Icons/buttons with just pictures on and no explanation or tool tips. Combined with pretty dense tutorials in games now makes it far easier to jump into a game now, and it’s a good thing.

Back when I was playing as a teen (Amiga, mid-‘90s) you were pretty dumped straight into games, very very rarely with any kind of tutorial and regularly with buttons that just had tiny icons on them instead of text. If you were into RPGs or god-style games, and you didn’t tend to read the manuals, these could be bloody confusing. Point-and-click weren’t usually too bad, as you at least had a standard layout with verbs.

Games that spring immediately to mind here are K240, Amberstar, The Settlers, Populous, Robin Hood, and to a lesser extent Dune (the first one - the point & click/RPG adventure, not the grandpappy of RTS games, Dune 2) , Syndicate and a few more.

I love those games to pieces and still play them now, but I also have hundreds of others I try from time to time and no longer have the manuals, and there’s bugger all explanation in-game. Today I tried Beastmaster which I remembered a demo of, and jesus it was confusing. No idea wtf I was meant to be doing or how to do it. Need to look it up.

I like modern games like Mount & Blade, Elder Scrolls, The Guild 2 etc with their nice tutorials / ‘learning sections’.