In recent years, triple-A games have often been criticised for overly excessive handholding, overcompensating for a dread fear that the player might become stuck. This has manifested in numerous ways like Atreus' heavy-handed puzzle hints in God of War: Ragnarok, yellow paint splashed on every other ledge of Stellar Blade, and most recently, Marvel's Wolverine essentially playing itself for entire portions of the game.

I'm not here to weigh in on that debate. Instead, I'm simply going to point you to Triple-A Minesweeper, a delightful spoof game created by developer Mike Lacher, which expertly skewers some of blockbuster gaming's most egregious habits.

Now, before I describe the experience of playing Triple-A Minesweeper, I strongly suggest that you go and play it. It only takes about five minutes, so in explaining it I will probably tell you about most of the game. It should also give you a giggle, perhaps several, even!

But if you insist on reading on, then unlike regular Minesweeper, which begins by letting you play Minesweeper, Triple-A Minesweeper opens with a bunch of un-skippable title cards for third-party software and developers, before we get the dramatic title of the game itself. Then your character—the Sweeper—slowly blinks open his eyes as a woman called Nora fills you in on the situation, namely that you need to sweep some mines.

But where should you begin sweeping on that terrifying grey grid? Fear not, because Nora has added a diamond-shaped yellow marker pointing to precisely where you should click.

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