Bad game design isn’t always about glitchy graphics or a boring story. Sometimes, it’s the way the game holds your hand—or shoves you into a wall—that breaks the experience. We’ve all been there. You’re playing a highly anticipated title, the atmosphere is perfect, and then you hit that bad walk through segment where the game decides you’re too slow, too fast, or just too stupid to play it "the right way." It’s frustrating. It feels like the developers stopped trusting the player and started following a checklist.
When people talk about a "walk through" in this context, they aren't talking about a guide on YouTube. They're talking about the forced tutorials, the unskippable "walk and talk" segments, and the rigid scripted sequences that make you feel like a passenger in a car someone else is driving poorly.
The Invisible Walls of Modern Gaming
The problem starts with the pacing. Modern AAA titles often suffer from what critics call "ludo-narrative dissonance," but in plain English, it just means the game’s story and its mechanics are fighting each other. You see this most often in forced walking segments. You know the ones. Your character suddenly slows down to a crawl because a side character needs to dump five minutes of lore on you while you walk through a narrow canyon. You can’t run. You can’t jump. You just... walk.
Look at the Call of Duty franchise or even some of the later Assassin's Creed entries. They frequently use these scripted "walk throughs" to hide loading screens or ensure you see a specific cinematic moment. While it keeps the game looking like a movie, it kills the momentum of the play.
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Actually, think about Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s a masterpiece, but it’s notorious for having that bad walk through feel during mission starts. If you deviate even ten feet from the path the game wants you to take, the screen fades to black and yells "MISSION FAILED." It’s a bizarre choice for an open-world game. It tells the player that their curiosity is a bug, not a feature.
Why Developers Trap You in Tutorials
Why does this happen? Usually, it’s a fear of the player getting lost. Developers spend $200 million on a game and they want to make sure you see every penny of it. If you skip the tutorial or miss a key mechanic, you might get frustrated later and quit. So, they over-correct. They create a "golden path"—a rigid, guided experience that ensures you see the cool explosions at exactly the right time.
But this often backfires. When a game forces a bad walk through on a veteran player, it feels patronizing. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was famously criticized for this. Fi, your companion, would stop the gameplay constantly to tell you things you already knew, like the fact that your batteries were low or that a door you just saw lock is, in fact, locked. It took a decade for Nintendo to fix this in the HD remake by making those hints optional.
When Scripted Events Go South
There’s a specific kind of frustration reserved for the "stealth or fail" segments. Imagine you're playing a high-octane action game. You're a super-soldier. Suddenly, the game strips your weapons and tells you to sneak through a base without being seen. If an AI guard catches a glimpse of your elbow, you restart. This is the ultimate "bad walk through" trope because it ignores how the player has been playing the game for the last ten hours.
It’s a design crutch.
Instead of creating dynamic systems where a player can recover from a mistake, the game forces a reset. This is "fail-state" design, and honestly, it’s outdated. The best games—like Dishonored or Hitman—don't have that bad walk through problem because they allow for "meaningful failure." If you get caught, the game changes; it doesn't just stop.
The Power of "Show, Don't Tell"
If you want to see how to avoid a bad walk through, look at Half-Life. Back in 1998, Valve figured out that you could teach a player how to play without ever taking control away from them. You learn to jump by needing to jump over a pipe. You learn to fight by being attacked. There are no pop-up windows. There are no invisible walls forcing you to look at a specific NPC.
Contrast that with something like the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II. It takes hours—literal hours—to get through the opening "walk through" of Twilight Town before the game actually starts. By the time you get your weapon, you've spent three afternoons doing digital chores like delivering mail and competing in "Struggle" matches.
Breaking the Cycle: How to Spot Bad Design Early
You can usually tell if a game is going to have these issues within the first twenty minutes.
- Does the camera constantly pull itself out of your control to point at something?
- Is there an NPC who walks slightly slower than your run speed but slightly faster than your walk speed?
- Are there context-sensitive buttons that only appear when the game "allows" you to interact with the world?
These are red flags. They indicate that the developers were more interested in directing a film than building a playground.
The reality is that "bad walk through" design is often a symptom of a bloated budget. When a game has to appeal to everyone from age 8 to 80, the developers often default to the lowest common denominator. They assume the player is perpetually confused. This leads to the "yellow paint" phenomenon where every climbable ledge in a game is coated in bright yellow paint because playtesters couldn't find the way forward without it. It breaks immersion. It makes the world feel like a theme park rather than a place.
Practical Steps for Players and Creators
If you’re a player stuck in one of these slogs, there isn't much you can do besides push through or check for a "skip tutorial" mod if you're on PC. But for those looking to understand game design better, or even those dabbling in indie development, the lesson is simple: trust the player.
- Iterative Learning: Instead of a text box, give the player a safe environment to fail. If they need to learn to double jump, put a pit in front of them that doesn't kill them if they miss, but requires the double jump to clear.
- Dynamic Dialogue: If you must have lore-heavy dialogue, let the player move at their own pace. Use "bark" systems where NPCs talk while the player is actually doing something useful, rather than standing still.
- Visual Language: Use lighting and architecture to guide the eye. A well-placed torch or an open door is a much better "walk through" than a giant glowing arrow on the ground.
- Organic Difficulty: Let the player decide how much help they need. Features like Celeste’s Assist Mode are brilliant because they are there if you need them but invisible if you don’t.
Stop settling for games that treat you like you've never held a controller before. The best experiences are the ones where you look back and realize you learned the rules without ever being told what they were. That is the hallmark of great design, and it's the exact opposite of that bad walk through we’ve all grown to loathe.
Pay attention to how a game introduces its world next time you pick up a controller. If you feel like you're being led on a leash, take note. That's not just "part of the game"—it's a specific design choice, and often, it's a lazy one. Demand more from the media you consume. The transition from being a spectator to being a participant is what makes gaming unique; don't let a poorly designed tutorial strip that away from you.