What do you do when you get stuck?

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

One of the best things about streaming games is that I have to power through. Usually I ask chat for help, or tell them I'm going to look at a walkthrough as the shared experience and story is more important than getting bogged down in the same place for hours.

 

I've had two games where I really got stuck on stream and took almost an entire 90 minute stream to get past a section while dying repeatedly, but it felt so good after - a couple of sections in Alien Isolation and a very tough series of fights in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

[Benji]

2 hours ago, ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster said:

One of the best things about streaming games is that I have to power through. Usually I ask chat for help, or tell them I'm going to look at a walkthrough as the shared experience and story is more important than getting bogged down in the same place for hours.

 

I've had two games where I really got stuck on stream and took almost an entire 90 minute stream to get past a section while dying repeatedly, but it felt so good after - a couple of sections in Alien Isolation and a very tough series of fights in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

I'm amazed it was the fights in Senua and not that section where you have to go through the correct mirror or whatever it was. If I hadn't followed a guide I never would have completed that section.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

55 minutes ago, Benji said:

I'm amazed it was the fights in Senua and not that section where you have to go through the correct mirror or whatever it was. If I hadn't followed a guide I never would have completed that section.

I definitely had to replay the mirror section a few times but for me it was the Sea of Corpses chapter where you have to fight wave after wave in that water with the anguished corpses hanging out of the cliffsides and fire everywhere. I was playing it on hard I think and that was tough. 

[Skummy]

it depends on the kind of "stuck", I suppose.

My girlfriend has been intermittently playing Monkey Island 2, ahead of me eventually playing Return to Monkey Island, and I've helped her with a few puzzles by kind of making suggestions of where she should go next - I haven't played MI2 nearly as much as 1 or 3, so it's not like I know it all inside and out anyway - but there's been a couple that I've just told her what she had to do; she was never going to figure out the "monkey wrench" puzzle, and the spitting contest is one of those infuriating puzzles where you basically get it, but chances are you're going to miss one out of the four or five steps. I don't think there's anything wrong with using a walkthrough in that kind of situation.

I'm playing Horizon Forbidden West at the moment, and there was a collectible (the vista point, in the ruins of Las Vegas) that I just could not find at all. It's super fiddly, and neither the clues or the map are any use at all, so I just looked that one up. I'll rarely use YouTube videos, but if there's a text walkthrough, that'll do. But when the options are looking it up, or wandering aimlessly for an hour and getting frustrated, I'm going to look it up once it becomes clear to me that I'm not figuring this out on my own. It's never my first choice on a puzzle, though. And with a game like Horizon, it'll never be something I look up for hints in combat, because there's always a clear path to beating any enemy, no matter how difficult it is.

Sometimes I'm just not good enough at the game. I started playing one of the Wolfenstein games recently, and I suck at it. Got killed like three times in the first bit of real combat. Luckily, it lets you change difficulty mid-game, so I knocked it down one setting. I still suck, only slightly less. I don't know if I want to play it on the easiest possible setting, so I might just give up. 

 

I don't think there's anything wrong with looking for help or hints or walkthroughs, or accepting the kind of help that some Nintendo games give you if you keep dying on the same level. You've paid for the whole game, so you deserve to access as much of the content as you can, rather than some of it being walled off by your ability to perfectly time a series of jumps.

I think the distinction for me is always that I'll look up where to find something quicker than I'll look up how to solve something.

[METALMAN]

I pay to win or I cheat. Usually I pre-emptively pay to win or cheat so I don’t have to risk getting stuck.

Srsly tho I only play Euro Truck Simulator and if I get stuck on that I call a tow service to haul me to the nearest repair garage.