Are Walkthroughs All Bad?

While playing Eternal Darkness over the holiday break I quite quickly got to a point where I couldn’t stand the games series of logicless puzzles. I felt like if I didn’t know how to proceed then I just had to press B as I passed by everything and hope I inspected the right thing. By about the halfway point I couldn’t take it anymore, but the vignette storyline among other things still had me very much intrigued. I decided to use a guide to deal with the trial and error style puzzles to minimize my frustrations while still being able to enjoy the more interesting aspects of the game.


Generally using guides is frowned upon as it defeats the purpose of actually playing the game. However, using a walkthrough can actually enhance some games by removing the parts that the player feels aren’t done well or detract from the game. Like I said above, by reading that I needed to grab some stick from somewhere that was indistinguishable as a usable object from everything else. Then stick it in some other thing that I happened to miss inspecting after searching an area for 45 minutes allowed me to move onto the other parts of the game more quickly.

I started thinking about other games I’ve used walkthroughs on. One series in particular that comes to mind is Metroid. My first foray into the series was with Metroid Fusion on the GBA and Metroid Prime on the GameCube. I got them both right after their release in November 2003 and got about a third into each before shelfing them. My problem was I never took the time to find any powerups because I just didn’t care. For whatever reason I found the exploration and solitary atmosphere to be excellent, but couldn’t be bothered to shoot every surface or in Primes’ case scan every surface.


A year or two later I ended up going back to Metroid Prime with a guide. I only used the guide to find items, not to solve puzzles or boss strategies. Once I got back to the boss I was stuck on I had acquired around 40% more health and more than three times the amount of missiles I could previously hold. I beat the boss on my first try with very minimal problems. As you can see, powerups play a huge role in Metroid, I just didn’t enjoy finding them all. My experience with Metroid Fusion is almost identical. I now consider Metroid Prime to be one of my favorite GameCube games, but without a guide I just couldn’t get into it.

So does anyone else feel the same way about certain games? If so, which ones?