When tutorials go too far

I've installed roughly forty mobile games in the last two months for this site, and the single most common thing that made me quit early wasn't bad gameplay. It was the tutorial. So many games bury the fun under a wall of pointing fingers and forced taps.

The best onboarding I've seen does the opposite: it throws you into a safe, simple version of the real game and lets you make a harmless mistake. You learn by doing, and it sticks. Hollowreach, which we reviewed recently, has almost no instructions at all and is better for it.

There's a middle ground that works for complex strategy games too. Tidelock Dominion explains one system at a time across its first few matches instead of front-loading everything. By the time I had to juggle supply lines I actually understood why they mattered.

My take after all this playing: trust the player a little more. A good game can usually teach itself.

If you're a developer reading this, let people fail early and cheaply. It's the fastest way to make them care.