It is safe to say that no one likes games with excessive exposition. Whether it be a clunky and miserably boring tutorial level, or an unnecessarily long and complicated narrative cut scene, gamers hate to feel as if their hand is being held. One great thing about an interactive medium is the ability a player has to explore on their own. Discovering the limits of a game through one's own unique process developed from a style entirely personal can be a highly rewarding and fulfilling experience. But it is possible for developers to find themselves on the opposite side of this problem, and there are many ways to fall into this trap.
Primarily an open world issue, a developer may design a fun game, populated with a dynamic world for the player to roam, full of possibilities for engaging gameplay. As the player progresses through the game, they find themselves stuck. They completed one quest, where do they go now in order to progress the story? They have the sword they need to defeat the dragon, but the game still insists that they wait to enter its lair. What are they doing wrong? What step in the process is missing? Because of the multitude of variables that games find themselves surrounded by, a disconnect can easily occur between narrative, mechanics, setting, goals, player agency and so on to ultimately create a confusing environment. Instead of the player feeling free to pursue many different forms of play, they feel helpless in the face of some invisible, unpredictable gameplay gradation.
Example: Kingdom Hearts
Though not a completely open world game, it is necessary to the progression of the story for the player to backtrack to previously visited worlds. They do this to either obtain special items, talk to key characters, or visit specific rooms. The bad thing is, however, that it is not always entirely clear which of these things is meant to happen when (or where, or with whom). A player can complete a level, move on to the next, and then find themselves scratching their heads over what to do afterwards. Because of the apparently arbitrary nature of the game, it may turn out that because the player did not utilize a trinity symbol in Traverse Town in order to open a specific sewer grate and have a short, seemingly meaningless conversation with a similarly trivial character, that means that they cannot progress anywhere else in the game. The connections between actions in order to advance the story seem nonexistent, and is something that can easily add a level of frustration that will force the player to give up.
