Fart Gas - When Handholding gets stupid.

Fart Gas.

Now that’s a sentence to open an article about handholding in games, am I right? Well, if you are confused, dear reader, this is a term that stuck to the release of WOLVERINE, the newest, flashiest, most expensive blockbuster title for Playstation 5. And as you can imagine, it is not a term of endearment, but a rather pejorative callout for the game excessive and insulting coddling of the players. Despite linear nature the game still doesn’t trust the players to be able to follow a damn corridor, and does its utmost best to steal every inch of agency and self-determination from the players by giving massive visual ‘cues’ to where everything is hidden, where to go, what to do…

Which also makes me wonder - can you can it ‘finding secrets’ if said secret emits a giant blue ping visible from across the entire level? I would argue that is hardly a secret but a detour for some padding of game time…

Anyway! Back to Fart Gas. While you can disable lots of the terrible guidance systems that are turned on by default in this game, in plenty of moments the scent tracks will always be present and there’s no way to turn them off. Sure, narratively it even makes some sense - Logan is a mutant with exceptional tracking skill and superbly sharp senses. But… gameplay wise, it is still mostly pointless. There is no way for you, the player, to get lost, because there’s no place on the tight levels to get lost in!

Just follow the smell curiously colored like liquid in hygienic pads commercials.

On Twitter - that vile hive of most vicious minds - I did spot a comment that made me snort. Basically, insulting the game for being mindless slop that could be played and completed by a slime mold. To quote: “Use your amoeba sense to find the oats at the end of the maze”. Yikes! But it doesn’t feel far off, in fact, it stung me as extremely on point. QTEs that cannot fail. Markers, pings, trails that guide you to everything. Linear stages, lots of cutscenes… Player agency, a thing I consider most sacred in games that TRY to be games, should be on a glorified pedestal. Not forgotten and discarded.

Consider DARK SOULS. Yes, here comes whiplash! DARK SOULS and Soulslike in general might not be your cup of tea, and that’s fair, but the game IS considered one of the most important games ever made. It won the Best Game of All Times award. It is universally praised as one of the best games ever made, one which influence is so widespread, so comprehensive and total, that gaming nowadays would look completely different if it didn’t exist.

And one of the things that I - and countless others! - found so refreshing about DARK SOULS is its callousness towards the player. This game holds back no punches. It will kick you in the boingloings when you’re down. If you ask for help or a handout, it will spit on you and tell you to find your own way. Now, that might sound horrible to some players, and that’s okay - games aren’t… SHOULDN’T… be aimed at everyone on the planet. But once you delve a bit deeper into discourse you will often find that plenty of people do not consider DARK SOULS, even the whole series, to be actually hard games. They aren’t hard, brutal or impossibly cruel. They just don’t hold your hand at any moment and let you make all the mistakes you can without a care in the world.

You can wander off into areas that will destroy you. You will be punished for being greedy. You will not be given any grace period if you stumble. Make an error, pay for it. No yellow paint to show you where to go. No handy characters telling you what to do. No map with markers, no pings, no objective points to navigate towards. All you have is your own brain, your own senses… and impeccably designed world that helps you navigate by being so tightly crafted, so perfectly interconnected, that it feeds your sense of wonder with every discovery. It’s magic.

You don't need big pulsing objective markers if your level design sparks curiosity on its own merit.

Same can be said about another game that is praised left and right as a titanic title that shifted the landscape of gaming - BREATH OF THE WILD. This game also is extremely light of any handholding. You’re given most basic input tutorial. Get out of a cave. Given final objective. And bam. Done. Do whatever you want. World is vast, full of interesting points, but the game does absolutely nothing to nudge you in any direction, really - it relishes the fact that you can just do whatever you want in any direction. Go nuts!

And here comes the bitter pill of the whole thing…

You can argue that all the markers on maps, all the breadcrumb trails, all the big pings, visual indicators and yellow paints, that they are ‘accessibility’ option. That they make the games less frustrating. Easier to navigate, easier to get to the Fun Parts. And while I will never say a word against having as robust accessibility options in games as possible, they can be neatly stuck in their own tab in Settings, ready for a player who needs them to turn them on. I can absolutely understand how players with color blindness or hearing issues might need extra help, that’s great to have!

But for me it often seems that this bloat of handholding features isn’t there to aid the players, but to hide the poor design choices, incompetence, blatant laziness. If you look at Horizon Zero Dawn or Assassin Creed’s maps… they are bloated behemoths, huge and littered with garbage of pings, markers and bits. Your character when wandering will murmur out loud stuff like “Mmm, I better check this cave here” or “There’s a thing around here!” or such nonsense. Then they will scatter those yellow paints or equivalents to make sure the player sees what’s accessible and what isn’t. But for me, that’s just bad design - why make realistic, sprawling maps, if you then need to trim out pathways for the players to follow? In BOTW you can go everywhere. Every square inch of the map. In DARK SOULS you need exactly zero ‘markers’ to know where to go.

The absolute dread of Assassin's Creed: Unity map - thanks guy, I was almost at risk of finding out something on my own.

And that is a pain point for me, because I will enjoy some of those games way more if they trust me to be curious. If they were happy to HIDE stuff from me and make me work for finding them out. The pleasure, the delight of making your very own discovery is incomparable to merely going to a point on the map that was fed to your eyes. It’s mostly an AAA curse, too - the lack of trust in their players, the almost insulting level of aid that makes me wonder if the developers thought that people who play their games have attention span of a cocker spaniel puppy that wet itself. Let me make my errors. Let me find my own way. Let me cherish organic learning! Don’t show your hand for free, make me work for it. The sense of triumph when you find out a solution on your own is what fuels the engagement and sticks to memory like tar. I literally remember nothing from my time playing Horizon Zero Dawn… But I will always remember how I found the Windmill to burn in DARK SOULS 2 to nerf the Baneful Queen boss fight. Or finding the first lift back to Firelink Shrine. Or the awe and wonder I felt when gliding through the air in BOTW and finding one of the colossal labyrinth constructions. Inspiring stuff.

This, ultimately, is my call for the game dev at large, a stone tossed into the ocean. Be Brave. Be Bold. Put some trust in your audience that they do have a mental capacity above that of an average penguin. That we CAN figure out that Red Key goes into Red Doors without the protagonist mumbling “gosh if only I could use this RED KEY to go through RED DOORS”. We get it, we can do it! And if you wonder if the risk of letting us stumble is worth it, just ponder about the games that are considered the best ever made, and see how they handle the whole Trust in the Players topic on their end…