Recently played Animal Well and am currently re-playing Tunic. Both have me thinking about how much I enjoy knowing about super deep secrets games can hold. It was the main thing I liked about Ready Player One as well. The idea of there being some multi layered secret that's damn near impossible to find has always interested me. The hidden, hiding in plain sight.

What other games have things like that? Not just break the fake wall to find a new area type secret. Something that takes real investigation and potentially a long time for anyone to discover.

So those two games have secrets?

One I hated (but that was revealed in the guide) was FFXII: if you want to get the zodiac spear you can't open certain chests. Like who thought that was a great "secret?"

There are many videos on hidden secrets that weren't found until years later because the devs revealed it or someone looked at the code, but the oddest one to me has always been this one (warning: cartoon nudity) which somehow got past the censors on a CD-I game of all things:

https://tcrf.net/The_Apprentice_%28CD-i%29

Yeah. I didn't want to spoil either but here are links if you're curious.

Animal Well: How To Solve The Wingdings Puzzles In Animal Well (thegamer.com)

Tunic: Tunic: How to Open Mountain Door (Golden Path Solution) (gamerant.com)

I don't mind because it's not like I would ever find these on my own, right?

Heh, yeah, Animal Well hid a lot of puzzles pretty well, though I'm not the biggest fan of the one that requires outside help -- but that was one puzzle of many.

Animal Well, definitely not. Tunic isn't so obscure if you read through the manual as you find each page. That's the added complexity to that one. You have to find the game's manual page by page as items in the game as you play it. And even then, most of it is in a made-up language the game doesn't translate for you.

I feel like Fez was the start to these type of games. The Witness is another one.

When I was a kid and in middle school I played the hell out of Ultima IV. You had to dig on a certain spot and a certain time of the day (in the game) to get an elite potion or poison. I don't know how I learned that because there weren't tips & tricks back then.

I really liked The Witness, although the ending was kind of a letdown. I'm not sure if any ending would have been satisfactory though.