10 Video Games Impossible To Beat Without A Guide

You ever play a game, expecting to just sit back in you chair and just let yourself melt into the comfy experience, only for it to slap you across the face with a hand wearing a sandpaper glove to make sure you're paying attention. Where suddenly you're staring down an insane puzzle or enemy that you just can't overcome but you NEED to beat in order to progress?

Well in that case, you look up a video game guide.

These have always been around ever since video games evolved to have more than one screen, but some really do require them in order to proceed.

Whether it's because the game design is so obtuse and user unfriendly that you're expected to have a master's degree in economics or rocket science in order to understand, or because it's just really bad at communicating to the player what they need to accomplish in order to succeed, you can find yourself stopped dead in your tracks.

Also this isn't like, say, Persona 5 with its difficult, often obscure classroom questions. You don't NEED to answer those correctly to proceed. This list solely looks at titles where, unless you have a wiki open on another screen, your ass ain't going nowhere.

Frankly, this whole list could have been made up of Lucasarts point-and-click games and their many copycats, but don't worry, it isn't. Just, ya know, most of it.

But don't act like you don't know why. These games are infamously infuriating due to their need to be cute with their puzzle solutions, more often than not spitting in the eye of the most logical solution in favor of something ridiculous because the devs NEED to feel smarter than everyone else to justify their choice in career to the spirit of their father that keeps whispering "failuuuuure~" to them in the lonely hours of the night.

The Monkey Island series was one of the grandfathers of this grand tradition of pissing people off through inane puzzles, and out of all of them, Monkey Island 2 is the one fans typically point to as the most egregious one.

LeChuck's Revenge is the embodiment of everything charming but also everything teeth grinding about the 90s Lucasarts library. The puzzles will drive you to madness, and then drive you to drink when you see how simple (if insane) their solutions were the whole time. The one everyone seems to agree is the worst is the dreaded monkey wrench puzzle, which requires you to use a metronome, to hypnotize a monkey, and then use the monkey as a wrench for a pump.

What's that? That sounds stupid and insane and no sensible person would ever think to do that? Pretty much, yeah. Fortunately, there was a help line for Lucasarts games around the time of this game's release, which you could call for hints, for a price of course.

Kinda makes it all line up, huh?