10 Video Games Impossible To Beat Without A Guide

6. Myst

LA Noire Interrogation
Brøderbund

In other point-and-click games, you have other people to talk to who will give you directions for where to go in order to keep things moving along and help you solve puzzles. A luxury many PC gamers in the 90s never realized how much they took for granted until they first played Myst.

Myst's main gimmick was that there was no one else on the eponymous isle except for you and some particularly chatty books. And it's your job to find out what the hell happened to everyone else. The problem is that with no sense of direction, no one to talk to, and very few visual cues of what your goals are and how to go about them, you'll very quickly get lost or stuck on a puzzle because this game is REALLY bad at feeding you information, even on the stuff you need to know in order to progress.

Due to this inability to properly convey - either visually or verbally - what you need to do to advance the story from minute to minute, any playthrough without a guide to help you along is going to leave you banging your head against the wall.

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John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?