Press A to Skip Your Will to Live: The Tutorial Trap Nobody Asked For

You cleared your Saturday. Snacks? Acquired. Phone? Face-down on the couch cushion. Bathroom break? Pre-emptively completed. You are ready. You boot up the game you've been waiting three months to play, and then — a cheerful little prompt appears on screen. A cartoon hand materializes. It points at a button. This is the jump button, it says. Press it to jump.

You have been pressing buttons to make things jump since approximately 1994.

Congratulations. You are now a prisoner of the tutorial.

How We Got Here: From Pamphlet to Purgatory

Once upon a time, game tutorials lived in a little folded booklet tucked inside the box. You could ignore it entirely, throw it at your sibling, or read it on the toilet — your call. The game itself just started. You figured things out through the ancient and extremely effective method of trying stuff until it worked.

Then something shifted. Developers, bless their anxious little hearts, decided players needed guidance. Not a nudge — guidance. Full escort service. A velvet rope experience where you couldn't access the actual game until you had proven, through a series of remedial exercises, that you understood the concept of walking forward.

The result? Tutorials that now routinely clock in at thirty, forty, even sixty minutes before anything resembling real gameplay begins. Some are so elaborate they have their own cutscenes, their own emotional arcs, their own boss fights. At a certain point, the tutorial stopped being a tutorial and became a separate, worse game bolted onto the front of the game you actually wanted.

The Psychology of Forced Pacing (Or: Why Your Brain Is Screaming)

Here's what nobody in a development meeting seems to want to acknowledge: forced slow pacing doesn't just bore experienced players. It actively trains them to disengage.

When you already know how to crouch and a game spends four minutes walking you through crouching — complete with a glowing indicator, a voiced NPC, and a prompt that won't disappear until you've crouched the approved number of times — your brain doesn't file that information under "useful." It files it under "please let this end." You're not learning. You're performing learning for an audience of one very insistent game engine.

Worse, some tutorials operate on a kind of inverted difficulty curve. The actual game might demand sharp reflexes and quick decision-making, but the tutorial has spent the last forty-five minutes conditioning you to wait, follow prompts, and never act without explicit permission. You finally reach real gameplay and your instincts are all wrong. The tutorial didn't prepare you — it reprogrammed you for a game that doesn't exist.

The Hall of Shame: Egregious Offenders, Ranked

Not all tutorials are created equal in their crimes. Here's a thoroughly unscientific but deeply felt ranking of tutorial offenses, from "mildly annoying" to "I need to lie down."

The Slow Walker — The game physically won't let you move faster than a leisurely stroll through the opening area. The character animation suggests urgency. The invisible speed cap does not. You are jogging in place while the plot pretends to be urgent.

The Unskippable Explainer — A character delivers a monologue about game mechanics you mastered in a different game in this exact franchise five years ago. There is no skip button. There is only time, passing.

The Fake Choice — "Would you like a tutorial?" Yes / Yes (but slower). One of the greatest illusions in modern gaming. The answer is always yes. The game has decided.

The Tutorial That Forgets You Finished It — You close the game, come back the next day, and the tutorial would like to remind you about jumping again. Just in case.

The Tutorial With Its Own Tutorial — Achieved by a small number of games operating at a level of hubris that demands respect, if not admiration. A tutorial that must first teach you how to engage with the tutorial. Peak content.

The Players Who Never Made It

Ask around and you'll find a surprising number of people who technically own games they've never actually played — because the tutorial finished them off first. Not the difficulty. Not a bug. The tutorial.

There's a specific kind of gamer exhaustion that sets in around the forty-minute mark of mandatory hand-holding. It's not anger exactly. It's a quiet, hollow feeling, like being read the terms and conditions aloud by someone who is genuinely excited about them. The couch still has snacks. The phone is still face-down. But something has died.

Several players on various forums have reported refunding games specifically because the tutorial was unskippable and they'd already played the previous entries in the series. A few have described this as "paying thirty dollars to be talked to like I've never held a controller." The sentiment is understandable.

So What's the Fix?

The good news — and there is good news, because FlyZap is not here to ruin your day — is that some developers have figured this out. The best modern tutorials are contextual. They surface information when you actually need it, not three scenes before. They let you skip if you've played before. They trust that if you're confused, you'll look for help, and if you're not confused, you'd like to play the game you purchased.

A few games have gone further and made tutorials genuinely optional side content — something you can seek out if you want it rather than a gauntlet you must survive. This is the correct approach. Put the instructions back in the box. Let us play.

The Actual Speedrun Begins Now

Here's the twist: the players who are most vocal about tutorial fatigue aren't lazy. They're experienced. They've logged thousands of hours. They understand mechanics intuitively because they've put in the time. The lengthy tutorial isn't failing to reach them — it's specifically alienating the people who love games the most.

Maybe that's the real design flaw. Not that tutorials exist, but that they're built for an imaginary first-time player while ignoring everyone else in the room. Games are allowed to have onboarding. Games are not allowed to make onboarding mandatory for people who've been onboarded since the Clinton administration.

Press A to continue. Or don't. The snacks are getting cold.