Should games offer more help when we get stuck?

As I said in my recent review, I generally had a blast making my way through Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PlayStation Vita. Despite some annoyances with the system's touch-screen and tilt-based controls, I had a good time working through the shooting and climbing sections and being rewarded with some well-acted witty banter in the cut scenes.

But despite my overall enjoyment, there was still one point in the game where I was so frustrated I was ready to turn it off and never return. And while this frustration was probably at least as much my fault as the game's, I still think it would have been nice, and much less frustrating, if the game had offered just a little help getting me past that point.

My extended moment of frustration came in Chapter 15, in a section where Drake is supposed to search a large, open cavern area to find four statues with carved patterns that are important to opening an otherwise impassable door. I was able to find the first three statues easily by simply wandering around the area and looking for the telltale handholds that indicate "climb here." But no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't figure out how to get to the fourth statue. I spent at least a half an hour wandering aimlessly around the huge cavern, examining every nook and cranny and retracing my steps to find the path I was obviously missing.

It was particularly frustrating because, up to this point, my experience with Golden Abyss had been pretty well paced, with just the right amount of action placed between the entertaining cut scene story breaks. Now, after a half-hour of fruitless wandering in this cavern, that careful pacing had been thrown out the window, and I was beginning to lose the thread of the plot altogether in my struggle.

Eventually, I was forced to Google for a video walkthrough of the area, which an enterprising player with the Japanese version of the game had thankfully posted. Of course, I felt pretty stupid when my YouTube guide simply hopped over a small section of wall that I had probably passed in the game dozens of times by that point, finding the obvious path to that last statue in the process. But as mad as I was at myself for missing this, I was just as mad at the game for letting me miss it for so long.

Game-beating triumph vs. game-ending annoyance

I know some of you gaming purists are probably actively hostile to the idea that games should help players in any way. You're probably thinking back fondly to the days when you'd spend weeks in front of some impenetrable LucasArts adventure game, trying literally every item combination and mouse click location until you finally stumbled on to the solution for a particularly tricky in-game problem. The feeling of achievement you got from that accomplishment was probably akin to a religious experience for some of you, and you look back on the results of your effort with a huge sense of nostalgic pride.

But for every example of gaming triumph through struggle and perseverance, there are probably at least as many tales of players who just gave up after banging their heads against a seemingly impassable wall for hour after hour. Not only will these players never get to experience the remainder of the game they bought (and presumably wanted to see through to the end), but their last memory of the game will be one of frustration and heartbreak. It doesn't matter if the solution should have been obvious, or if the player was at fault for missing something staring them right in the face; they're still going to remember the game as "the one where I got stuck on that stupid puzzle."

And the focus of gaming has changed a bit since those golden days as well. In a game like Golden Abyss, the gameplay is arguably just filler to work through before the next bit of impeccably-acted dialogue. Moving the story along in a brisk manner is what makes Uncharted interesting, at least as much as the by-the-numbers shooting and climbing. With games increasingly acting as a storytelling medium, do we really want to stop a large portion of the audience from experiencing the end of that story simply because they get stuck in the middle of the second act? Try and imagine if a movie or book didn't let you even see the ending unless you proved yourself worthy in some way.

Help a brother out

Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for games that basically play themselves by immediately telling you how to solve a puzzle before you've even had a chance to see it. I also get frustrated at games that seem determined to hold my hand throughout the entire experience, removing any sense of exploration or adventure in favor of a prescribed set of carefully outlined steps towards the end.

But there are also plenty of games that fall too far on the other end of the spectrum, throwing the player into a wide open situation with the expectation that they will figure everything out without the slightest bit of help. What I'm looking for is a happy medium. In the Uncharted example, for instance, my AI partner could have piped up with some sort of subtle hint after ten minutes or so of fruitless searching for that fourth statue. Something like "I think I saw a path over by that wall," could have gently broken me out of my wandering loop without even breaking the world of the game. These sorts of hints could even be turned off by default, in deference to the "hardcore" players who would bristle at a game that has the temerity to offer them assistance.

Sure, finding the statue with this kind of in-game hint wouldn't have been as satisfying as finding it on my own, but it would have been a hell of a lot more satisfying than searching the Internet for a video walkthrough, which is what I ended up doing. Why do we simply accept that many players will be forced to go outside a game for help to simply make it through to the end? Wouldn't it be better to design our games so they provide a gentle, organic push to those players that are obviously having a hard time?

Some game makers are already moving in this direction. Many of Nintendo's recent games, for example, have optional video walkthroughs for certain areas, or offer to play through tricky sections automatically after a few dozen failed attempts. Other titles, like Vita download Escape Plan, simply let you skip a tough level and come back to it later if you get stuck. I, for one, would like to see more games that aren't simply content to tell players, in essence, "Sorry, but you're not good enough to see the rest of the game you paid for."

Listing image by Photograph by Bradley Gordon