Hollow Knight was kind of like this, with a better tutorial, and I loved the game for that. The exploration felt so much more mysterious.
based.
game doesn’t save your hitpoints, starts you at 30 hp every time
cringe.
“Which way is Firelink Shrine?”
The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you’ve played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you’re presented with a narrow passage you can’t crawl through. At this point, you’ll discover that you can also go left. There’s another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you’ll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can’t jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.
Yeah, the best games back then had tutorials built in. Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 is probably one of the best tutorials ever made.
The first areas of the Halo 1, 2, and 3 were all designed to have all the movement training in it and have sections for the new weapons.
The level 1-1 glazing is crazy. It’s iconic for being the most played level but it’s not an incredible engineering feat.
I just said it was a good tutorial…
Not your particular comment, the common view on level 1-1 is it’s the perfect tutorial. I’m not targetting you specifically
Not to mention that at that time, games shipped with an instruction booklet that told you the controls…
I liked the FFVII manual that gave you bios of all the characters, along with telling you that Cid is “old”.
He’s 32.
In those days tutorials weren’t a thing. Games came with manuals that you were expected to actually read.
And they were cool! And it was better that way! And get off my lawn!
In those days, developers largely didn’t know the concept of player training through gameplay and had to resort to text dump tutorials (or worse, tutorial videos (where applicable)).
? You start in a room you where right leads to ledge you can’t jump to, and left takes you over a pyramid with a power up and small hole.
It was gameplay teaching you.
Mind, this is the only such moment. The rest of this game is fucking bullshit that ate my childhood
