Tutorials are boring and discovering things is fun. Some of the best games allow players to learn how to play through doing instead of through reading, and this is especially important when trying to maintain an atmosphere. Ideally a game should keep the player immersed in the world of the game and minimize breaking the fourth wall.

The first level of the original Super Mario Bros. was particularly designed to teach the player the basics of how to play.

Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - How Super Mario Mastered Level Design

Level 1-1 creates a space where players can experiment with the few buttons they are given and they naturally guide themselves toward an understanding of the game without needing anything to be explained.

Similarly, the Mega Man games are famous for how it teaches through intuition instead of through tutorials.

Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X

The overall idea is that a game is more fun when it does not hold the player's hand and lets the player discover how to play, especially there are only a few buttons to experiment with. Unfortunately, in the case of Phoenix Anomaly, this does not seem to have worked according to the feedback that we have been getting.

One of the core mechanics of this game is swinging. It has a dedicated button to throwing a grapnel hook, so players can discover that easily enough, especially if they look at the control bindings in the options. Once you have a rope connected to the ceiling, you can jump and walk around with that rope still attached. Multiple players have gotten to this point and been unable to decipher how to use the rope to swing.

The trick to swinging is that you have to let go of the jump button while in the air to switch from jumping to swinging. To figure this out, all they have to do is not hold the jump button for the entire jump. This gives the player the freedom start their swing at any point, but it is also not telegraphed in any way to the player. The hope was that players would just naturally stumble upon it while jumping around with that rope.

Instead, here is a comment from a player that is representative of feedback from several players:

"For some reason I've failed to do this rope jumps - rope just extending instead of keeping the same length to make me swing."

As a consequence of this, we have added a "Tips" section to the game's page with some brief advice on how to play, including how letting go of the jump button can enable certain abilities. We still hold out hope that it should not be necessary to add a tutorial to the game in order to help players figure this out.

Has anyone tried this game and figured out how to swing without needing to be told?