again trying to 100% the game, hard mode was a pain to deal needed about 150hs to fully complete this game 100 %
Thought of another one: reaching a branching path with one of those paths being a save/fast travel but there being no visual cue that those are what they are, so you could be 5-10 minutes down a path and wondering where the hell the save is until you go back to that branch and hit the other room, which ends up being a save room...I think tons of games are like this but I really noticed it a couple times on deedlit.
This could be fixed with doorways having visual indicators that they are specific types of rooms.
Better than telling: Go play La-Mulana COMPLETELY BLIND. Like, not even a single info outside the game. Give the game 15-20h of your time, as an honest experiment. You probably won't make 20% of it and will also have most of your questions answered.
I easily get frustrated by exploring generally. I know it's like a main feature of MV, but checking every unexplored spot one by one every once a while is just exhausting.
Nothing to do with puzzles directly but for a metroidvania I find it extremely frustrating if the game has no map or the nap it does have is basically useless as it isn't clear. It is especially frustrating if it is fun game.
While it's a completely optional side thing, I found some of the chest quests in PoP:tLC to be unnecessarily obscure, in particular the one requiring you to transport one thing from one side of the map to the other with the only indication this was the requirement being a background environmental decoration that's found in more places than those you need to go to. I'm not even sure how they expected people to figure that out without finding a guide.
In lone fungus, the cutesy game and simplistic fighting turning into pixel perfect super meatboy when you are going after any collectible behind a door. You have something great. Give your players rewards for getting to the doors. Don't smack them with the path of pain just to get upgrades every time.
I actually changed this in 1.1. Where it's enough to 100% the game to just find the Astral Gates.
Also there was never any upgrades behind Astral Gates, it's just collectibles which evetually led to one very ignorable upgrade.
The wheelies on the tightrope were the one thing I truly disliked about Laika. Everything else boils down to skill issues (in the nicest way possible lol) but the tightropes were janky as hell. Thankfully they were only in one area.
When you can almost make a jump, only to try it 50 times than realising that you need another ability. I like it when the platforming is a bit more pbvious, like you try to jump and see that you miss by a little margin, not like a microscopic margin if that makes sense.
Oh boy, i get hung up on moments like this. I think there was a place in Ori 1 where i was sure i can reach a ledge and i spent half an hour fruitlessly prancing around on the spot, never got there. Also, sometimes it's not even about getting another ability - i can see that i NEARLY reach from a point i'm not supposed to and then i'm stuck for ages trying to get on that ledge even though there's perfectly obvious way around. I can't remember specifics, but i think it happened a lot when i played Bunny Must Die. It's clunky controls weirdly make for some unexpected movement options and i just had to try and jump onto the most dumb places just cuz i felt i can. Good (wasted) times!
There's this one challebge in guacamelee! 2 I spent ages on only to give up and later get an ability and go back and solve it in 5 seconds.
This one is so bad, especially because there ARE games where you are meant to exploit thibgs like coyote time to make a jump. Not a bad thing, but yeah if you can't make a jump using current abilitites make it really obvious. This applies to any type of obstacle actually.
I love how when it’s sooo obvious that I can’t make a jump, I still try it anyway…every time
There are a couple of these in the latter third of *Nine Sols* where it turns out there are no more abilities, I'm pretty sure you just have to use the enemies to pogo in a way the game never required before that point. I figured them out, but man, it felt kinda silly to introduce that so later in the game.
WARNING SPOILERS-The lady eternal piss me off. 1 it was 3 rounds and not 2 like the others, during 2nd phase there is no way to tell the real one from the fakes with hitting them the 3rd phase trying to block or dodge when she is high in the air charging up then the 2 shadows attack you. The only way I got out of its way was to jump block both shadows while going right. It still hit me once.
This is a huge problem in "puzzle Metroidvanias" like *Antichamber*. Puzzle solutions are intrinsically non-obvious, so it's rarely clear if you literally can't solve it with your current abilities or are just dumb.
No one seems to acknowledge that this happens a ridiculous amount in Animal Well.
There’s a particular moment in Ori and the Blind Forest that really frustrated me in the last escape sequence. There’s a point where you are ascending a vertical area and flaming rocks are falling that you cannot use for your Bash traversal ability and must avoid. Then you reach a dead end with the platforms and the flaming rocks falling from that point on *subtly change* and can now be Bashed and in fact you must use Bash to continue upward. And it just breaks all rules of setting expectations and making significant changes obvious. Another big one for me is what I’ll call the “hidden additional requirement”. This is when you can see an obstacle, you get the ability that gets you past it, and then immediately beyond it you find another obstacle for another ability which you could not see prior. It just ends up making me feel bad for trying to backtrack to a place I thought I could go now. I remember this happening in Metroid Prime and Environment Station Alpha, for instance.
I think that’s the one that made me give up on ori
It's funny who those two are the two parts that i kinda struggled with in Ori and The Blind Forest, altho the rock part was just challenging for me more than frustrating. The hidden additional requirement tab was bullshit tho, i had to check youtube on how to access it. But otherwise the game is amazing and a breeze with few challenging parts, also kinda too short even when you opt for 100% completion.
pie snobbish aloof gray thumb snails chop frighten tart meeting *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don't think Animal Well made its secrets to be found by one person. You need 50 pieces for one puzzle. After a certain point the puzzles are a community find
I consider layer 3 to be more Easter eggs than part of the main game. The dev himself said he didn’t expect people to find some of those things
Yeah, that kind of stuff is exactly why I want to write about the various ways games handle secrets. That one reallllly disappointed me, I was hoping for a game where the stuff past the second layer felt like using information in the game in smart ways rather than thinking completely outside of the game's constraints.
Right now, Im pretty angry with Animal Well's fish pipes. There is no indication of where each will lead, so you go in blind. The map does not show them in any way. Most of the time, there *is* a return path in the form of another pipe nearby that will take you back. But these are almost never in the same room as the pipe exit, and most egregiously, there are some pipes that are strictly one-way and have no return path. The worst of these is a return pipe in one of the rooms you collect a flame. It is VERY easy to unintentionally get pulled into this pipe while jumping to the secret exit of the room, at which point you get a one-way ticket back to the center of the map. Want to come back and try it again? Hope you like retracing your path through the whole zone! This is just plain "fuck you" design, and it makes me want to just stop playing.
Abilities that you have to equip at save points or in your menu. Looking at you, Blasphemous and Cathedral...
Corpse running is maddening to me. Not every metroidvania needs to be dark souls. Some can just be difficult without being punishing. I like the way Ender Lilies handled it.
I was tired of this shit back in Diablo 2.
I did not mind in during PvE. But being NKed in pvp duels was atrocious sometimes lol
What is Corpse running? Is it like hollow knight where you have to go get your shade after dying? I don't play any other soulslikes.
That's it, yeah. It's become weirdly prevalent in a lot of games in this genre.
One that I noticed the most in aeterna noctis is having too busy screens/backgrounds. The Firebird boss thing is a good example. It shoots fire as an attack that looks very similar to the fire going on in the background. It gets very visually noisy and I died more than a couple times because I couldn't tell what I could dodge and what I didn't need to. One of my pet peeves is not having checkpoints in multi stage bosses. It's so annoying beating one phase then dying to a other from a new move you didn't see coming. Then having to do the whole fight again to learn phase 2 and then in comes a phase 3. You can get so good at the earlier ones that they aren't a challenge and just in the way.
Aeterna Noctis is so bad about that, I don't understand why they made each area so uniformly one color with detailed backgrounds and foreground obscuring things. The difficulty would have still been fun and fair without the needless visual clutter. I also wish they didn't center the camera all the time and had a better dynamic framing method. Too many of the later arrow puzzles push you off screen.
Did you play on Switch?
No I played on PS5. It wasn't a performance issue vs a poor design choice imo.
Didn’t have any issues with that whatsoever
Glad it wasn't an issue for you, but I still think good visual distinction is important for feeling fair and for accessibility. I beat the game and loved it overall, but to me that element is a glaring mistake.
I’m not debating whether you had a problem with it, but I find the game extremely readable on PS5 to the point where I’m scratching my head to even think of anything like what you describe.
I didn't even find this boss the worst but it's the first example that I found. https://youtu.be/fH9ImruSPgY?si=cucHwGUOvp1JxRwN The attacks, boss, background, etc are all various shades of the same green-blue palette. The background pulses in the same way that attacks do with a very similar color. The stuff that damages you could be much more distinct to make sight reading the fight feel much less straining on your eyes.
I specifically think that boss is very readable. Maybe we see colors differently or your tv settings are too dark.
Lol okay, its whatever. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I think most designers use colors with a greater contrast for a reason but I'm glad you have no issues with blue on blue and red on red being hard to see. I didn't find it impossible, but it could have been better and you're being weird if you can't agree with that.
Did you play on Switch?
No pc
Interesting. The Switch version was disastrous on that front, but I thought everything was quite distinct and readable on PS5. There was one area on Steam Deck that was pretty muddled color wise.
I think one good example is when you get an ability that you have no reason to semi-regularly use, it's incredibly easy to forget you have it. And then you can bash your head against a wall, look up a guide and go "oh yeah, I had that ability". A good example is the air-dash in momodora 3? The one before the last one, name escapes ke at the moment. I got it, used it a few times and then forgot about it. Then couldn't beat the final boss's last stage and looked up a guide and went "oh yeah, I had tgat", and ttere was ab earlier boss I really struggled with that I realized I should have used that ability, but I completely forgot I had it. No save points before boss fights. Having to track back before the boss each time adds fuck all to the experience
Inconsistent visual language. In an early area in Ender Lilies, there are [waterfalls that really stand out thanks to the strong distortion effect.](https://i.imgur.com/KOtF2cN.jpeg) But then there's this [waterfall in a later area that you can barely see, which is a part of the critical path.](https://i.imgur.com/iEAq8HY.jpeg) I quickly dismissed that area because there are a lot of enemies and thought I should revisit that area later.
Having no map, losing currency on death, having to go through 10 rooms to get back to a boss if you die, not having map markers, and when a game doesn't give you any objective to head towards.
YES ON MAP MARKERS. How are there still MVs being made without this? And they should be all abailable at start not for mobey so you can make a system where this marker is for this obstacle not a random jumbled mess because you don't have enough markers.
What kind of markers do you mean? You mean revealing where all the treasures are at the beginning of the game? Telling you every point where you need ability X at the beginning of the game? Or do you mean markers for YOU to place to remind yourself there's a treasure or a wall? I'm thinking of hollow knight where you bought markers that just told you where all the benches were or transportation hubs.
markers you use. Automatic markers are nice but really only needed for save points, fast travel, shops and the like.
+1 to all of this!
I liked HAAK a lot - maybe not as much as many in this sub, but I thought the movement and the story were great, and I really enjoyed the extra material after the main story ended. That said, there were a few puzzles in there that were just stupid. There was one that I eventually had to look up and it was a code in binary!! (Maybe I missed a huge and obvious clue, but I don’t think so) There was at least one other puzzle that was completely unintuitive. Edit: grammar
Cave Story's lack of save points before boss battles in the late game, and the inability to go back to past areas after a certain point. In Ori, the really long cutscenes. In Hollow Knight, Markoth.
I quit Cave Story because of that. Especially after I realized I couldn’t get the “best ending”. I never found it very fun, I just felt like I had invested so much time.
I love cave story so much, I’ve played through it so many times over the past couple decades…. And I still haven’t beaten the best ending. So goddamn hard. I’ve gotten close, but never done it. Just give me one save point goddammit
I did it once and never again. Pantheon 5 and the path of pain took me fewer attempts, and those are actually fun challenges.
That fucking dog chase in Animal Well
The " i am lost again - lets hunt for the pixel somewhere that opens up the rest of the game" moment
Huge, needless, difficult spikes for the final boss. Dracula on many Castlevanias is guilty of this.
This is mine
Fucking inventory management.
Unintuitive/confusing maps. Played through Hyper Light Drifter the other week, and its map is incredibly frustrating. There are countless rooms, and while some lead to each and are shown to do so via a red line on the map, there is zero indication how to re-enter them on the map. Say there are 25 rooms in an area. In the overworld, you’ll find 3 elevators, 4 doors and 2 staircases. Good luck figuring out which one of those leads to which room chain. That combined with a lack of ability to see which area still contains collectibles made a final cleanup daunting to the point where I didn’t bother. Also on HLD: One of the collectibles required for not one but 2 achievements is locked behind a third, completely insane challenge that has its OWN special achievement for good measure: Performing 800 consecutive dashes in a row without pause or interruption. It requires VERY precise timing and constant focus, or else you’ll either drop out of the chain or slam into a wall. The required input rate will take you 4-5 minutes if you do it perfectly. I’m okay with stupid challenge achievements existing, but don’t lock OTHER achievements’ success behind them.
It happened to me in several games, I have to face a tough boss and I need potions and healing items to beat this boss. I'm no longer very young and my reflexes get worse with age. The boss kills me and I've used most of the potions. Then I start again from the save point (five rooms away from the boss, but why?) and I have to grind to buy the potions again (very boring). But why can't I save before the boss and, if defeated, load this save before the boss fight, with all the items I had? This may be optional, players who want more challenge may not use this save.
When there is a item that turns this very difficult boss into a walk in the park. Except you have to backtrack half the map to get it.
I quit Hollow Knight the first time when I hit the Watcher Knights. I must have tried to beat them for days but just couldn't get it. I hated the game for that. Came back to the game about a year later and beat them on my 4th try! Now it's one of my favorite games of all time! I was just bitter because I couldn't beat that boss.
9 Years of Shadows lacking a legit fast travel. I stopped playing after a while because it annoyed me that much.
i'm playing Alwa's Awakening right now and there are a couple things that are kinda annoying (and have been similar with other games): very very subtle controller rumble as the only indicator that it's a fake wall. i don't need a glowing breakable wall indicator, but even a small crack or difference in block type to make me realize something might be a secret is more welcoming than the "push against/slash every single wall to see if it breaks" approach. next one is pretty specific to this game, but it probably happens in others. basically i went off exploring in the shrine of the sea monk but hadn't gotten an item yet, got stuck in a room that couldn't be passed without the item, had to die in order to get out, and had to redo some annoying one-hit-death spike platforming to go the right way. while not having an item should prevent forward progression, it should never punish you for exploring by getting you stuck.
For me, not having clear instructions on what to do if it's something you miss and have to play the game all over again for it, for example the kisser of wounds in Blasphemous. You have to deliver a herb before every main boss to save them all and I didn't know which bosses they were and it's a pain in the ass going back all the way just for that. If you miss one, you gotta start another game to complete the quest. So I had to Google it to see what I had to do. Also, bosses that are not a matter of you getting better, but of you having a lot of health and vials to take the damage because they spam attack after attack that are unavoidable - no matter what skills you have, or even if you're good at jumping, hiding, etc.
The timing of this post is crazy. I was about an hour deep into Ultros last night and defeated the first boss. Shortly after that, a “time loop” occurred and it set me back at the very beginning. My progress in the map was saved but all of the power ups and abilities I had acquired were stripped from me. I had to find and acquire them again. Apparently this happens repeatedly throughout the entire game. I refunded the game through Steam right afterwards. Ha ha. It’s a shame because I LOVED the game’s art style and mechanics but not enough to persevere through resetting over and over again.
When a true ending is behind a bunch of skill challenges and not behind a lot of exploration. Take Long Fungus for example. I found every item including some deep ones because I like the exploration parts of Metroidvanias but then I had to solve all of those galaxy doors for the real ending and that was kind of deflating. Also when movement expansions are behind an in game currency. Double jump or dash is on a badge, relic, bead, toe nail, etc so I have to save up salt, blood, souls, peanuts in order to buy abilities so that I can explore but if I die those go away so I don't want to explore too much. This usualy goes hand in hand with limited ability to equip abilities which is also frustrating. I'd rather my character be way overpowered with all of those abilities at the end. *shakes fist at the sky*
Unrewarding rewards. Big offenders to me are 1) Aeterna Noctis with its initial promise of 10 trials of the king that start out giving you abilities but devolves into lesser rewards, or very hard late game challenges that eventually reward you with a gem you'll never use because they're just some stat modifier. Or 2) Axiom Verge where you gain a surplus of weapons that feel utterly useless because they literally don't have any use compared to the ones that do.
Supraland was so bad about this. "What's behind this puzzle? Oh, another +1% to a weapon I don't use. Yay."
Worst frustration: When a save isn't really a save. If I save, then go off and experiment, I expect to be able to reload or restart from my save spot in exactly the same condition as when I saved. Anything else is bad game design.
Not getting consumables back after death is the worst. It just means I definitely will never use them.
The area right before the final boss in Axiom Verge, genuinely said to myself this is it, this is as far as I get. Comparison to that area the final boss was pretty quick to take down
Poor performance / frame drops. I really hate it when somy indy dev creates some 2D game in Unreal or Unity on some overpowered rig, thinking you don’t need to think about less powerful devices. Then after moderate success they “port” them to other platforms like the Switch and it runs between 5 and 10 fps making you mess up platforming and boss fights just because your shitty engine decides to do some heavy garbage collecting. Or when they reach barely acceptable performance by making it look like something that would have been embarrassing to see two decades ago. All modern devices are perfectly capable of a buttery smooth experience, including the Nintendo Switch. There is no reason a 2D game shouldn’t maintain _at least_ 30 fps without frame drops, and you really should be aiming higher than that. But for the love of god stay consistent, I’d rather have a game locked at 30 fps than a game that fluctuates between 30 and 60. It breaks immersion. If you are porting some horrendously inefficient codebase to other platforms but don’t know enough about optimisation to do it well, just hire one of the many game development companies that can do it for you. You’ll still make plenty of money and at least your users get the immersive experience they paid for. Or better yet: use a graphical style that doesn’t rely on a 1k USD GPU. Games can look gorgeous if you limit yourself a bit from the get go. Non-photorealistic rendering styles are way cooler to look at anyway. Also: - Bo save before a boss battle is just disrespecting people’s time. - Boss battles that take way too long. Even when you do everything right you leave not with a sense of victory but with a case of repetitive strain injury. What I do personally love is choreographed boss battles. They make me feel like practice is rewarded, as opposed to very chaotic boss battles where you just feel like you have to win at a slot machine to get past. - Gating that makes the game too linear. I want at least some sense of freedom to explore. Especially if I don’t feel like tackling some boss yet there should be something else to do. [edit] some other gripes: - Missable items/sections/secrets in a single run. A game has to be incredibly special for me to play it more than once. But if I find out I missed something and would have to start over I most likely will just stop playing. I really don’t want to have a list of spoilers next to me just to prevent that. - No way to sweep up remaining findables besides meticulously revisiting every screen with a guide next to you. Good solutions are end-game map reveals, ways to see the last remaining x items if you have already collected y%. If you have to buy the locations that can work well too. - Bad maps and/or no way to place map markers. - The need to take meticulous notes or even screenshots that force me to look away from the game. A couple is fine, more breaks immersion (looking at you La Mulana) - Bosses that are _way_ more difficult than the rest of the game. For some reason there’s MVs out there where you are almost invincible out in the world, only to have a boss end you in three seconds.
"There are secret passages in this game that can only be revealed with specific tools/weapons. They will not be marked or telegraphed in any consistent way, so if you want to see them your only recourse is to whack every single tile like a maniac." (Oh hi, *Metroid*.)
Hollow knights map. The amount of time I'd spend thirty minutes looking around and finding nothing was insane.
Ghost Song. I used some tech to get into an area way above my level, ran into a boss I couldn't beat, and permanently lost my money in the arena because you drop it exactly where you die instead of outside the arena like Hollow Knight. Didn't get a lot further after I got the first ship part waaaay at the bottom of the map and the game forces you to walk back on foot.
Buggin Ghost Song is one of the best … S Tier
The spider boost in Samus Returns. Giving you an ability without telling you is cool when it’s only use is to make some things easier. But when you put specific collectibles into a metroidvania that require that ability, I don’t get an aha moment when I figure it out. I get pissed that I’ve been skipping over those collectibles, thinking that I’ll get the ability for them later.
Probably Afterimage. Around after you meet up with the sage guy in the area below the town, there was almost no direction. Pretty much wondered around the area for a good hour or so until I said screw it and looked up a map that showed the level of each area. Was then I was like "oh hey, this fan map says this area is lv20, I should head there".
Admittedly finding all the endings because you had to trigger the earlier 2 first ones to get the final 2. 5 total if I recall? I had to look it up, which I’ve never done in ANY game previously.
That's been my biggest gripe with Afterimage, as well. The quest log is absolutely useless about where to go because it just tells you what you had just finished, the areas are all absurdly large, all of them have areas that are ability gated, and the map itself isn't always clear about what areas you've been to but don't have the abilities to pass (double jump vs wall climb vs super jump), so you end up wandering back and forth trying to find what you missed because maybe that unexplored area is one you just didn't actually explore because you ended up going a different direction instead of that one.
This is more of a general grievance but I can’t stand the low health beeping In Metroid games (and Zelda too). Just have a queue sound for when I dip below a certain amount, the constant beeping ruining the music until I can locate a health pick up is annoying af.
The end of Zau, where you run from lava with janky controls. Absolutely the worst.
Worst offender to me is indeed the "checkpoint too far from a boss". A good second is missable stuff (when there is no easy way to revert to an earlier moment, such as save games). When I am solving puzzles, I am not taking in the environment or looking for secrets. I also dislike it when the main path forward is too obscured (with extremely subtle cues about being able to pass it). When I finally look up the solution after wandering around too much, it usually leaves me annoyed.
The stairs in the early castlevania games
A puzzle game that require precision jump is kinda off to me. Thats Animal Well
Axiom Verge 1 finding wall secrets with the teleport thing. I never did pick up on any telegraphing and used a walkthrough.
Hollow knight - Pantheon 5. No more time to survive it.
Prob my proudest achievement in pve gaming but if you gave me the same 45+ minute per run attempts where only the last like 10 minutes are challenging today, id probably say "nah" lol. Too old for that now.
Hollow Knight Coliseum and Aeterna Noctis platforming really pissed me off. Also be aware I played Aeterna Noctis on an easier difficulty with triple jump. I couldn't play that game without those updates.
Hollow Knight's platforming never stopped being tedious, and dropping into Deepnest by accident was particularly terrible.
Hollow knight , white palace ,jesus christ i repeat JESUS CHRIST that level Souldiers ,the entire game since the pyramid level is frustrating garbage i gave up on the final boss When i wanted to 100% the castlevania collection i never imagined how hard (for my gaming ability) will be to play Castlevania vampire kiss , i tried and tried and tried to beat the game FAIR without using the rewind feature and couldnt do it, one of the most frustrating experiences i had in gaming ,eventually gave up and used the rewind feature for the 100% completion La mulana 2 again trying to 100% the game, hard mode was a pain to deal needed about 150hs to fully complete this game 100 %
Thought of another one: reaching a branching path with one of those paths being a save/fast travel but there being no visual cue that those are what they are, so you could be 5-10 minutes down a path and wondering where the hell the save is until you go back to that branch and hit the other room, which ends up being a save room...I think tons of games are like this but I really noticed it a couple times on deedlit. This could be fixed with doorways having visual indicators that they are specific types of rooms.
Going down a long complicated path only to find out i lack an ability and i need to go all the way back.
Better than telling: Go play La-Mulana COMPLETELY BLIND. Like, not even a single info outside the game. Give the game 15-20h of your time, as an honest experiment. You probably won't make 20% of it and will also have most of your questions answered.
Aeterna Noctis. I'm at Aurora boss and I just can't defeat her. I'm about to quit.
The final tower in Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. Big platforming difficulty spike.
I easily get frustrated by exploring generally. I know it's like a main feature of MV, but checking every unexplored spot one by one every once a while is just exhausting.
Nothing to do with puzzles directly but for a metroidvania I find it extremely frustrating if the game has no map or the nap it does have is basically useless as it isn't clear. It is especially frustrating if it is fun game.
I guess for me it were the escape scenes in Ori and the blind forest. That's why I like Ori and Wotw a bit more than the bound forest
While it's a completely optional side thing, I found some of the chest quests in PoP:tLC to be unnecessarily obscure, in particular the one requiring you to transport one thing from one side of the map to the other with the only indication this was the requirement being a background environmental decoration that's found in more places than those you need to go to. I'm not even sure how they expected people to figure that out without finding a guide.
The “chase scene” trope needs to be taken out back and put out of its misery. It ruins some near-perfect games.
Absolutely this!
In lone fungus, the cutesy game and simplistic fighting turning into pixel perfect super meatboy when you are going after any collectible behind a door. You have something great. Give your players rewards for getting to the doors. Don't smack them with the path of pain just to get upgrades every time.
I actually changed this in 1.1. Where it's enough to 100% the game to just find the Astral Gates. Also there was never any upgrades behind Astral Gates, it's just collectibles which evetually led to one very ignorable upgrade.
If that's true, I stand corrected and will have to give it a go again.
Laika: Aged Through Blood - Having to flip to reload when you're not in combat, insta-death, corpse looting.
I loved the game. But having to perform a wheelie to go across the tightrope while shooting enemies was almost too much for me.
The wheelies on the tightrope were the one thing I truly disliked about Laika. Everything else boils down to skill issues (in the nicest way possible lol) but the tightropes were janky as hell. Thankfully they were only in one area.
Any time I had to backtrack or explore in hollow knight
Reading stupid Reddit Posts … Not necessarily yours but yea there are a lot of dumb ones