Hidden Game Mechanics

[Chaosian]

So I concluded watching Markiplier's playthrough of Outlast 2 the other day- and I found something very neat occurred with it's ending. Without any spoilers, there was a notable visual difference in one scene, that has lead to the understanding that there's two endings to the game. The interesting thing I find about this however, is that absolutely no one knows seems to know how the alternate ending is unlocked - there is no known choice the player makes, no known path or process the player has to take, and only some players get it with 100% completion.

My question for you, Escapists, is what other games have completely unexplained or hidden game mechanics buried deep inside them? Bonus points if it's not just mathematics in the background like Pokemon catch rate.
Do you prefer it like this? Would you rather something more explicit like Karma or Reputation in Fallout and Mass Effect, or do you enjoy a sort of esoteric medium like Moral Points in Metro or basically everything in Knock Knock?

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Is stuff like animation cancels considered hidden mechanics? Because I love stuff like that. I love how in Vanquish you can cancel the reload animation and boost-dodge to keep you power meter from draining. In Horizon Zero Dawn you can load an arrow during the roll animation. Ghost Recon Future Soldier has loads of animation cancels to where you can string together a series of movements so much quicker than it would normally take, much like stringing combos in a fighting game in a sense. The MGS games have loads of little touches like being able to get a boss to eat rotten food.

Would you rather something more explicit like Karma or Reputation in Fallout and Mass Effect, or do you enjoy a sort of esoteric medium like Moral Points in Metro or basically everything in Knock Knock?

I really liked how Witcher 3 handled the Ciri "choices" towards the end. It was pretty easy to figure out the game was wanting you to make choices but it was subtle enough to not have Choice A or B put up on the screen as a prompt. And you really didn't need to look over a FAQ to figure it out either.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Resident Evil 6 never mentions that you can recover from knockdowns immediately by pressing BACK+DODGE. In fact, it barely explains any of its game mechanics, making it a game where 90% of its core gameplay consists of "hidden mechanics".

 

[pookie101]

human revolution had a good one. at the start you are left at your office and told to get to the helicopter for your mission. if you screw around exploring the hostages actually die on the next mission

 

[CaitSeith]

Riding a bear in Breath of the Wild. Need to say more?

Or how about throwing a Lloyd's Talisman to a mimic chest in Dark Souls makes it open up and gives you its treasure without a fight? Does the game ever tell you that?

 

[BarkBarker]

Skyward Sword has a shield bash parry system, the first of its kind in a Zelda game to my knowledge that I didn't know of till 70% through the game when I noticed it by accident. It's kind of important for the final boss because you need to keep up a perfect guard against a flurry of attacks and I really would have liked to know about it earlier. For having a tutorial area where they sought to teach me how to climb blocks they thought I shouldn't be informed of how to participate in half the games content: the combat.

 

[SmugFrog]

human revolution had a good one. at the start you are left at your office and told to get to the helicopter for your mission. if you screw around exploring the hostages actually die on the next mission

Thanks, I replayed recently and I think they had all been killed - and I was trying to figure out what bad decision I made but just went on. I think if you're spotted at a certain point during that mission they can be killed too?

 

[pookie101]

human revolution had a good one. at the start you are left at your office and told to get to the helicopter for your mission. if you screw around exploring the hostages actually die on the next mission

Thanks, I replayed recently and I think they had all been killed - and I was trying to figure out what bad decision I made but just went on. I think if you're spotted at a certain point during that mission they can be killed too?

yeah being spotted at a certain point gets them killed as well. but it surprised me having an actual time limit that wasnt a ticking clock on screen like usual

 

[Xprimentyl]

Dark Souls. Nuff said. 99% of that game is hidden. From quests you?re never outwardly told are quests to randomly placed false walls hiding entire unique areas to late-game consequences for early-game actions when you could never guess how the action and consequence are connected, a first playthrough leaves HUGE chunks of the game hidden. Most notably, playing through blindly and following the ?guidance? of Frampt, most people will bring the Lord Vessel to him and ultimately link the fire ?beating? the game; at no point are you clued in that retrieving the Lord Vessel and beating the Four Kings before speaking with Frampt reveals Kaathe, another primordial serpent who essentially tells you you?ve been had and should do the OPPOSITE of what the game?s story has been overtly leading you to do. I wish I had been there when the game launched, before wikis and YouTube revealed all the secrets; it had to have been interesting being an early adopter and experience those dozens upon dozens of ?Oh shit, really?!? I didn?t know that!!? moments.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The multiple endings in Silent Hill 2.
With most Silent Hills there's a clear system to unlocking each ending (moral choices, usually). With Silent Hill 2 the way towards achieving each end is incredibly obscure; most guides sell them as "you need to re-examine or re-read this frequently" but are very imprecise as to how frequently, nor do they address the overlapping between requisites. So much so that I've found myself striving for a particular ending and getting one that stands in complete opposition to it.
Even if you know beforehand about the branching endings from playing the other games you'd be fooled into waiting for an obvious moral choice that won't ever come.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth allows you to angle the camera through use of the touch screen such that you can look at the character models from directly above or below but they never mention that in any control tutorials or manuals etc. I don't know if they did that to reward the especially pervy players or if it was just them forgetting about it due to it not being on the ps3 version (since obviously ps3s don't have a touch screen) but either way it was pretty funny.


Not exactly what this topic was going for but it's all that comes to mind atm lol.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Riding a bear in Breath of the Wild. Need to say more?

I still haven't found any bears in that game and I've been playing for over 90 hours...Another thing I like in Breath of the Wild though is how convection is a thing: If you don't have enough clothes to keep you warm you can always just equip a fire-based weapon. If you want to melt a block of ice you can always just set up 20 campfires. I also love how you can aim an arrow at a lit fire to jury-rig up an impromptu fire arrow. It's kinda like how MGS2 had that algorhythm in place that made ice melt at different rates depending on how close it was to other bits of ice...only simplified I guess...

 

[SmallHatLogan]

Final Fantasy 10 had a hidden affection stat that would affect which party member would speak to you in a handful of cutscenes. The stat was impacted both in battle and in scenes where you could talk to several team mates. It's only a small thing but it's a nice touch that could potentially surprise you on a second playthrough.

Final Fantasy 7 had a similar thing with the date at the Golden Saucer but that one's a bit more well known.

 

[Lilani]

The most obvious one I can think of is EV's and IV's in the Pokemon games. I've never taken advantage of them, but I know people who wish to play a certain way have spent hundreds of hours finding ways to max out their EV's and IV's to get a perfect competition machine.

Portal 2 also had a few of them. There were all those radios off in hidden areas you had to move around to get the "transmission received" achievement, which revealed some obscure hard to reveal image (people had to convert the sound to code somehow, anyway it took people a while to figure it out IIRC). Also there was that achievement for bashing all of Wheatley's monitors in each test chamber. Each time you hit one he said a special line of dialog. Oh aaaand that one test chamber where you could rescue the companion cube. All totally unnecessary and unannounced challenges, but fun to explore just to see what the results are.

 

[kilenem]

Riding a bear in Breath of the Wild.

Quite Literately every fucking thing in Breath of the Wild.

The one I really wish I knew,All amiibo's work with the game, if they aren't Zelda themed amiibos, they give you food, which can be used to upgrade armor. I got 22 amiibos collecting Dust on a shelf while I beat BOTW all the way.

Also armor stat boost don't stack with the same Food boost.

 

[Squilookle]

Two tiny but much loved features I've noticed in my day-

GTA3 onwards had an unspoken mechanic whereby if you jumped into a car and floored it immediately, the player would forget about the driver side door and it would swing around aimlessly. Let go of -all- the controls however, and the character remembers and yanks it shut. This was expanded in IV if I remember right- jumping in and giving the game a moment before you pressed anything made Niko but on his seatbelt, which would prevent dives through the windscreen if you crashed.

The second was in Star Wars Battlefront II and the PSP games. You'd spawn, turn to see the vehicle you wanted only to see a bot leap into it first. As long as you keep the crosshair over that vehicle however, the bot will not move, allowing you to run up to it and commandeer it. Absolutely nowhere is this pointed out or explained, but it's extremely useful and something I wish all other sandbox military sims would adopt.

 

[Nuuu]

In Bayonetta 1, there was apparently a really rare counter-able attack Grace and Glory did that was discovered fairly recently, and took an even longer time to figure out why it happened.

Spoiler

It apparently requires the player to be hit (or bat-formed) by one of the two while the second is idle, prompting a chance for the attack to occur.

I'm pretty sure God Hand also had several mechanics that didn't come to light for a good while after release.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I just finished Nier: Automata. There's a chest out in the middle of the Flood City that I could not figure out how to get to. I thought eventually a path would open us, or I'd get some new Pod Program, but no. On my third playthrough, coming up on the end, I finally got fed up and looked it up.

Turns out that there's a long jump, where your Pod flings you through the air. Never once is this mentioned in the game, and holy cow would it have made some areas of the game so much easier.

 

[pookie101]

fallout 3 holding down the use key makes you continually drink from a water source. much easier than having to tap use. it only took me 2 years and a mention in this forum to find that out

 

[maninahat]

human revolution had a good one. at the start you are left at your office and told to get to the helicopter for your mission. if you screw around exploring the hostages actually die on the next mission

That happened to me the first time, and I didn't even realise until the second playthrough that I had been secretly being timed. Games don't normally penalise you for this sort of slow, methodical approach (even in a hostage crisis) so it was interesting seeing it included.