10 Video Games That Hold Your Hand WAY Too Much

We’re living in a Golden Age of Video Games where the biggest AAA games are typically accessible to a large swath of gamers of different abilities.

After all, options are most certainly a good thing for a pastime that’s supposed to be fun above all else, yet there are also extremes where developers don’t get the balance right at all.

There’s including granular settings in your game and then there’s… forcibly grabbing the player’s hand and refusing to let go for potentially hours on end.

Though the onboarding process for any game is vitally important, these 10 games all went way overboard with it, hovering over the player like an anxious helicopter parent and refusing to just let them make a mistake or two.

Much as developers obviously don’t want players to bounce off their games in frustration, there’s a balance, and these games all categorically whiffed it by guiding the players a little too eagerly down a well-trod path.

When most of these issues could’ve simply been alleviated with skippable tutorials or toggle options, it was infuriating to see them robbing players of so much fun…

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is in many respects a fantastic game, even though it's also by far the hand-holdiest of all the mainline Zelda titles.

The opening hours in particular are frontloaded with a stamina-obliterating number of tutorials which, for those acquainted with the series, feel like wading through treacle.

It's a game where players are never really encouraged to veer off the beaten path or do anything except precisely what they were supposed to in order to advance linear progress.

And let's not forget about companion character Fi, who regularly interrupts gameplay to patronisingly tell you something you probably already know.

It's almost as though Nintendo was scared of newer fans of the series being lost for even a second. Thankfully for 2021's HD re-release, Fi's intrusiveness was scaled back and many of her disruptive remarks made optional.

And further to their credit, Nintendo has at least pivoted in the exact opposite direction of Skyward Sword in recent games, with Breath of the Wild quite famously hurling players into its open world with the ultimate objective "Destroy Ganon" and largely letting them forge their own path to the endgame.