Dwarf Fortress, Space Station 13 and Warframe

The first two to untangle mechanical obtuseness, and for Warframe's mess of items and currencies and shit

SS13 ur absolutely right, holy shit I completely passed it up! Can you go on about Warframe? I dont know anything about the game

Used the wiki for Factorio many, many, times. Optimizing systems with resource management in mind is tough work.

how about nethack

The Kingdom Hearts series for understanding story/characters/organisations/obtuse questlines

either runescape

@PKMudkipz @Legailmao could u guys go more in-depht? I've never played Runescape or nethack

noita could prob fir for similar reasons to dst but a bit more player friendly early on. the game's difficulty gets immense before long unless you look up more info than the game ever would have given you without dozens of hours of experimentation, and the mechanics and game world elements are pretty rich but not really made clear to the player without, again, dozens of hours of experimentation

yu-gi-oh! forbidden memories and yu-gi-oh! the duelists of the roses are interesting cause they're still beatable without a wiki/guide but doing so is incredibly painful and grindy. both of these games feature monster fusions as a key gameplay element during duels but neither game has any form of guide as to what combinations you can make and what the results will be, meaning you can very often shoot yourself in the foot with bad combinations while having no way of knowing what to do otherwise unless you look it up. later parts of the games make that fusion a total must as the npcs start getting monsters that are way out of your league unless you spent many hours grinding for better ones (which in itself would generally require a guide to figure out which npcs drop which cards)

in persona 1, starting the snow queen quest route or playing with the party member reiji both require going through hoops you'd have to either know about in advance or otherwise do more backtracking/talking to everyone than one normally would

melee might be an interesting one to throw on too since anything you would need to know to even remotely play competitively is generally gonna be exploit-tier shit that you would only know from a fuckton of labbing or outside information like tutorials, word of mouth, and wikis, which would put it in a similar boat to older minecraft. realistically it's more or less fully inaccessible to someone playing the game on their own or with buddies normally

from what i've been told, siren was literally built to be this kind of game but never took off enough to pull that off successfully. one example i've heard is that there's a part of the game where if you didn't go across the entire map into a closet inside a specific house and listen to an rng-based password on a radio in it, then unlock a shed with it and put a towel from that shed into a freezer across the map, the game will eventually softlock and there is basically no way of knowing this will happen unless you're looking at a walkthrough

pt (playable teaser) had a fair amount of speculation and trial-and-error the community had to go through to figure out everything the game would need or want you to do to either progress or get certain events to happen

i've heard enough about pathologic 1 that it seems like it'd fit on here but i've got even less info on that than on siren so someone else would prob have to corroborate this claim

closer to walkthrough/nintendo power territory and maybe a little iffy would be zelda 1 and castlevania 2, with the latter being a bit more iffy while i don't think anyone would reasonably contest zelda 1 being convoluted at times with the player having to bomb random walls or light random bushes on fire to find secrets

oh yeah, can't forget digimon world 1 - that's another one i've only heard about secondhand but wanna play sometime, but some random examples of jank you'd need to know about in advance are...

the manual has incorrect information (great start) and this led to misinformation being spread about the game online for years
some encounters are only a 5% chance when loading a map, but you'd not know that as a player
you can crash the game by doing innocuous things like going to the jukebox and scrolling down
digivolving and getting the hyperspecific requirements for digivolutions are grindy and sometimes so random that you'd never guess them . one digivolution requires you to have a digimon eat a certain amount of poop left on the overworld by other mons or else you're locked into a crappier digivolution for that particular one. another digivolution is a 5% chance of happening after letting one of your digimon die, which would otherwise just make them disappear and spawn a new egg to have to raise that one all over again.
this is all on top of the general vpet mechanics that already would be confusing to someone new to that kind of thing, but even for veterans some conventions like more mistakes = worse evolution are flipped randomly for no reason

Seconding Old School Runescape (current Runescape isn't as bad about it). The most popular client, RuneLite, has a dedicated plugin just for looking things up on the wiki. Quests are sometimes so obtuse that guides are required, and the wiki has optimised methods for almost everything in the game. Since OSRS's entire meta is optimisation and the playerbase is so antisocial ingame, it's a crucial resource.

@Lynxelot thaks for all the suggestions! I'll take most, but I'll have to offer some resistance on others.

Keep in mind that the list is specifically for wikis, hence my aprehension to adding stuff like Persona 1 that are much more about using guides rather than wikis. There's a distinction which I'll try to clarify with the following statement: you use wikis for specific information that can be divided into articles, while guides are looking to be more comprehensive. It's why I put something like Terraria, where I'm not particularly looking for comprehensive info like a progression flowchart and more specific info like where certain materials can be gathered.

Regarding Siren: it's true that the game was designed (afaik) in a way that communication between players was part of the puzzle-solving process, but not really in a wiki sense. It's much more about the word of mouth rather than an encyclopedia, so I think that'd be a theme for another list (as in, games that feature word of mouth as an intended meta mechanic)

I've seen a lot of people elsewhere suggest the RimWorld wiki is essential. The game has its own in-game information panel but it is extremely barebones. The wiki on the other hand is extensive and covers every facet of every bit of gameplay. The game isn't as obtuse as Dwarf Fortress but competent play, particularly concerning how to play around the storytellers, requires that deep information.

Also like Isaac, Enter the Gungeon is playable without the wiki/Platinum God, but some gun mechanics, item effects, and especially synergies are not explained or easily intuited without those resources.

can vouch for digimon world as well. the thing with that game is while it does call for a guide at times (or trial and error) a wiki would actually be very beneficial. that's because there's not necessarily an ideal digimon to train into at a given time. different raising techniques beget new creatures and even horrible ones (like numemon, which literally eats its own shit) can become really strong with the right training

the actual "guide game" nature of digimon world is just figuring out where to go or what flags to trigger for certain events

@Franz this link should speak for itself: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Yet_Another_Stupid_Death

fair enough on p1, though i'd also add that negotiation is its own can of worms where you'll want to spend almost the whole game with the negotiation wiki lists up since it's not as easy to grasp as p2 despite being just as consistent. and yeah i get the reasoning for siren/pt, i think if i owned the list i'd still count them as enough but i think there's def a strong case to say they're less in the spirit of how you're handling the list

I'd like to nominate Genealogy of the Holy War. As it's main gimmick, characters being able to fall in love with each other and get married is controlled by a very bizarre system with many facets to it that is never explained to the player. This was done to make the outcome of each playthrough different, but make some pairings less likely to happen then others. Nowadays it just means that people have to do math and constantly be looking at one of the three Fire Emblem wikis to get the pairings they want. It's very charming in its oddly complicated way of working, though. Here are two relevant pages for it:
https://serenesforest.net/genealogy-of-the-holy-war/characters/love-growth/
https://serenesforest.net/genealogy-of-the-holy-war/characters/jealousy/

Path of Exile is such a wiki game that when fandom began getting worse the community bounced and made their own poewiki.net. The game is full of obtuse mechanics, doesn't present information on e.g. item drop locations, and is generally just full of tons of Stuff that's hard to keep all in your head.

Valkyrie profile, since the A ending requires some real esoteric steps to get if you dont wanna miss out on good items and gods favor.

Is that not more aligned to guides rather than wikis? Or is the wiki the main source people follow for the endings?

Town of Salem. It's a social deduction online game based loosely on Mafia/Werewolf, but a lot more complex. It's role system has SO MANY possibilities and there are SO MANY strategies it's overwhelming, and (at least last time I played) the game does a pretty shit job explaining any of that to you.

https://www.blankmediagames.com/TownOfSalem/
https://town-of-salem.fandom.com/wiki/Strategies

Escape from Tarkov

The game is extremely punishing as you lose gear whenever you die, so for a new player the game is absolutely brutal as there is not a single in-game tutorial. If you don't have a map up on another screen while learning there is basically zero chance you live. When you spawn into a raid there are extracts that are told to you at the start (there is a keybind to see them but this isn't told to you) but it doesn't tell you where they are on the map. So even if you somehow don't die to players or AI, you aren't gonna be able to find your extract without a map. Quests in the game don't tell you too much about what you need to do so the wiki is necessary for doing these. There are a bunch of hidden values in the game that are essential to know, for example ammo is what determines how much damage you can do and how well you can penetrate armor, yet none of these values are shown to you in-game. You must look it up on the wiki to get the numbers and after you get the numbers from the wiki you have to use the wiki even more to know what the numbers actually mean. Nearly every gun can be modded heavily with tons of attachments and figuring out what goes on what can be a really difficult and confusing process. These are just the core fundamentals and there is even more stuff that has really no indication in-game. Armor material, skills, useful keybinds, the economy of the game, the way bullets travel, and so many more things that aren't told to you in game that it can take easily 50-150 hours to be "comfortable" with the mechanics, let alone good at them.

I would put Dragon Quest 7 here purely due to how incredibly specific your knowledge and approach needs to be. Not only is navigation to the next story beat very difficult with no guide (Dungeons are fine), the Class system requires that you intentionally keep your self under leveled until you liberate the job temple at the 25% of the story.

The class system is incredibly intricate and the player should know the area level caps where you stop gaining job XP after hitting a certain level. These caps are never hinted to in game and require searching online.

Now that I am on this train of thought. Add Dragon quest 6 as well. Unlike 7 which has reasonable level caps that gradually increase for each subsequent area after you unlock the class system, DQ6's area caps are allover the place. Castle Swanstone has a cap of 99 when you'll be at the half way point, but the next few areas after have caps of 24 for whatever fucking reason. Like 7 it also never tells you about area caps so you'll most likely be OL'd when you unlock them.

My findings are based on the original Snes version of 6 (You can find that on here by searching the japanese title) and the original PS1 version of 7 (which you can find on here by searching "Dragon Warrior 7"

thank you for specifying the versions 💯 💯 💯

Morrowind 110%

@Dalaamclouds can u give me some more info so i can add it to a note, ive never played morrowind 🥹

wheres my fucking emoji

oh oops so sorry! Morrowind doesn't hold your hand nearly as much as Oblivion and Skyrim, so people take to the wiki to figure out which spells and skills you should train first and places to go so you're not constantly dying and are able to teleport as such as well. Also helps with letting you know all quests in a town, etc.