Gaming

Not necessarily a feature but I went into Forager blind and was playing on a shitty linux laptop through wine, leading to me playing at half speed for about 12 hours before I eventually opened the game in a window on accident and discovered that the game was meant to run at 60 fps and my laptop just couldn't handle running it at that speed in fullscreen

I think a lot of the reason Dark Souls has a reputation as a super hard game is that it doesn't do anything to explain how weapon scaling works

In the original XCOM my brother and I didn't realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother's mind!

In Legend of Dragoon I hit a wall on a Disc 2 boss and was stuck for months. After I took a break and came back I realized you could change your equipment--I'd never upgraded anything equipped and was using all of the starting equipped weapons and armor. This was not my first RPG, nor was I young enough to use age as an excuse.

I played through all of Tears of the Kingdom without making a hover bike.

I played Mass Effect 3 all the way to just before the final mission using only level 1 weapons. When I was doing my final walk through of the ship I went down to the hangar and encountered a terminal I hadn’t seen that let me upgrade my weapons. I had like 700,000 credits and upgraded everything right then and there.

The first ever game of harvest moon was on the switch last year. I repaid the debt by fishing and collecting shells as I couldn't figure out how to dig as I couldn't obtain a pickaxe to finish my first ever quest. After 6+ hours of foraging around the staeting area, I realised that if you sleep, the quest progresses and you get the pickaxe...... Yea!

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I don't know if this really counts, but I kind of self sabatoge myself with almost any game that has skill points that aren't easily resettable. I'm so indecisive into what to place them into that I end up holding onto the points without using them. So I miss out on power up skills, spells, all sorts of things depending on the game.

There was an old PC game called MegaRace. Somehow I changed my controls and set steering to Left was Right and Right was Left. I never noticed this for the entire time I played it.

When I bought Test Drive 4 the first race I proceeded to drive straight into a wall. After struggling for a while I went back to MegaRace and instantly realized what my issue was.

Fast forward a decade or two later after doing only console racing games, proceeded to buy Dirt Rally and use my keyboard and muscle memory kicked in and drove straight off the track. I basically have to set driving games I play keyboard with to reverse steering. Thankfully a wheel, seat, pedals, and shifter have alleviated this problem in my current life.

I'm pretty sure Animal Crossing: New Horizons never actually tells you that you can run by holding B. You just have figure it out by accident... I think I played for a month or two before I realized it was possible when watching someone play on YouTube.

Half Life. Final boss fight. Not enough ammo and I couldn't be bothered to go several hours of saves back to replay and conserve ammo.

Dead Space 2. There was an ability to slow/freeze time which I thought was silly and OP so I didn't put any points into it. Later on there's a boss that requires the ability to freeze time. The stupid thing is is it wasn't even a fight, you just had to run away through a locked door but you needed the time ability to open it before it gets you which is impossible to do without frickin freezing time.

I never finished it.

In Red Dead Redemption 2 on PS4 the deadeye button was kind of inconveniently placed and barely explained. I didn't realize how useful it was until I played on PC. On console i was struggling so hard in the shooting sections

In the SSX series you can use one of the analog sticks to move along the rail instead of just falling off like a moron(me)

I got hard stuck on one of the seymour fights on Mt. Gagazet and couldn't be fucked to grind out enough levels to brute force it so that's still where my save file is stuck at some 20 years later.

Star Ocean 2! I didn't realize I didn't have to find a save point, that I could just save on the world map, until like 90% through the game cause I noticed when I was in the menu screen that save was lit up like it was useable. Oops.

Also, the first time I played, I didn't use the feature that empowers your stats on FFVIII, cause I didn't bother to read the directions. Got caught on a late game boss fight and gave up until years later when I finally read the directions and had so much fun save scumming and exploiting renewing magic draw points. (Basic memory from like 15 years ago so I could have some details wrong, but you get the point)

I went into Undertale completely blind and played a couple of hours before I realized you could get through every encounter without killing anything. I kind of gave up after that because I felt so bad.

This is lampooned in this epic NPC man skit

Nioh. You can transform into demon mode and I didn't know until I played the sequel. It's a soulslike so I played it exactly how I play Dark Souls which made me completely lose out on the unique and in-depth systems the game has to offer.