Making games is hard right? They’re expensive, they’re labour intensive and once you’ve made them, you have to go to bed each night knowing that your game will still get outsold by an anime dating sim made in four hours by AI.
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| (Images property of Marvel and Sony Interactive Entertainment, Microsoft Game Studios, Konami, 2K and Bandai Namco) |
As such, it is an absolute miracle that any games come out good in the end. However, even some of the best games ever made still have their bad moments. Below, I’ve compiled a list of some of history’s best games that still struggled with the occasional bed-wetting incident either because of dodgy design choices, running out of money or just bafflingly bad ideas.
Beware spoilers for all of the games listed below.
Dark Souls - Tomb of the Giants
Upon its release in 2011, FromSoftware’s seminal fantasy RPG Dark Souls made a name for itself for crushing difficulty, gameplay-led design and a strangely high proportion of barefooted female characters. One thing that it was not renowned for at the time though was its effective use of lighting. While, for the most part, the game succeeds in creating a mysterious and compelling world to explore that you can actually see, this doesn’t apply so much to one of the game’s later areas, the Tomb of the Giants.
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| (Image property of FromSoftware and Bandai Namco) |
Located miles below Lordran, the Tomb of the Giants is a maze of winding tunnels and caves full of reanimated skeletons who all seem to miss having their flesh because they seem very keen on tearing yours off you. So far, so Dark Souls, it sounds like, so what makes the Tomb of the Giants special? Well, while the various spirits of the damned are harassing the player, the developers decided to enhance the experience by making the player almost completely blind.
Taking the dark in dark fantasy all too literally, the Tomb of the Giants is almost entirely pitch black. To compensate, there are some light-emitting items scattered throughout the game but none of them do much beyond replacing your total blindness with a good view of your player character and not much else. To make matters worse, the developers clearly didn’t want to be too generous because, there are also numerous sheer cliffs and blind drops within the tomb, some leading to treasure and some leading to a gruesome splattery death hundreds of feet below. The only way to tell the difference? Throwing yourself head-first into them.
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| (Image property of FromSoftware and Bandai Namco) |
In an overall exemplary game, the Tomb of the Giants stands out as a groan-inducing moment in any player’s Dark Souls playthrough which starts to toe the line between Dark Souls’ usual ‘tough but fair’ mantra and blinding frustration as you’re cast into a bottomless pit for the fourth time in ten minutes.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night AND Aria of Sorrow - Clock Tower
The classic series of 2D Castlevania games have spent the last 25 years being lathered with praise. As such, it is difficult to find any bad moments in such well-regarded games. However, while they may be rare, they can be found and not only that, they can be found in the same place in two different games!
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| (Image property of Konami) |
Both in 1997’s Symphony of the Night and its GBA successor Aria of Sorrow, you have to traverse the Clock Tower of Dracula’s castle and, in both cases, it sucks. The primary reason for this unpleasant suction is the level design. In both cases, the Clock Tower is designed in the form of a series of tall, thin rooms full of rotating cog platforms and overlapping gears representing some of the worst fictional occupational health and safety I’ve ever seen. This puts the onus on the player to platform their way up and down each tower without being thrown off or cast back down to the bottom by the constantly shifting platforms.
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| (Image property of Konami) |
Doesn’t sound so bad, you might be thinking, platforming in Castlevania usually isn’t so bad. Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to agree, but similarly to Dark Souls, the developers were clearly worried about the player having things too easy. That is the only reasonable explanation for why they would then proceed to fill the tower with flying Medusa heads that can turn the player to stone on contact. These pestilential, petrifying pains in the arse change the games’ Clock Towers from a manageable obstacle into a controller-breaking brick wall as players are cast time and time again off the moving platforms while they are too busy being frozen in stone to do anything about it.
While Symphony and Aria remain some of my favourite games of all time, I cannot deny that each time I consider replaying them, I can hear an echoing tick-tock sound as I flash forward to the thought of having to suffer my way through the Clock Towers again.
Bioshock - Proving Grounds and Fontaine
Speaking of my favourite games of all time, it seems like I might have a taste for flawed classics. I’ve gone on the record before to say that Bioshock might be my favourite game of all time. However, I can say with absolute certainty that the final levels of the game did almost nothing to earn it that title.
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| (Image property of 2K) |
What makes Bioshock so excellent is how it places the player in an established setting and, through a series of loose objectives, leaves them to make their own way through the carnage like a Border Terrier navigating the aftermath of its owner’s 3 week bender. What sets the final levels, Proving Grounds and Fontaine apart is that they almost completely dispense with this established tone in favour of leaning into the game’s first person shooter mechanics. You know, like every other game that came out in 2007.
Just in case that wasn’t enough, the game doubles down on the at-best dubious decision-making and decides that Proving Grounds should be an escort mission too! As if our order of a dog turd sandwich needed an extra dip, the game insists that your independent survivalist protagonist, Jack, would be better suited doing his best Joel from The Last of Us impression by being forced to protect defenceless little girls from hordes of mindless murderers.
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| (Image property of 2K) |
This is all then capped off by a boss fight against the game’s villain, Fontaine. This fight, rather than being some kind of philosophical battle of wits in line with the rest of the game’s themes, is instead about running away from the glowing roid-rage monster when he charges at you and hitting him when he gets disorientated. Do this three times like it's Mario 64 and you win. Not exactly the climactic battle you’d expect from a philosophical horror game but at least Jack doesn’t follow the Mario 64 example of calling his nemesis homophobic slurs during the fight, so I guess it could be worse.
Marvel’s Spider-Man - MJ and Miles stealth levels
Spider-Man is one of the most popular, profitable and well-known characters in the history of fiction. His combination of unique powers, colourful villains and relatable problems means that, even in the gaming sphere, he is able to draw a wide audience. It is also because of this popularity I can say with confidence that nobody buying a Spider-Man game was desperate to play as the other members of his best friends treehouse club.
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| (Image property of Marvel, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Insomniac Games) |
Now, I’m well aware that I’m not the first person to make this point. In fact, there was a widespread debate before Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 released whether or not there should be more missions that require you to play as Peter Parker’s friends after the lukewarm reception they received in the first game. Usually, I’d happily defend bold gameplay decisions like these for being important to the game’s pacing, allowing you to occasionally pump the brakes on the game’s narrative. Usually I would, but today I’ve can't help but admit that they’re just kind of crap.
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| (Image property of Marvel, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Insomniac Games) |
While I stand by my point about pacing, what kills these kinds of missions for me is the way that they play. Mary Jane and Miles Morales are both normal humans, at least to begin with, in Marvel’s Spider-Man which means that their ability to perform acrobatic takedowns and web-swinging is pretty limited by the prospect of broken bones and copious vomiting. As a result, the developers clearly felt that the only way to implement them into gameplay would be to convey their feeble humanness with forced stealth sections. The worst part of these sections is that they have to result in an instant game over as soon as you’re spotted because MJ and Miles’s only protection at that point is loudly apologising which doesn’t act as a great defence against bullets.
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| (Image property of Marvel, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Insomniac Games) |
These moments stick out like a sore thumb when the rest of Marvel’s Spider-Man feels so smooth and satisfying to play. The result is that every time anyone wants to replay that game you have to look forward to the MJ and Miles moments like a balloon whisk in the eye socket. The three or four of them that there are function like jury duty which you have to just suffer through so that you can get back to cartwheeling through Times Square at two-hundred miles an hour.
Halo: Combat Evolved - The Library
Last but certainly not least, we have a prime example of a truly terrible moment in an otherwise beloved game. The Library from the original Halo is the reason why the phrase, ‘I loved Halo: CE but…’ exists. I can’t say with much honesty that I have any nostalgia for Halo: CE myself but I can’t deny the game’s pedigree and the impact that it had on console shooters as a genre. The simple, solid gameplay that combined unique weaponry and vehicles with a story that knew when to take a back seat made it an almost instant success back around the turn of the millennium.
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| (Image property of Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios) |
With that in mind and in all seriousness, The Library in Halo: CE is the most boring library that I’ve ever visited, either real or fictional. As a level, The Library is all about finding out what the titular halo does and where the horrific zombified horde called the Flood came from. However, unlike the rest of the game which spans sunny vistas and snow-capped mountains, The Library is set entirely in a grey, dark, empty tower. No sunny vistas, no vehicles and no fun allowed. Instead, you get to wander around the inside of this colossal monument to nothing which is populated exclusively by onerous waves of enemies to deal with and one incredibly patronising AI whose main purpose is to vomit vague exposition at you in the form of proper nouns like ‘the Flood’, ‘the Forerunners’, and ‘the Covenant’.
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| (Image property of Bungie and Microsoft Game Studio) |
While this obviously is not brain-meltingly good game design as is, the most offensive thing about The Library is just how damned long it is. The level consists of a near complete circumnavigation of three nominally different but visually identical floors, simply following your floating AI football friend. All the while, you have to fend off wave after wave of the same Flood enemies who seem just as bored of the experience as you are because they can’t even be bothered to try and be scary anymore.
It’s safe to say that, if he's anything like me, when Master Chief eventually reaches whatever the Spartan retirement age is, he’s probably not going to look back on his blowing up of the original halo ring as a mistake so long as The Library didn’t get to survive.
Final thoughts
I hope you enjoyed this little jaunt down the memory lane of some of gaming’s best-worst moments. If you have any of your own suggestions that I might’ve missed, please do get in touch because I’d love to hear what other moments in great games people have struggled to jive with.
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