I agree with this article. Classic adventure games have a lot of terrible, frustrating design. On the other hand... I think there's something to be said for ob

I agree with this article. Classic adventure games have a lot of terrible, frustrating design. On the other hand... I think there's something to be said for obscurity as a mechanic. Games these days tend to be easy and digestible. They're built on systems that we're all intimately familiar with, and we can usually tell how a game's going to go from the first 15 minutes. So when I played Metro 2033 for the first time, I suddenly found myself in unfamiliar territory. My mask could get smudged and break. My filters could run out, as could my ammo. I knew that I could easily box myself in and ruin my save if I didn't manage my resources carefully. So I found myself running around and exploring some really terrifying nooks and crannies — air running out and ammo on the low! — just for the chance to get some extra bullets or scavenge the filter off a corpse. At one point, in a dark cavern surrounded by dangerous monsters, I even found myself switching to my rare currency-ammo — something I would never do in any other action game — just because I hadn't brought enough supplies with me. I eked out with just a few bullets remaining, wondering if they'd last me until the end of the mission. It was truly exhilarating. Another great example is the metroidvania platformer La-Mulana. From an outside perspective, that game is incomprehensible. You can go in one of a dozen different directions. There are obscure phrases scribbled on the walls, each corresponding to a puzzle somewhere in the ruins. Pushing a button is as likely to open a door right in front of you as it is one across the map. You find strange items all over the place, none of them with any obvious function. Some traps insta-kill you or wall you in, and some items can't be found again if you approach them the wrong way. A real mess, right? But this sense of mystery — that I'm in way over my head — is something that truly excites me, rekindling distant memories of exploring strange shareware worlds through my creaky, yellow-tinted CRT. Back then, as a kid, the world past my backyard was a nebulous, murky unknown to me, and games were an extension of that feeling. Now, as an adult, I mostly understand how the world works. That frontier is closed. But that feeling can still be found in those few difficult, incomprehensible games that don't follow the trends. You're not coddled by them. There are no rails. You're in a hostile world that wants you out, and it's up to you to figure out how to survive it. I don't like consulting walkthroughs. I don't like instant-death traps. I don't like stumbling around aimlessly looking for a solution. And yet, when I'm deep in a game like this, I somehow find that I can't pull myself away.