Guide Dang It/Video Games/Survival Horror

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Examples of Guide Dang It in Survival Horror games include:

  • Silent Hill 3. Let's put it this way: when the game gives you the option to set puzzles to "Hard", it is not joking around. You're either spending five minutes with a guide or five hours with the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
    • The keypad puzzle in the hospital, where the solution is cryptically explained in a poem about mutilating someone's face.
    • Same goes with Silent Hill 2 on the higher riddle difficulties.
      • And the clogged garbage chute in SH 2, which you have to drop a case of soda down to dislodge a critical puzzle item (see Soup Cans).
    • A Guide Dang It on all difficulties: the scene where Heather holds Claudia at gunpoint. If you shoot her, the God will possess Heather, resulting in a Nonstandard Game Over. The solution is to ingest the Held Back Phlebotinum pill inside the pendant she's been carrying since the beginning of the game. You only know of its existence by examining the pendant, and like in SH1, the in-game hints only vaguely reference its use.
    • Silent Hill 1: To get the Good+ ending, you must collect the red liquid (later revealed to be Aglaophotis, a form of Applied Phlebotinum) from the broken vial in a plastic bottle, then, during the fight with the Puppet Cybil, throw it on her to exorcise the demonic parasite from her. The few in-game hints only remotely reference this substance's power, but scenario writer Hiroyuki Owaku stated that Cybil's fate after SH1 is left to players' imaginations.
      • This is not really a Guide Dang It, because you're not supposed to know how to use it until you get the Good ending, which is the only instance in the game which informs you of its purpose. The Plus endings are intended to be earned in replays.
    • And that's not forget the Crematorium puzzle, also on Silent Hill 3's hard mode. Which requires you to know the real life habits of a particular, obscure bird most people don't know of, let alone know the real life habits of. Oh, and that's not to mention the part of the poem applied to this bird seems to identify an entirely different bird based on the poems provided in game.
      • This is made even worse by a string of subtle clues that have been scattered throughout the hospital. The mysterious telephone voice you encounter in the locker room tells you that the psycho who's been leaving you love letters through the whole level so far is dead, and that his new name is number 7. Lo and behold, 7 is the number of the gurney he's lying on, and the accompanying poem very clearly refers to him. And yet, as noted above, the corresponding clue has nothing to do with any of this, instead giving the aforementioned vague bird clue. Apparently you have to be a member of the Audobon Society to survive in Silent Hill.
        • To be fair, the poem is a nursery rhyme.
    • Pretty much what happens in the games.
  • Resident Evil Outbreak. Try figuring out how to get all the SP items without a guide, much less try figuring out that they're even there in the first place since it's entirely possible to complete the whole game many times over without ever realising that they're there. And the "set" of items spawned on the map is determined by a random variable and further confusing people, some can only be obtained on certain difficulties and by certain characters. Have fun. Your reward for all of this? Costumes and alternate character models that play identically to existing characters
    • A less annoying example but still valid, is that in order to complete the Event Checklist for each scenario and therefore unlock an extra mode, you are required to kill yourself in a specific way on two separate occasions. One isn't so bad to figure out and might be accomplished by the player for laughs or just out of curiosity but the other requires the player to stand around for close to two minutes while nothing happens with no indication that anything even will happen there.
  • In Rule of Rose many important plot-points are hidden out of the beaten path, and you can miss the introduction of one of the most important characters in the story if you don't know where to look in the first chapter. Also, you can't get the best ending unless you do the most unintuitive thing imaginable in the final bossfight: give the first and only firearm that you have to the Stray Dog. He will shoot himself dead.
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