This is a topic I love. What are some games that felt imparsable or not understandable to you? Mostly asking from the perspective of games you played young and couldn’t grasp, but this can happen at any age to anyone. Did you ever come back to it? Did it make sense later?
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I’ll open - my first experience with thie was my mom’s copy of Q-Bert on the 2600. Looking back it was a simple game, but the isometric perspective totally confused me.
After that, I remember trying to play Mario is Missing on SNES a lot and never knowing what to do. I wondered how to get to the fun stuff with Yoshi and mushrooms - the sprites were reworked from Super Mario World, which my cousin had, so I thought it was the same game and I just could not find the fun parts.
When I got older, I played Morrowind on another cousin’s XBOX. I was so enchanted by what seemed like an entire simulated world, but could not for the life of me understand how to play (of course, no idea why my attacks all did no damage).
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I couldn’t understand Killer7 as a kid, but I beat it as an adult.
Same with the original Pathologic, I simply can’t deal with what it wants me to do and requires a lot of patience.
There’s also Das Geisterschiff. In concept, it’s quite simple: a first person dungeon crawler where you pilot a giant mech and work for corporations. The thing is that it’s mechanics can be a bit obtuse and even though I liked it, I’ll have to come back to it later.
Also same with Morrowind, I dropped it for Oblivion but came back to it later.
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Uhh gonna have a look at that mech crawler.
Oh wow! That looks cool. Ide play this in 640x480 if I can. Or pipe it into a crt honestly! 
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Oh yeah this is basically every PC game I played as a kid. I’ve covered a few of these on my channel. Alone in the Dark, Ecstatica, LBA, X-COM, Magic Carpet. Never had a clue what I was supposed to be doing. I would boot up a game and just wander around the first level, often not even knowing the controls. I would inevitably get killed and then just start again.
But I would just enjoy the vibes. The sounds, the music (if I could figure out how to get it working), the art style. So many games of my youth didn’t get beaten (or really even played past level 1) until I was an adult.
And I liked it that way!
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As a Pole probably a lot of games I played as a kid due to language barrier but one notable to me example is Heroes of Might and Magic IV, I feel like this is an effect of that, plus the fact that the game graphics make it look a little like a fever dream, and me being not a huge but still a fan of HoMM series, yet I never got back around to playing 4 as an adult (even though I remember enjoying it back then anyway despite it being afaik universally declared worst game in the series).
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My dad was gifted a boxed copy of Icewind Dale for PC when I was 10 maybe 12? I tried it, my barely english speaking ass was deeply confused at everything and could barely get past the first screen which meant I just entirely gave up. I’m curious how confusing it genuinely was at this point but I also have too many games too focus on first.
Another is Parkan: Iron Strategy a genuinely really cool concept that was a mix of RTS, FPS and mech-builder. But child me couldn’t get past the second level, even though at that point I was at least good enough at English to understand what was going on.
I did retry this a few years later, and while I got a bit further I am just total ass at strategy games so I’ve accepted it’s not for me.
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Gonna start with the classic: Minesweeper. Took me a while to understand as a kid. To be fair, it was Windows 3.1 so all I had to go on was a help file…
My first proper go at a Fire Emblem game was Awakening and I beat the game on Normal without remotely understanding how synergies and relationships worked. My hard mode playthrough was actually easier because it pretty much added so much I was breezing through a lot of encounters I struggled to brute force first time round.
I dunno who remembers the marketing at the time but NiGHTS was pitted against the likes of Crash and Mario 64 as the Saturn’s own ‘3D’ adventure title. And it’s not even close to being that kind of game, it took me ages to figure out how you’re supposed to play it. If you don’t know NiGHTS, it’s a 3D game that you play on a 2D plane for the most part, any movement across the third axis is pre-determined. So essentially you’re moving across a fixed ‘track’.
And that’s what it is, it’s a racing game masked as an adventure title. You can go for time or you can go for higher scores, the best way to get all A ranks is the latter but you’re still racing to collect as many orbs as possible in the time you have. Honestly think a big reason why its underrated is because of expectation vs reality.
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I had a lot of these experiences too, and I believe it’s still very much a part of experiencing games as a kid. You may not get the game’s overall goals or objectives, but you can control the character and be in the space.
I think this sort of play is basically just an extension of the same imaginative rules-less play that manifests with toys or make believe. For me it was just novel to have control over the game world, to see it respond to my input.
And kids still do this - when I got Mario Kart World and played its free roam mode I remember thinking “This isn’t really for me but as a kid I would have played this WAY more than the races.” Later I was catching up with a coworker who had bought it to play with his family, and his young son did exactly that. It’s rare that I find myself engaging with a game that way anymore, but when it does happen it’s always a comforting feeling.
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Here’s one I couldn’t understand as an adult: Crusader Kings. Granted I didn’t dedicate much time to it. But there are a lot of systems going on there that I felt like I needed to take a class to understand…
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A game I tried to grasp so many times as a teen was Carnage Hearts for the PS1, a niche game from Artdink. It’s practically a robot programming kit with its own iconographic coding language. You send one off to battle another and have to anticipate all the actions your opponent might take and code in appropriate responses and variables. Fascinating stuff, and I do enjoy tinkering with it these days every so often, but it’s still heavy going stuff.
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When I was first introduced to the Toronto game dev scene, a lot of the younger developers were obsessed with a type of game they called “Towlrs". They were small, single-screen games with some common visual elements that explained nothing about how to control them or what the objective was. There were definitely a few that completely stumped me, which was kind of the point some of these devs were going for.
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Every fighting game I’ve ever put my hands on.
On day I’ll sit down and really try to get it.
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I feel this. I have played fighting games my whole life and have friends who were very into FGC and I think the only term I ever felt comfortable understanding was “neutral.”
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I’ve been getting there, but its been a really slow process. It has definitely helped that I’ve had to cover them for the podcast so I’ve put in SOME effort to understand them better.
this is one genre i used to love but feel like i’m constantly trying to catch up to my level as a kid. i’ll say that a big help was watching a very beginner friendly tutorial on the concept of fighting games as a whole, it taught me to see it as a game of managing space rather than just trying to attack the other character.
also somewhat ironically was the genre that taught me about frames. i knew it intuitively as a kid but not being able to put it into words meant i really struggled with how to string together combos as the games got more mechanically advanced.
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I feel this, what I had to do was a change of perspective.
I used to be able to react to moves and stuff pretty consistently but as I grew older, that went away.
What I did was learn how to create situations where the opponent will end up doing what I need them to do in order for me to win by limiting their options with things such as standing at a very specific range from them so certain moves don’t hit me, for example.
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I’m by no means a fighting game guy, but the closest I’ve gotten to understanding one is Street Fighter 6. I was starting to get whose ’turn’ it was, when to whiff punish and really dialled in some reliable combos. Unfortunately I’ve probably forgotten all this again by now!
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Which character?