What's a good game you played with an awful tutorial?

Minecraft. Back when I started playing, it wouldn't even tell you what recipes existed, yet gave you a 2x2/3x3 grid with hundreds of types of items/blocks to figure it out yourself.

Still one of my favorite games though.

The game that comes to mind is Dark Souls. They teach you the bare bones of the controls and that's it.

Nothing about where to go, what stats to level up, ways to defeat specific enemies, what spells/elemental attacks to use, etc.

I had to Google a lot of things in the beginning.

Warframe explains very little of its systems, and what it explains is generally poorly done. Upgrading and optimizing your abilities, acquiring proper mods and frames, how the levelling system actually works, generally anything that isn't "shoot at enemy until it dies" needs to be taught by another player or read upon.

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros, because the tutorials never stop. Even 20 hours into the game, it will explain which button to press in exhausting detail every single time. Gave up the game due to this.

On the opposite side, ΔV: Rings of Saturn. The tutorial does a really bad job of explaining the (very unusual) controls of the game. Worse, you can accidentally leave the area during the tutorial, which cancels the tutorial altogether so you have to restart the game. That happened to me twice. Third time was the charm though, and I did enjoy the game afterwards.

I don't have an exact answer, but there are a lot of games that you need the wiki up on your second monitor for. Their tutorials teach you the basic controls, but nothing about what you're supposed to do or anything like that.

I feel it's kinda lazy on the developer's side and leave it to the community to do their job. You see a 5-10 min video on youtube explaining everything, yet the developer couldn't do that?

All Paradox Interactive games ever created 😂
The worst I had was Hearts Of Iron IV. I played a 2h tutorial only to not understand a single thing the real game threw at me afterwards...

Elite: Dangerous (pre-Horizons DLC). They teach you how to fly forward and maybe auto-dock.

Hollow Knight is an excellent game with no tutorial whatsoever.

When you start a new game the ways you aren’t supposed to go are guarded by armored bugs you can’t kill, or a large guard who can one hit you. This teaches the player that generally if it’s bigger than you it will kill you.

After wandering aimlessly enough, because the game does not show you where to go, the only way to proceed is by challenging the False Knight boss, who is much bigger than you.

Dark Souls 1. It's tutorial is decent for controls but it doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't explain rolling, weight and stats are only in level up screen, at least for prompting. So many things about the game you need to know that they leave to expensive trial and error.

I like The Backlogs' video on it. It's a flawed masterpiece.

Kerbal Space Program.

Basically "do rocket science without instructions".

Sunset Overdrive.

Tutorial: Go from point A to point B.

Dies.
Dies.
Dies.

Failed to tell you the game operates under "ground is lava" rules. You are to go from point A to point B without touching the ground.

DayZ comes to mind. I love the game but it kind of just throws you in and says , "Hey there. Survive."

Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you've no idea of the controls.

Pretty much any of the souls games or something like Viewtiful Joe

Deus bloody Ex, the first one. Both the tutorial and the first mission are mostly useless and many players outright drop the game during the first mission. Afterwards the game shows its true colours, but the beginning is just rough.

That BF game, where the tutorial instructions were given in broken english by some manager from the company making the game. Pure cringe.

Witcher 3. Just huge walls of text, teaching you the most intricate details of some mechanics, and not enough for others.

2 of my favorites of all time. Final Fantasy VIII and Morrowind.

Final Fantasy VIII, to my knowledge, never once tells you that enemy levels scale. This wouldn't be a problem if you never grinded fights (for exp, AP, items, etc). I think the intention was that you would never need to grind so you never would (the game is actually super easy). But people do grind, and you can level up very quickly if you want to.

Morrowind just drops you into the world, for better or worse. There are some prompts to familiarize you to menus. But that's it. Most of the basic functions are self explainable. Except fatigue. Fatigue affects everything you do. And you won't realize that it's the reason whatever you're trying to do isn't working. Most players get frustrated and quit because they can't hit anything with their weapon, not realizing it's because their stamina bar is drained.

Escape from Tarkov

Skullgirls, which is now my favorite game, scares people away with its tutorial, so I ended up making my own for it instead. It was through resources for a bunch of other fighting games that I ended up realizing what I wasn't understanding about Skullgirls.

Honestly, you could probably just put fighting games here in general. Understanding what it means for a move to be plus on block is super important, but most new players will have no idea what that means. I can only name one game, Fantasy Strike, that teaches you to jump to escape command grabs.

So many I can't even narrow down a specific one. Many new titles have tutorials that go over generic bullshit like how to move and aim and then don't tell you how to do anything that's actually unique to the game itself. I hate that shit.

Really hate having a tutorial objective of "put the goober in the jibjab" but then it doesn't explain what the fuck either of those things are, and it's not obvious by just looking at the situation.

Oh, The Ascent did this. Tells you to hack something early on; does not tell you how this is achieved. Everything up to that point was walk up to thing and press A/X. To hack you have to HOLD A/X. But it doesn't say that. I had to look it up online. Which is stupid.

Dark Souls also. But... It's hard to be mad at that one, since being vague is literally purposeful game design with those. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Donkey Kong 64's tutorial is very poor. Most 3D platformers give you a safe area or easy first level, within which you can explore and learn the mechanics at your own pace. DK64 instead forces you through several tiny tutorial gauntlets, and it's a little jarring.

Can't believe it's not in here yet, but Monster Hunter. I find the eventual understanding of the gameplay loop to not actually be as complex as I thought it'd be, but getting a good overview of all what you want to do and use isn't really possible even in the latest entries, just specific information about specific mechanics.

Fallout 2. That Game has the Opposite of a Tutorial. It does Not explain anything and throws you immediately into a Dungeon where you are supposed to solve it with specific skills. Can be really annoying If you have the wrong skills. It was literally tacked onto the Game because the Publisher demanded it. Love the Game, but the Temple of Trials ist one of the worst Things in the entire Series.

The worst one I can remember is Final Fantasy 8.

But also the UI was so complicated and bad that it made me hate the game.

Does anyone remember Driver on the, I think, PS1? I mean the tutorial wasn't awful because it's irrelevant but because it's notoriously difficult to beat.

Gears of War 1 in online co-op. If you take the tutorial path instead of the right-into-the-game path, you can end up softlocked because it expects you to throw grenades at one point but doesn't explain it.

Dwarf Fortress (before the Steam edition.) There was no in-game tutorial. I found a 2 hour long fanmade tutorial on Youtube, and even after that I had to learn a lot of stuff from the wiki.

Baldurs gate has almost no tutorial for non-gamers, there is SO much assumed you know.

Ultima Online. Idk how it is now, as I haven't played on vanilla servers in like 20yrs, but you basically just got dropped into the game. Luckily, I had a friend who did play who taught me the basics. Otherwise, I woulda just been running around town aimlessly.

Eve Online is kinda like that, too. Originally, I don't think there was a tutorial (I started in 2005). Over the years, they've implemented a tutorial and iterated on it. Or just completely re-did it over and over again. It was bad. Like Ultima Online, Eve is a sandbox MMO, so no tutorial can show you everything possible in the game. But even the basics felt like not enough and just long and drawn out. The system in place today is certainly better, but players are still better off making friends quickly to learn the ins and outs.

Planetside 2 also originally didn't have a tutorial. I played the original Planetside back in the day, but the games are pretty different from each other. So it was a bit rough in the beginning. I remember coming across the early biolabs and running around the bottom of it for a quite a long time until realizing there were then "satelite bases" which had jumppads to the top of the biolab entries.

Even when a tutorial was introduced, it was pretty crap. Like sure you learned the basics of how to move, and how to shoot, and how to spawn vehicles. But the game is so much more than that. Big parts of Planetside 2 is understanding the map and environment, flow of battles, where each bases' capture points are, and of course positioning. And that's all stuff you don't get in the tutorial because there are so many different bases and the continent are large. Plus, some of that can only be learned by playing the game. Which can be frustrating when a player is dying 50 times in a row while getting a single kill (if they're lucky), because they don't yet understand anything I mentioned.

If you've never played Fear and Hunger, it's really easy to assume that there's no tutorial. At the very start of the game, a pack of angry dogs appears and mauls you to death. If you go through the front door, the pack of angry dogs follows you and mauls you to death. You can escape from the dogs in battle, but they'll keep chasing you on the overworld until they maul you to death.

The lesson the game wants to teach you is "Hey, don't stick around and fight enemies that will maul you to death", and "Hey, you should actually check out the side passages instead of the obvious way forward" because the dogs will not maul you to death if you dip into the side passage in the very first area. The game has a lot of such side passages that you need to look for later on that will save you so much grief, but you have no way but to intuit that this is something to look for in the first place after being mauled to death by dogs a few times.