Unfinishable games

[heltenjon]

Have you ever wasted your time trying to solve some cryptic puzzle in a game, and then it turns out it can't be solved? I thought it would be nice with a thread where we can name the games that are unfinishable, either because they are buggy, or that they are designed like that. Some joke games may take their humour from making the game unwinnable, but wasting the players' time by being vague about it is just unnecessary, in my view.

Ever since being caught in a never-ending loop in The Fabulous Wanda on the Commodore 64, I've felt this isn't really funny for the player, but rather a disappointment. Now, there may well be some play value in a buggy game, but it would be nice to know when to stop trying. Likewise with demos without a scripted ending. So let's help each other out, shall we?

Pixely Pete (MAGS 2001-07) seems to lack an ending.

[Creamy]

Recently, I've played Fur Balls 1 - evil be thy name: Bundles of mayhem!
I got stuck in a room with a smoking fur ball watching the TV . Probably a bug since the game was fair and easy up to that point. Plus, you can't leave the room and few things are interactive. Heltenjon proved me wrong. See his post below.

Broken Sword 2 - the Smoking mirror
If you don't pick up the worm that George spits from a Vodka bottle in the first room, you're stuck with the fisherboy way later in the Carribean. I was wrong. Apparently, another option becomes available if you forgot the worm.

[Pax Animo]

I had the CD version of Toonstruck which had an unsolvable puzzle in it. I was big into point n click games at the time so i knew some of the annoyance that could be involved within their puzzles so i spent days trying solve this Toonstruck puzzle which later on turned out to be a game breaking bug. Think i read about the bug in a gamer magazine as access to the internet back then was limited.

[Stupot]

I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head.

It can be quite easy to assume a game is bugged when you are certain that you’ve exhausted every possibility. A recent example for me was playing Slasher’s In Search of Marina*. It’s only a short game with a few rooms so it didn’t take long to do a complete sweep, clicking every possible hotspot, trying every item on everything and exhausting all conversations with NPCs, but still I was stuck. I was this close to PMing Slasher to tell him his game was broken when something flickered and I realized I had missed a hotspot after all. And sure enough, clicking that hotspot triggered an important item to appear in another room.

This kind of thing happens all the time and I’m usually quite quick to assume it must be the game’s fault, rather than mine.

^{(*for MAGGIES. Please play the games and vote!)}

[Mandle]

Not a puzzle bug, but it always annoyed me in my version of Roadwar 2000 that there was a bug so simple I could have fixed it myself if I had access to the code, but put the game in a state where it could no longer progress:

During a battle, if you boarded an enemy vehicle and killed all the NPCs on board it, you took control of the vehicle. This should have been a very cool feature as it gave you hard-won access to vehicles already in decent running order with armor already attached in most cases.

But the coder(s) had forgotten to subtract one from the number of remaining enemies counter when you did so. So the game always thought there were enemy vehicles left to be dealt with when there are not and the combat could never end.

Of course, crashing the vehicle yourself and destroying it also didn't help as it was no longer counted as an enemy vehicle.

Reverting back to the previous save was not the annoying thing, as on a Commodore 64 you saved after each bit of progress as crashes were likely (no pun intended).

It was the fact that I never got to use that cool feature that a lot of hard work had obviously gone into only to be screwed up by one tiny error and, obviously, no testing, that really annoyed me.

I tried downloading it a few years ago, as the bug was fixed in later versions, and playing it but the clunky keyboard-only interface that I was used to as a kid was just too annoying to deal with as an adult.

Someone should do a remake of that otherwise amazing game with modern controls!

[Gilbert]

They're not really unfinishable, but bugged me for quite some times, for two commercial games.

• Leisure Suit Larry 2
  BITD I've played to the very end of the game and the last action is
  
  Spoiler

  obvious to make a Molotov cocktail by putting a bag into a bottle,

  [close]
  but every time I typed
  Spoiler

  "put bag in bottle"

  [close]
  it's a game over.
  No matter what I did I was unable to finish the game, until years later when I came across Al Lowe's own site and found out it's a glitch in the parser that the word 'bag' was always recognised as a verb instead of a noun unless you typed something like "the bag" and when I tried this I immediately completed the game.
  The problem was, I always just typed commands like "get stuff" and "look bed" and they never failed, but it would fail in the very last command. This glitch had me stuck in the game for at least 15 years! Also BITD there was no convenient places liked the Internet and some friends I had asked said that the command was correct and they could complete the game (probably because they always typed 'the' like Al Lowe himself did). This was so annoying and this glitch was never fixed.
• Rex Nebular (a Microprose point and click adventure game)
  It's been a while so I couldn't remember details. This game had two modes, Easy and Normal (or was it Hard? didn't remember).
  As a first time player I decided to try Easy mode first and... I was stuck in the middle of the game when I had to disarm a bomb (or plant a bomb? I can't remember. Anyway, it's also about BOMBS like in LSL2's case).
  I was stuck for maybe a few weeks until I decided to start over and try the Normal mode... and I got through that part readily!
  That meant the Easy mode was even harder!
  The reason was that in "Easy" mode they removed a number of required actions for the player to make progress, but after such changes, many of the actions were no longer logical.
  In the part in question you could never guess that you just needed to jump to the end without doing all the in-between logical steps and I think this was just poor design.
  

[Matti]

I got an example that's neither a design flaw nor a bug, and it still makes me angry after ~ 20 years.

When I played Fallout 2 back then, it drove me made that I couldn't complete a certain quest (finding Jonny near Modoc). I wasted hours on the mission without success. The worst thing is that it took me years to realize that in the german version of Fallout, which I played, every child was censored out of the game (because otherwise you would be able to kill children in the game!). I was not only angry about the rigorous and often silly* censorship in Germany (yet again), I was particularly angry about the fact that they didn't even care about leaving an unbeatable mission in the game 

I was happy about completing the quest years later when I replayed Fallout in the original version 


* The blood in Unreal was black. The enemies were supposed to be robots that lose oil after being shot 

[heltenjon]

Recently, I've played Fur Balls 1 - evil be thy name: Bundles of mayhem!
I got stuck in a room with a smoking fur ball watching the TV . Probably a bug since the game was fair and easy up to that point. Plus, you can't leave the room and few things are interactive.

I just had to try this, of course... It's a bit of a pixel hunt.

Spoiler

There is a small piece of wood hidden somewhere on the large logs. Take it.

[close]

I guess you will be able to kill the furball after that.

[Creamy]

I just had to try this, of course... It's a bit of a pixel hunt.
SPOILER: SHOW
I guess you will be able to kill the furball after that.

You're such an hardcore gamer 

Leisure Suit Larry 2
BITD I've played to the very end of the game and the last action is
SPOILER: SHOW

but every time I typed
SPOILER: SHOW
it's a game over.
No matter what I did I was unable to finish the game, until years later when I came across Al Lowe's own site and found out it's a glitch in the parser that the word 'bag' was always recognised as a verb instead of a noun unless you typed something like "the bag" and when I tried this I immediately completed the game.
The problem was, I always just typed commands like "get stuff" and "look bed" and they never failed, but it would fail in the very last command. This glitch had me stuck in the game for at least 15 years! Also BITD there was no convenient places liked the Internet and some friends I had asked said that the command was correct and they could complete the game (probably because they always typed 'the' like Al Lowe himself did). This was so annoying and this glitch was never fixed.

That's a bug Al Lowe wishes he could have changed. Developers probably had a lot more pressure when games couldn't get fixed.

[OneDollar]

I had the CD version of Toonstruck which had an unsolvable puzzle in it. I was big into point n click games at the time so i knew some of the annoyance that could be involved within their puzzles so i spent days trying solve this Toonstruck puzzle which later on turned out to be a game breaking bug. Think i read about the bug in a gamer magazine as access to the internet back then was limited.

Curious what this was, do you remember? Toonstruck is one of my favourites.

Ages ago someone on these forums (Monkey0506 maybe?) found a soft-lock in The Secret Of Monkey Island. Spoilers for a game you've all already played:

Spoiler

In part 2 when you're on the ship you need to light an item on fire so you can light the cannon fuse. There's a few different items you can use (feather, business card, book), but the problem is you can also add most of them to the cooking pot at which point they're gone for good. The game tries to stop you locking yourself by letting you set fire to the treasure map/dance instructions from part 1, and it won't let you add these to the pot to get rid of them. The problem is it's possible to find the treasure just by walking around the forest without every needing to buy the map. So you could get to part 2 without having the map in your inventory, add all the other flammable items to the cooking pot and then you're stuck.

[close]

[FransisKransis]

The King's Quest V jail cell is a good soft-lock, because if you don't rescue a random mouse in the first act of the game, if I recall correctly you're just stuck in jail, like, forever. But it's not a game over or anything, and it's a single room, so you can waste a decent bit of time trying to brute force the puzzle. When in reality, you've been a dead man walking for the past half hour of the game. But almost anything Sierra is basically cheating for this question.

[heltenjon]

Is there someone here who can confirm whether the two Time Quest games made in AGS by TERNOX and Sledgy are, in fact, unfinishable?

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1260-time-quest/
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1261

[heltenjon]

It seems that James Bondage is unfinishable. From the old threads, it looks like it was released "as is", that is, a demo with no ending, for a MAGS. If anyone knows otherwise, please correct this.

[CaptainD]

I fear I may have discovered, on my first ever playthrough no less, a broken sequence in 3 Skulls of the Toltecs. I think that by moving the corpse before exhausting all dialogue options with Friar Bacon, I've missed the "Star of Mexico" dialogue forever and therefore cannot complete the game. I don't seem to be able to talk to him now he's running around like a madman and Fenimore won't pick up the medal.

[heltenjon]

Perhaps not surprisingly, a game called Gravity's Test Game seems to not have an ending.

[LimpingFish]

The Amiga version of forgotten adventure Crash Garrett is bugged and cannot be finished.

I had the Atari ST version of the game back in the day. Apparently the ST version (and the C64, CPC, and DOS versions) can be finished, though I never did manage to finish it.

[heltenjon]

Jimm's Quest III: Lesko's Revenge Demo does not have a scripted ending. To be fair, this is more or less stated on the db page, but there is nothing in-game.