There are many strange gameplay mechanics I can understand and accept when it comes to a videogame, but the one thing I absolutely hate in any videogame is a gameplay mechanic I'm calling disorientation.

What is disorientation in this sense? Well, to put it very simply, it's a gameplay mechanic where the developer tries to effectively force you into a situation where you're piloting your character blind.

This comes in many forms, the most notable of which happen to come in early RPGs. Allow me to offer this scenario.

You are in an adventuring party which is tasked with reaching point B from point A. Between the two points is a cursed forest. shrouded in fog, where you can only enter or exit from the north, south, east, and west directions. You are given the vaguest of hints as to how to traverse the forest without getting lost... and so begins your trek through the forest.

In top-down RPGs, this would be represented as a forest area with four openings, with you in the middle of the screen. To exit the forest at Point B, you'd have to direct your character in one of the cardinal directions multiple times, until you "unlock" the exit screen for the forest. Unless you grabbed a clue about escaping the forest beforehand, you could expect to see the same damned forest screen an almost infinite number of times.

Of course, that is only one example. This also happens with enchanted labyrinths where traversing a screen always changes your facing, or where you're in a single, humongous area that's covered in snow (this is FFVII, to be sure). You could even count top-down roguelikes that don't let you zoom out into this mix, especially if the camera turns around a lot.

While the desired effect is perhaps to cause the player a sense of unease, it also adds a layer of frustration into a game. It also pads the game with a one-time gimmicky device that usually isn't even part of the main plot.

Of course, so long as there are video games, there will also be frustrating game mechanics, but I'd like to think that, as the technology in video game creation develops, we'd see less of this disorientation mechanic happening. While this might be replaced with other frustrating game mechanics, I'd still put this single gameplay mechanic somewhere near the top of the list of annoying things to avoid in a new-generation videogame.

Picture taken from Wikimedia Commons. Author: Mila Zinkova