Apart from Point‘n‘Click adventures and puzzle games, I haven‘t played any games which had a ‚bad‘ tutorial. They are mostly longplay and openworld games like Horizon Zero Dawn, No Man‘s Sky or Hogwarts Legacy.
So, instead of one long tutorial, you have little quests combined with little tutvids that pop-in when you get confronted with a new action or material. I really like this kind of tutorial, except for the point that if you happen to accidentally click the wrong button when the vid just pops in, you miss the whole tutorial section.
I think Horizon Zero Dawn did very well that they also integrated the tutvids into the Player‘s journal/wiki/„Focus“ so you were able to rewatch them any time. Since I tend to make long breaks while playing longplay games, this is a really good feature for me.
In general, I like it to have something like a personal wiki that collects items, facts and notes from the game while you play it.
Now, coming to the P‘n‘Cs and puzzles. Since most of the P‘n’Cs actually have just the basic commands… namely Point and Click
… I am surprised how many games don‘t manage to give a bearable tutorial. The only good (and funny) tutorial in the P‘n‘C section that comes to my mind is The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (the first one wasn‘t bad either but not skippable as it formed the beginning of the story).
My criterias for a good P‘n‘C tutorial:
1. Can you skip it? For me, who has already played dozens of P‘n‘Cs and who likes to replay them if they have a catchy story, the most annoying part is an unskippable tutorial.
2. Is it working? Yes, I‘ve experienced it more than once that tutorials didn‘t even work. Sometimes, the click areas where you were supposed to click were just too small to find or even blocked by decorational elements. My worst tutorial experience was in Lost Horizon 2 where they found it funny to introduce a new wasd-control for an escape part. (Little side note: In the end, it was the only part in the whole game to use this kind of controls…) If you used the keys as the tutorial told you, you failed, died and it restared the whole cutscene. Every. Single. Time. I actually had to google my way out of it, just to be able to continue with the game.
3. (Bonus) Is it creative/funny/entertaining? Well, I think this point is self-explaining. A tutorial which makes fun and invites you to keep playing is one of the best, imo.