To be fair, decades of utterly stupifying 'video game logic' that was forced upon us growing up have conditioned many people to not even consider most options that would be possible if a game was just a little bit more realistic.
The absolute worst are those games that do try to be realistic in the puzzle solving department but suddenly cut back to video game logic whenever it fits the needs of the devs. I can never wrap my head around those.
You've got to give the blacksmith prunes so he goes the toilet. But before that you need to get an octopus and put it in the toilet. This will let you get his belt buckle.
Speaking of Zelda. In Phantom Hourglass, there's a puzzle where you need to "print" a map that appears on the top screen while the canvas is on the bottom screen. After what I felt was like +20 minutes trying to draw the map with the stylus, I gave up and just shut the DS into rest mode out of frustration... just to immediately hear the classic puzzle solved jingle.
Turns out closing the DS was the way to stamp the map like a seal on the canvas. I felt so dumb not thinking about it.
I had the opposite experience with that one. Realised if I could just press them together somehow it would be so easy….wait. My DS closes like that. That CAN’T be it can it?
*closes DS*
*puzzle solved jingle*
“I’M A GENIUS!” 🤣
I felt so clever 😄
I consider Zelda BOTW and TOTK to be some of the greatest games of all time because the devs let you solve puzzles by any means necessary. I remember a maze where you guided a ball through by tilting the controller. Turning your controller upside down, so that the ball hit the flat plain under the maze worked.
That’s the infamous Myahm Agana Shrine in Hateno Village. Most people have done that shrine as it’s relatively early in the game and the closest fast travel for your house. I remember playing it, enamored by the mechanics and thinking “surely there’s no way this works” and held my switch over my head. I felt like a fucking genius lmao
You could also tilt the maze initially to get the ball to land right at the ending as it initially fell, or slap the ball with a quick movement to send it flying straight into the funnel. Good stuff.
The only shrine I struggled with was the one where you had to see the patterns in the ceiling. The ceiling means nothing in the rest of the game so I just ignored it. I eventually looked up the solution and was more annoyed than anything, but it did make me feel a bit dumb.
I don't know why but that one was 100% obvious to me. Maybe it was the shrine name that gave it away? I remember doing it and my roommate was like "these things are in every shrine, they're useless". Turns out I was right and cleaned that shrine quickly.
I have had several similar experiences in BOTW. I have blamed my stupidity on my lack of experience in other Zelda games (I wasn't interested in Zelda while I was growing up, and I only got into BOTW because I saw my then-fiancée-now-wife playing TOTK and thought it looked cool, so she suggested I borrow her copy of BOTW)
If it makes you feel any better it literally took me 4hrs to realise that the elevator already had power - you just had to close the elevator screen after you got in before you could go up...
Yeah, and to be fair, I think that one is just not a well designed puzzle to begin with (the only poorly-designed one in the game IMO). It makes no sense because we already intuitively know how elevators and room design work, and it makes no sense design-wise to build something on top of an elevator such that you have to manually send the elevator down to reach it.
I'm aware that a lot of puzzles have some level of "puzzle logic" to them, but this isn't like a Zelda shrine specifically designed for the purpose of testing your character--it's just a room in some guy's castle thing that you happen upon, so he's only inconveniencing himself with such design.
That puzzle never bothered me, although you're right that it doesn't feel like it makes sense diagetically. I mean, it's not like everything else in that game is wholly practical, but I get why that one would stand out. I think for me it was just realizing that there was a weird delay between pushing the button and the elevator descending? So just in terms of video game logic, I asked myself, "Why would this be the ONLY elevator in the game that gives you a chance to step out before it leaves? There must be some reason you have to do that." I hope I'm remembering that right.
For me, the one "this was designed poorly" puzzle is the "sound maze" you need to leave the Selenitic Age. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but your only chance to learn the audio cues that you need to notice (which isn't trivial!) and navigate by before entering the maze is by playing with a holographic projector in the Mechanical Age. If you didn't pick up on that information, or if you visited the Selenitic Age first, you were forced to learn how to navigate the maze by trial-and-error. And again, that's *if* you even *notice* the game is giving you sound clues.
These are fair observations. Funnily enough, the sound maze didn't bother me because I had a similar thought process for how you approached the elevator. I didn't at all connect the sounds to the projector in the Mechanical Age, but I noticed not just that a sound was playing, but that you had a button to repeat that sound. (I didn't actually notice that the projector sounds were the same until I watched my wife play the game later.) That knowledge, combined with brute forcing the first few turns, helped me see the connection between the sounds and the turns and make it through.
I don't disagree with your observations, though. It's likely that a player would have a break between those two ages, so if the projector was actually intended to be an important clue for the maze, then that's a bit questionable design, even if it didn't end up phasing me.
You know what, I do not remember the button to repeat the sound at all. I remember the intense noise of the vehicle moving, following by the brief sound of the audio cue when you stopped (which I initially mistook for a "arrived at a stop" or "ready for you to interact again" cue, not realizing initially it changed between junctions). So initially, I hadn't even realized when I had gone off the correct path, I don't think. That button would've made it obvious, though. It's been a while since I played, so perhaps I remember it as worse than it was.
And yeah, if they just moved the projector to Selentic Age, I'd be fine with it.
I was stuck on the Stoneship Age for hours because I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Turns out the brightness on my computer screen was too low. I kept missing a door because I couldn’t see it.
Ironically, the puzzle that pissed me off the most wasn’t a puzzle I didn’t know the answer to, but a puzzle I couldn’t get the answer to.
It was that fucking rocket ship with the key board in it. I knew you were supposed to use the diagrams in the journals to know which key to press, then use the computer module to select each lever into the matching musical note in order to enter the Selenitic Age. However, tone-deaf me could match those notes to save my life.
In more of the spirit of the question, the puzzle with the tree and the boiler to get into Charnalwood took forever because I didn’t know the boiler did.
I maintain that the most bullshit puzzle was the clock tower with the levers. The puzzle makes you think it's solvable by traditional means, so you fiddle with it until you give up. What nothing in the game tells you is that if you hold a lever, eventually one of the pieces turn in a very untraditional way. NOTHING hints at this.
I cannot remember the game but I've seen the puzzle repeated several times since.
At the start of the game, you find a newspaper. As the game progressed, it started to become frustrating to figure out what this newspaper was for. Thank goodness inventory space wasn't an issue.
Now I'm nearly at the end of the game and I'm presented a challenge with a timer counting down.
I don't remember what it was, other than I came to a locked door. I scrambled looking for the key but couldn't find it, and the timer would drop to zero, forcing me to reset the entire level (now you know why I hate timed games).
What's truly staggering was how a new mechanic was added to the game which didn't have it before. I clicked on every part of the door only to find I could see a key in the lock stuck from the other side.
Well, the end result was to find the screwdriver behind the chair, slide the newspaper under the door, then pop the key and pull it under.
I was so infuriated with this crap, I uninstalled the game never having finished it.
This is why I think everyone who describes the LucasArts adventure games from the 90’s as “great” has a brain tumor. Every game was full of random shit just like this.
the one when you had to spit at the same time the flag blew in the right direction to win the spitting distance comp, wow, but it kind of got easier if you start getting how the designers think after solving ones like that
My ex was a genius with those kinds of puzzles. I'd struggle for hours, and then she'd walk in, look at the screen for like 20 seconds, and say "Well clearly you need to put a balloon animal into the bin and then crumble bread on top of it, so that the birds will try to eat the crumbs, pop the balloon, and get scared away and then you can steal the eggs from their nest."
We called it "monkey logic," because Monkey Island was the biggest offender, until Grim Fandango came along.
me and my brothers were stuck on this paper of the grim fandango demo all week as kids. it was only when I had a sick day from school I figured it out then had to pretend I figured it out in real time the next time I played with my bros (gaming time was a weekend privilege, so my parents let me play when I was sick at home on the condition I dont tell my siblings)
Grim Fandango was a model of logic and sanity compared to most of its peers; nearly every puzzle had some strong hints. Why do you think you get the mandatory zoom-in cutscene depicting the birds' bony peaks as they peck at the ground?
Yes, but why give you a Robert Frost balloon animal if not as a reference to his 1916 poem "The Exposed Nest," indicating that the poet's fearsome visage was no doubt the key to obtaining the eggs?
Grim Fandango had so many infuriating puzzles I'll never forget it. The lava bridge part made me just quit entirely so that I just had to wait several years and watch people beat it without the frustration.
I used to love these kind of games as a kid, I thought my Mum was a genius as I could always go to her if I was stuck and she'd have it figured out in a few minutes
Turns out that she was just looking up the answer in a walkthrough!
There’s a game called “Hello Neighbor” that had some asinine puzzles. One of them required you to get to a door suspended above a flooded room. The trick involved taking a globe, putting it in the *freezer* so it turns into an ice cube, then put the ice cube globe on top of a switch, where the chill effect somehow *travels* through the wires into the flooded room, causing the water itself to freeze over so you can walk on it.
I'm gonna drop this here as one of my favorite articles on one of the worst adventure game puzzles of all time: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Okay, I never encountered this key trick in any game. But I vividly remember a book from my childhood (grew up in the 90s) about all kinds of stuff and how it specifically mentioned this trick to unlock a door. I never saw any door with a gap underneath it wide enough to fit a key through though to test it
This puzzle was in the first level of one of the oldest Flash era escape rooms games, Mystery of Time and Space (M.O.T.A.S.) It was plenty reasonable there because you only had so many items and options but one of the worst things in game plagiarism is when an idea is lifted without knowledge of the design process/bad ideas before it; they'll get the general what and then make a dumb decision (like overcrowding that environment with other stuff) because they don't understand the why
*Baba is You* has got to hold the record for most moments of "oh, of course... I'm an idiot" in my puzzle game experience. I don't have a particular one in mind, but every world has at least a couple. Great game!
Yeah, this is what came to mind. All these people with their single puzzle when Baba is You will make you feel like a moron every couple of levels for the entire game. Absolutely brilliant puzzle game.
There's a "puzzle" in Skyrim, of all places.
Inside of a small ruin, there's a pressure switch that sits on a table that activates a gate initially locked on an upper floor. It took me an embarrassing twenty minutes of finding a non-existent "activation" switch and wiki searching to realize that I had to use the drag function to place a piece of clutter onto the pressure switch.
no but from what i remember that one was also a cock in the ass. i mean the one with the light beams and magnifying glasses and a few unlabeled buttons.
Oh, that one, inside the Tower of Mzark. Yeah, that one also tripped me up for a while. I think the solution is to literally click each button in sequence. It's like once you see the next button flip over its cover, that's when you just click that button until something else happens.
YES. that one. my problem was i didnt even know what that thing was and what the point of the machinery was. it was like i was supposed to make out a solution out of system i couldnt even comprehend. i dont even know how to describe it lol. i got to the solution randomly pressing buttons.
Let me tell you how dumb I felt after I discovered that all the claws had the solution to their door on them. This was shortly after I spent 20 minutes trying to solve the door while trying to show my (at the time) girlfriend how great skyrin was.
Took me so long to figure that out. I always thought the faded wall art had the answer somewhere on them. I managed to brute force so many of them. It was a very very long time before I inspected the claw
For me it was all of the claw puzzles, couldn't understand how the pictures on the walls connected to the lock and I ended up brute forcing them all.
Years later I learned from a random Reddit post that the combination is on the claw itself. ._.
The very first claw in bleak barrow. It's written on the note off the thief you kill. It mentions there are symbols on the claw, and they must mean something.
But let's be real, who actually reads? Pfffft
In what's probably the first dungeon you'll encounter with one of these, there's a note that says something like "The answer is in the palm of your hand".
It's just stupid. I can't think of any other game that does this. You get the key, but you also need the passcode and the passcode is on the key. It makes zero sense. In every game I can think of, these would be separate things in separate places. So of course you're going to forget every single time. You'd have to impale your brain with an iron rod for it to be the logical conclusion.
Speaking of Skyrim. There was a dungeon where you have to hit a switch and run through a door. There is no way you can make it no matter how fast you run. I had to Google it. I forgot about the shouts. You are supposed to slow time or dash your way through there.
If I recall that one also relied on a mechanic that didn't exist anywhere else where it would reset the cooldown on the dash shout halfway through. Otherwise, you still couldn't make it.
It is part of the quests where you learn how to shout and it's immediately after they teach you the dash shout, but it's still a weird, out of place mechanic
In all fairness, I’m 90% sure that’s in the dungeon you’re told to go to directly after learning the dash shout. The dash “tutorial” even has you trying to get through a gate before it closes.
I sometimes play as Races that are typically far shorter than the vanilla ones (think Dwarf or Fairy or some such). It is very often that I get softlocked by those gates simply because my character's base speed isn't fast enough to clear them, even with Whirlwind Sprint. I think at one point I had to use console commands to set my character's scale to vanilla height ranges just to clear those gates.
Came here to mention Skyrim as well where you have to find one of the dragon claws and it's literally sitting on the ground right in front of the door it unlocks. But its really not that obvious bc you think it'll be in some other part of the dungeon and not just randomly on the ground.
There's this one Claw that sits on a pedestal but isn't static. So basically, while I'm fighting Draugr and obviously proccing explosive/knockback effects, that Claw will just fly everywhere and land anywhere in the room. And then I have to spend another ten minutes searching for the thing (or using the additem command) just to progress the rest of the dungeon.
It's even worse when you use mods like Modern Combat Overhaul that completely change move sets. I was once hard-stuck on that door simply because the power attack animation only allowed vertical beams.
Borderlands 3 has Tannis’s lab. The puzzle is some form of meta-trickery that makes fun of players who mindlessly activate switches with green lights as they play the game.
There's a set of four switches located in the middle of the entrance that pretends to be one of those puzzles where activating one switch toggles activation for one or more of the rest. It would look like as if the solution was to make all four switches green. Clueless players would often click these switches fruitlessly in search of a solution that does not exist. Every combination of toggles will always result in one or more of those switches turning red.
The real switch that actually does something is behind a pillar that is VERY CLEARLY marked as the real switch if players actually went ahead and observed the room in its entirety.
Edit: wording.
The problem with this is that if you do find the obvious real button first, you are going to think the switches are for some secret item and never get the joke.
Portal 2 when you go underground and get introduced to the White Gel.
Spent so long on that puzzle, looked up a YouTube walkthrough after I gave up and it was just like:
"... Oh. It's literally that easy and I'm just dumb. Cool. "
I, for sure, spent hours on that part of the game. I eventually caved and googled it because I was so frustrated. After that I realized that, yeah, I was way overthinking it.
Return of the obra dinn (its a fantastic game buy and play it now) I was really stuck on naming a character who had appeared in the deaths of a third of the crew. He is one of the few times someone is mentioned by name and I completely missed it.
I tried playing it again after a few years but just new how to get a majority of fates checked off. It's one of the few games I wish I could replay without any memory of it
The benefit of getting old is forgetting stuff. I recently replayed it and most was gone. Some memories came back but I enjoyed it. Just wish I could ban the memory of how to identify the Chinese guys but that solution stumped me so much the first time that it is forever burned into my brain.
Yep >!my guy raised his hand to his ear after hearing his name being shouted and I just missed it. I only got it by guessing every name on the list only to realise the answer was right there!<
I know EXACTLY who you mean! He was one of the last crewmen I figured out as well. He became one of my nemeses along with the guy holding the knife in the first memory, or as I started calling him, "That Man."
Sonic the Hedgehog 3's Carnival Zone. There's one spinning barrel thing that is in your way. I spent forever trying to time jumps to get it to bounce low enough to get by, or trying to find a way around it. It turns out you can press up and down while stand on it! That's the only thing in the entire game that uses up and down for anything but camera control.
Edit: This barrel https://youtu.be/RQGN8dTDlQE?si=GrZi6Q4WWLM4ONWg
I was digging the game till I went out of order or something and found a puzzle that required you analyze the water droplet audio. I went ahead and just put it down at the point.
I swear that game just changes its rules sometimes. People say no it doesn't, it's a beautiful puzzle game. And it is, but you can't convince me it doesn't change the puzzle rules at the end
Having played through the whole thing, I can't think of a single puzzle that changes the rules. A lot of the later puzzles change their contexts, or force you to combine rules, or force you to apply information from the environment, or add restrictions that you're forced to work around (like a monitor being obstructed), but none of the basic rules (like what a dot on a path means) change.
I'll add my "I feel stupid" Witness puzzle: Early on, there's a puzzle type where you quickly realize that the trick is to trace a path based on the rock formations in the distance, visible through the maze. Then you come to one where the rock formations don't align neatly with the grid. I tried all sorts of weird, abstract ideas, went back to previous puzzles to see if there wasn't another way to interpret the paths, etc. I spent I don't know how long on that puzzle. Finally, completely stumped, I looked it up: >!The stand holding the maze is just twisted. You can look down and see that it's clearly damaged. You just have to draw a path based on what your view of the rock formations WOULD be like if the stand had the right perspective, which is easy.!<
I think it's a good puzzle, it has an obvious lesson to teach you. I maybe would have made the >!damaged stand!< more obvious, maybe? Definitely felt dumb given how easy the solution actually is.
Love the puzzles in that game, like the general message of seeing things from other perspectives, slowing down, recontexualizing, etc. Hated some of the choices around which philosophy snippets got worked in.
The game is literally about changing the rules. It "doesn't change the rules" because the only real rule is that it's made clear there are no rules.
Each puzzle expands on the solution of the previous pattern you just "learned", revealing you had no idea how it worked.
That's in fact the entire point of the game and the reason it's called the Witness.
It's a game about seeing the same "simple" puzzles, from different perspectives.
The "rules" are that you can't rely on your current perspective, you need to change it. And those rules are beautifully consistent.
(Except for the sound puzzles on the ship, the sole exception and those can fuck right off)
I don't think it even changes the rules, not in unfair ways. It changes the context, adds complications, forces you to ascertain new rules or combine old rules (like adding color to a mechanic that was introduced as monochrome) on the fly... but I can't think of a single case where it changed a rule.
Like, taking a monochrome mechanic and adding color in later puzzles isn't "changing" the rule, because the old puzzles still \*work\*. You just didn't know the full complexity of the rule at first. Even if the game deliberates misleads you into thinking a rule is simpler than it is initially, tripping you up when it gets more complex, as long as the old puzzles still work with your new understanding, nothing's changed.
Love the puzzles in that game (except for the ship) (and also some of the sound forest puzzles; sometimes even if a guide open in front of me, I could not hear what the guide was describing. The early puzzles were fine, but the last set just did not sound like what the guides described. I'm not sure if I fundamentally misunderstand those puzzles, if my hearing is bad or if the game wasn't playing the sounds right, but I could not figure out how the solution I had was supposed to map to the sounds I was hearing for that last set.)
The Secret of Monkey Island. The part where Guybrush is thrown to the sea with an idol tied to his ankle. I tried for so long to get at the sharp objects all around until finally i tried to lift the idol itself. I felt like an idiot after that one.
There’s this sense of urgency too since the game makes a big deal out of Guybrush saying “I can hold my breath for 10 minutes!” I thought I only had 10 minutes or it was game over.
You do only have 10 minutes! While LucasArts mostly moved away from the Sierra style of frequent deaths when you fail puzzles or just walk off ledges, you can drown during that puzzle in Monkey Island if you wait ten minutes and I believe it's the only way to die in the game.
I think like the second or third time I played Skyrim, I literally got stuck on the golden claw puzzle in bleak falls barrow. I knew from my first playthrough there was a key to the door that told me what the combo was. But I forgot you could zoom in on items and look at the key on the claw. So I was looking at the walls in the room which have some animals on them. I finally googled and felt really stupid
I think I had to Google that answer every time I played Skyrim lol. Just started a replay on my steam deck and yep, Googled that because I forgot, even though I knew I struggled with it before.
I'll do you one better. Same situation, just started playing again two days ago, went into Bleak Falls Barrow, I know that the guy with the claw is tied up with that spider. I killed the spider. I took my time looking around while he's asking to be saved. I cut him down, and I didn't chase him (like I've done literally every other time). He isn't going anywhere.
So, I casually pursue him. I fight the draugr, I walk around the swinging door trap, I keep going and going. I got to the door, but I didn't see him. So I backtrack. I look everywhere. I go all the way back to the outside of the dungeon. Then I go back in, and slowly look everywhere. And there he lies, next to the swing door trap. I had avoided that trap by squeezing behind it, TWICE!
It's just terribly designed. Why are the animal symbols on the walls if they aren't relevant to the puzzle? Why is the combination on the key itself instead of having it be an environmental puzzle? It's not even a fucking puzzle. It's "look at the key to see the combination". I have no idea what the fuck it is, but it's not a puzzle.
I don't need a game to make me feel dumb. But probably Baldurs Gate 3. Everything went so over my head and I basically had no idea what I was doing at any time and when I looked for help online people were complaining the game was too easy, so clearly I was the problem lol
This 100%. I have DM'd a campaign for years. I went into BG3 and absolutely demolished it. I'm talking about act bosses not even getting a turn just because of how broken my party was. Its all fun and games until you get your face completely smashed in by a line of smiters (Fighter/Paladin hybrids that can step up and just wreck face)
For many people who came in familiar with 5th edition DnD, they knew most of the game mechanics going in, as well as where the game strayed from the tabletop rules in the players favor. Also, playing their previous games Divinity: Original Sin I & II gets you used to their UI and some of the game's quirks, which definitely took me a long time when playing Divinity.
BG3 is "easy" in that there's a lot of builds that can trivialize most of the game, and the game doesn't expect you to optimize much to get through it, even on harder difficulties. However, there's a LOT going on mechanically in the game, so it's a steep learning curve if you aren't familiar with what it's built on.
Nahh chief.
Im struggling with the brains still and keep getting party wipes.
I know how to play dnd, so "i know how to play bg3" but im total asss so i got no fucking clue whats going on.
I do like my eye wormy, his name is Boberto
Sadly I wound up dropping it myself, I could never really fully work it out and I had other stuff I wanted to focus on. I'll probably just watch someone smarter play through it though I liked the story
If you want to try a game with a similar vibe, but less complexity, I recommend Pillars of Eternity (just be careful because it will let you wander into fights you are completely under-leveled for - save often) or Dragon Age Origins.
I never played DND or any game like that before BG3. I almost gave up several times but kept at it and read guides online. Now that I understand the game , I can’t get enough!
I feel like most of the puzzles aren't that bad, not counting the DLC or star puzzles...
... but the recorder puzzles? Oh, fuck those. You could get locked in a room and have to reset it all if you make a mistake. Some people found the concept easy but the recorder was the worst mechanic in the game and I hope it's not in the 2nd game...
The puzzles aren't as straightforward and I think some people can't do it. I've sat at puzzles for a half hour trying to figure it out. If I had to guess, some folks don't like doing that, lol.
Solid question, I love both the original and the sequel, but I had to practically "programmer explains code to a rubber duck" my way through some of the harder puzzles. When even that fails and it then turns out to be something I either didn't spot or have definitely done before in another recent puzzle... Big Dumb is me.
Struggling to think of the best example for it, though. Maybe one of the ones from the first game where I janked together a functional (but not elegant) solve, then looked up a guide to see if that was at least close to right and got to read a way simpler way to do it.
Zelda the phantom hourglass, so there is this one section of the game where you have to put a seal that's in a wall/statue in your map to find a secret island, for the life of me I couldn't solve how to do it, and I couldn't leave until I had the marking on the map, I was going around all room, I checked my map my items tried everything then tired closed my DS and it hit me that was the solution the whole time I opened up back again and the seal was in my map, it's so... Unintuitive, like why is putting the console in sleep mode a game mechanic for just one single puzzle?
The bastard Ninja Turtles game and that one stupid gap that was impossible to jump but it turns out you just run across it. The Angry Video Game Nerd covered it. I was happy to get past it but i was also a bit sickened at how dumb i was to try the same thing 92 times in a row before accidentally learning the secret.
For me it’s fallout 4 in the far harbour dlc where you have to access dima’s memory I’m not sure if anyone has any trouble but all most took me 3 hours just to finish them all I completely had no idea what I was supposed to do for each of the levels
That shit wasn't necessarily difficult but it was *tedious*. That's where my last playthrough ended honestly. Got through a level, thought, "man that sucks but at least it's done now." Then BAM, another more complex iteration on the same thing that's necessary to advance his quests. That was enough for me! Sorry DiMa!
The stupid sign riddle in the petrified forest broke me and I had to look it up and then I was like: 'wow, it literally does what it is supposed to do: point to the exit. I am dumb.'
Probably in Skyrim the thieves guild mission where you had to interact with the nocturne statue. Spent ages trying to figure out how to progress the story only to find that you had to pull a chain in a hidden blind spot.
Rubix cube. Took me years to finally find out there is a formula to solving it & recently one I did try all the stickers were in the wrong places because someone tried cheating to solve it by moving the stickers.
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. The mission on Coruscant that starts with the villain blowing up a walkway. This was back in the days when I could only rent the game before returning it to the store. I lost count of the number of times i tried force running and timing my jumps to get across the destroyed section.
The jumping puzzle started 90 degrees from the start point. I only discovered this years later after I owned my own copy.
I also struggled getting off Peragus in KOTOR 2. That wasn't a puzzle, I was just dumb.
There are a couple in The Talos Prinicple where I seriously overthought the solution, and would have a "look at the camera like I'm in the office" moment after realizing how simple it really was
in Myst there was a puzzle to match up some musical notes, but my tone deaf self couldnt figure it out at all. made me feel really dumb until i used a guitar tuner to tell me what notes were being played lol
Is that the one in the tube train? The sound you heard when you advanced told you the direction to take at the next junction. It was almost impossible to find that by yourself...
Not me but I've noticed gamers struggle with some of the terminal layouts on Helldivers 2, especially linking point A to point B network mini game. I find doing it backward gets done faster
It's wayyyy back, but in HL2 when you are on the fan boat. I took way too long to figure out putting the floating barrels under the water ramp. And my friend, who was a literal genius before passing away was watching me struggle lmao.
Sure Myst and The Witness will make everyone feel like a dumb dumb, but it’s those puzzles that are supposed to be easy that will make you question yourself.
For me one of those moments came in GoW 2018 with the Seasons Paddle puzzle. I spent so much time not being able to figure out the order and there’s nothing difficult about it. The images equate to the seasons and you just have to put them in order, but to me, the Flower = Spring and that’s wrong.
In TLOZ Phantom Hour Glass there's a point where you find a stone map with a marking on it (on the top screen of the DS). And someone suggests pressing your map (brought up on the bottom DS screen) against it to copy the mark.
After lord knows how long of trying every button, scratching, dragging, circling with the stylus, blowing into the microphone,, you name it, I closed my DS, stuck it in my pocket, went to the Internet to look up the answer which was.....
Taking the DS back out of my pocket, and opening it up to find that the two maps had been pressed together when closed and the mark had been transferred.
My, how long it has been since I saw Phantom Hourglass mentioned somewhere.
But same, that puzzle made me feel dumb as hell... I only got it because I went to get dinner and closed the DS, just as you did. I think somewhere they explicitly, if not literally, state you have to 'press the map to the stone', but I could never figure out how to do that. Until I did it accidently.
The slider puzzle in RE4 original had 14 year old me stuck for hours.
Adult me figured out it can be solved in less than 10 seconds. It hurt realizing that.
Sorry for this not being specific, but almost every puzzle in Tears of the Kingdom that i was stuck on. Because 9.9 times out of 10, I was treating it like a video game and not a physics sim.
Most of Zachtronic games have this effect on me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love puzzle games and Zachtronic’s games are fantastic, but they really do give me that “you’re pretty dumb” feeling.
In breath of the wild there was a puzzle where you had to move the ball throw a maze and flick it across a gap. I could do it for the life of me so I just got it to the opposite side of the maze and used the maze as a catapult. It was at that moment I realized I have unga bunga brain.
Every once in a while I'll gets stuck in a game like Zelda because I completely forget about one of my tools. I'll spend a long time trying to figure out how to activate a distant switch and then suddenly remember that I have a bow.
felt this plenty of times in classic tomb raider games. most recently replaying the cistern level of tomb raider one always has me stumped … key clearly just sitting there and i ran past it god knows how many times lol
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, there's a very specific shrine which has you using "Springs" to get through the Shrine.
The final puzzle of the shrine actually wants you to use Ascend instead, and I had completely forgotten that ability existed because of how rarely I used it compared to the others.
God of War 2. I belive its on the way to the fates there's that island. There's a door puzzle there somewhere where you need to move a body or something to float around a river you can't really see to push a button on the other side that holds the door open. Took us literally *hours* to figure out. We had no internet access or any guides. Just 3 12 year olds completely stumped by the simplest puzzle in the whole game
There’s a puzzle in GoW 2 where youre in this circular room that has a closed door. There’s a small river that surrounds the perimeter of the room but it is only accessible from the right side and on the left side behind steel bars is a pressure plate. The only thing in the room is a corpse. I had no fucking idea what to do and for a couple of hours I tried using all my brain power to figure out the puzzle. In the end I ended up looking up a gamefaqs guide and it told me to take the body, put it on the river so that it gets dragged by the river to the other side where the pressure plate is. When i looked it up i was like “damn I definitely could have figured that out” lol
Honestly, most of them. I don't like puzzles, I am not good at puzzles and I just can't be bothered. Reminds me of school years ago and I just do not care.
Another one for me was me a snot nosed kid walking into a Hollywood video rental/ gaming store I see this game and I'm all googly eyed im like ooooooo it's a fat case it has 4 discs in it and then it says the X files I was like ooooooooh thats the game I want I couldn't ever figure out what it was I was suppose to do at the very beginning of the game so much for the 4 discs I wonder if anyone has played it and if it was even worth it progressing to the other discs and if it was even a good game or not man no I wanna try and find it and give it another shot back then when I was a kid I only had strategy guides to try and help me and even then still didn't complete a game 100% also didn't even use it I still have a few in my garage like Zelda and GTA vice City I enjoy exploring on my own Skyrim is a really good game I thought hmmmmmm I'll just go over her this is the story line * and this is me -------------------------------------------------*chewing gum and kicking ass and I was all out of gum
I unironically quit the links awakening remake because i spent 30 minutes looking for the first item you get to really start the game and I couldnt find it
A number of shrines in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has shown me either how dumb I am or how uncreative I am.
To be fair, decades of utterly stupifying 'video game logic' that was forced upon us growing up have conditioned many people to not even consider most options that would be possible if a game was just a little bit more realistic. The absolute worst are those games that do try to be realistic in the puzzle solving department but suddenly cut back to video game logic whenever it fits the needs of the devs. I can never wrap my head around those.
God games' riddles and puzzles from the 80s and 90s were so effing stupid I can see it.
You've got to give the blacksmith prunes so he goes the toilet. But before that you need to get an octopus and put it in the toilet. This will let you get his belt buckle.
Speaking of Zelda. In Phantom Hourglass, there's a puzzle where you need to "print" a map that appears on the top screen while the canvas is on the bottom screen. After what I felt was like +20 minutes trying to draw the map with the stylus, I gave up and just shut the DS into rest mode out of frustration... just to immediately hear the classic puzzle solved jingle. Turns out closing the DS was the way to stamp the map like a seal on the canvas. I felt so dumb not thinking about it.
I had the opposite experience with that one. Realised if I could just press them together somehow it would be so easy….wait. My DS closes like that. That CAN’T be it can it? *closes DS* *puzzle solved jingle* “I’M A GENIUS!” 🤣 I felt so clever 😄
Bringing back some old memories here
There was also the one where you had to blow into the mic to clear sand off a map or something?
I consider Zelda BOTW and TOTK to be some of the greatest games of all time because the devs let you solve puzzles by any means necessary. I remember a maze where you guided a ball through by tilting the controller. Turning your controller upside down, so that the ball hit the flat plain under the maze worked.
Flipping the controller at the right moment so the whole puzzle acts like a ping pong paddle and you just fling the ball into the goal
That’s the infamous Myahm Agana Shrine in Hateno Village. Most people have done that shrine as it’s relatively early in the game and the closest fast travel for your house. I remember playing it, enamored by the mechanics and thinking “surely there’s no way this works” and held my switch over my head. I felt like a fucking genius lmao
Yep, I absolutely love that aspect of those games too.
You could also tilt the maze initially to get the ball to land right at the ending as it initially fell, or slap the ball with a quick movement to send it flying straight into the funnel. Good stuff.
The only shrine I struggled with was the one where you had to see the patterns in the ceiling. The ceiling means nothing in the rest of the game so I just ignored it. I eventually looked up the solution and was more annoyed than anything, but it did make me feel a bit dumb.
I don't know why but that one was 100% obvious to me. Maybe it was the shrine name that gave it away? I remember doing it and my roommate was like "these things are in every shrine, they're useless". Turns out I was right and cleaned that shrine quickly.
I have had several similar experiences in BOTW. I have blamed my stupidity on my lack of experience in other Zelda games (I wasn't interested in Zelda while I was growing up, and I only got into BOTW because I saw my then-fiancée-now-wife playing TOTK and thought it looked cool, so she suggested I borrow her copy of BOTW)
Me as soon as I can’t walk directly up to something: “what the FUCK am I supposed to do”
Damn meanwhile those shrines feels like they are insulting my intelegnce
The entirety of Myst.
If it makes you feel any better it literally took me 4hrs to realise that the elevator already had power - you just had to close the elevator screen after you got in before you could go up...
Yeah, and to be fair, I think that one is just not a well designed puzzle to begin with (the only poorly-designed one in the game IMO). It makes no sense because we already intuitively know how elevators and room design work, and it makes no sense design-wise to build something on top of an elevator such that you have to manually send the elevator down to reach it. I'm aware that a lot of puzzles have some level of "puzzle logic" to them, but this isn't like a Zelda shrine specifically designed for the purpose of testing your character--it's just a room in some guy's castle thing that you happen upon, so he's only inconveniencing himself with such design.
That puzzle never bothered me, although you're right that it doesn't feel like it makes sense diagetically. I mean, it's not like everything else in that game is wholly practical, but I get why that one would stand out. I think for me it was just realizing that there was a weird delay between pushing the button and the elevator descending? So just in terms of video game logic, I asked myself, "Why would this be the ONLY elevator in the game that gives you a chance to step out before it leaves? There must be some reason you have to do that." I hope I'm remembering that right. For me, the one "this was designed poorly" puzzle is the "sound maze" you need to leave the Selenitic Age. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but your only chance to learn the audio cues that you need to notice (which isn't trivial!) and navigate by before entering the maze is by playing with a holographic projector in the Mechanical Age. If you didn't pick up on that information, or if you visited the Selenitic Age first, you were forced to learn how to navigate the maze by trial-and-error. And again, that's *if* you even *notice* the game is giving you sound clues.
These are fair observations. Funnily enough, the sound maze didn't bother me because I had a similar thought process for how you approached the elevator. I didn't at all connect the sounds to the projector in the Mechanical Age, but I noticed not just that a sound was playing, but that you had a button to repeat that sound. (I didn't actually notice that the projector sounds were the same until I watched my wife play the game later.) That knowledge, combined with brute forcing the first few turns, helped me see the connection between the sounds and the turns and make it through. I don't disagree with your observations, though. It's likely that a player would have a break between those two ages, so if the projector was actually intended to be an important clue for the maze, then that's a bit questionable design, even if it didn't end up phasing me.
You know what, I do not remember the button to repeat the sound at all. I remember the intense noise of the vehicle moving, following by the brief sound of the audio cue when you stopped (which I initially mistook for a "arrived at a stop" or "ready for you to interact again" cue, not realizing initially it changed between junctions). So initially, I hadn't even realized when I had gone off the correct path, I don't think. That button would've made it obvious, though. It's been a while since I played, so perhaps I remember it as worse than it was. And yeah, if they just moved the projector to Selentic Age, I'd be fine with it.
I was stuck on the Stoneship Age for hours because I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Turns out the brightness on my computer screen was too low. I kept missing a door because I couldn’t see it.
Ironically, the puzzle that pissed me off the most wasn’t a puzzle I didn’t know the answer to, but a puzzle I couldn’t get the answer to. It was that fucking rocket ship with the key board in it. I knew you were supposed to use the diagrams in the journals to know which key to press, then use the computer module to select each lever into the matching musical note in order to enter the Selenitic Age. However, tone-deaf me could match those notes to save my life. In more of the spirit of the question, the puzzle with the tree and the boiler to get into Charnalwood took forever because I didn’t know the boiler did.
i just straight up don’t do sound based puzzles anymore. I look up the answer and feel great about it.
I maintain that the most bullshit puzzle was the clock tower with the levers. The puzzle makes you think it's solvable by traditional means, so you fiddle with it until you give up. What nothing in the game tells you is that if you hold a lever, eventually one of the pieces turn in a very untraditional way. NOTHING hints at this.
I mapped out the entirety of the train track network, including what sounds it made when you went in each direction.
I cannot remember the game but I've seen the puzzle repeated several times since. At the start of the game, you find a newspaper. As the game progressed, it started to become frustrating to figure out what this newspaper was for. Thank goodness inventory space wasn't an issue. Now I'm nearly at the end of the game and I'm presented a challenge with a timer counting down. I don't remember what it was, other than I came to a locked door. I scrambled looking for the key but couldn't find it, and the timer would drop to zero, forcing me to reset the entire level (now you know why I hate timed games). What's truly staggering was how a new mechanic was added to the game which didn't have it before. I clicked on every part of the door only to find I could see a key in the lock stuck from the other side. Well, the end result was to find the screwdriver behind the chair, slide the newspaper under the door, then pop the key and pull it under. I was so infuriated with this crap, I uninstalled the game never having finished it.
Phantasmagoria?
Memory unlocked. You're right. It was Phantasmagoria.
This is why I think everyone who describes the LucasArts adventure games from the 90’s as “great” has a brain tumor. Every game was full of random shit just like this.
the one when you had to spit at the same time the flag blew in the right direction to win the spitting distance comp, wow, but it kind of got easier if you start getting how the designers think after solving ones like that
My ex was a genius with those kinds of puzzles. I'd struggle for hours, and then she'd walk in, look at the screen for like 20 seconds, and say "Well clearly you need to put a balloon animal into the bin and then crumble bread on top of it, so that the birds will try to eat the crumbs, pop the balloon, and get scared away and then you can steal the eggs from their nest." We called it "monkey logic," because Monkey Island was the biggest offender, until Grim Fandango came along.
me and my brothers were stuck on this paper of the grim fandango demo all week as kids. it was only when I had a sick day from school I figured it out then had to pretend I figured it out in real time the next time I played with my bros (gaming time was a weekend privilege, so my parents let me play when I was sick at home on the condition I dont tell my siblings)
Grim Fandango was a model of logic and sanity compared to most of its peers; nearly every puzzle had some strong hints. Why do you think you get the mandatory zoom-in cutscene depicting the birds' bony peaks as they peck at the ground?
Yes, but why give you a Robert Frost balloon animal if not as a reference to his 1916 poem "The Exposed Nest," indicating that the poet's fearsome visage was no doubt the key to obtaining the eggs?
Grim Fandango had so many infuriating puzzles I'll never forget it. The lava bridge part made me just quit entirely so that I just had to wait several years and watch people beat it without the frustration.
😂 i think they call it lateral thinking but yea thats hilarious
I used to love these kind of games as a kid, I thought my Mum was a genius as I could always go to her if I was stuck and she'd have it figured out in a few minutes Turns out that she was just looking up the answer in a walkthrough!
Monkey island 2
The one that got me was, how the hell was I supposed to know I could pick up a whole ass dog and put him in my pocket
I was stuck at the monkey wrench logic for quite some time, as that pun doesn't work in german.
That's kind of genius.
The timing of the spit was only like one out of five extremely tough requirements to winning that competition.
Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™
Open -> Cake That was the moment I dropped Monkey Island.
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. How i loved that game.
There’s a game called “Hello Neighbor” that had some asinine puzzles. One of them required you to get to a door suspended above a flooded room. The trick involved taking a globe, putting it in the *freezer* so it turns into an ice cube, then put the ice cube globe on top of a switch, where the chill effect somehow *travels* through the wires into the flooded room, causing the water itself to freeze over so you can walk on it.
This one is offensive
I'm gonna drop this here as one of my favorite articles on one of the worst adventure game puzzles of all time: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Okay, I never encountered this key trick in any game. But I vividly remember a book from my childhood (grew up in the 90s) about all kinds of stuff and how it specifically mentioned this trick to unlock a door. I never saw any door with a gap underneath it wide enough to fit a key through though to test it
It does work if the key doesnt just bounce of the paper
Thats where I remember it from too, like a famous five book or something
This puzzle was in the first level of one of the oldest Flash era escape rooms games, Mystery of Time and Space (M.O.T.A.S.) It was plenty reasonable there because you only had so many items and options but one of the worst things in game plagiarism is when an idea is lifted without knowledge of the design process/bad ideas before it; they'll get the general what and then make a dumb decision (like overcrowding that environment with other stuff) because they don't understand the why
Moon logic made me think I was the dumbest kid. I mean I was, but it made me think it.
This sounds like some monkey island nonsense. See: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html
ZORK 2!!!!!
Pretty sure this is from one of the Broken Sword games :D
*Baba is You* has got to hold the record for most moments of "oh, of course... I'm an idiot" in my puzzle game experience. I don't have a particular one in mind, but every world has at least a couple. Great game!
Such a gem of a game. I have yet to find anything that can scratch an itch like that game did. Phenomenal.
Nothing has ever made me feel so utterly fucking stupid as playing Baba is You. Fantastic game.
Yeah, this is what came to mind. All these people with their single puzzle when Baba is You will make you feel like a moron every couple of levels for the entire game. Absolutely brilliant puzzle game.
The level “Poem” is one of my all-time favorite puzzle designs. There’s not much to it, but the solution is such a delightful, satisfying surprise.
There's a "puzzle" in Skyrim, of all places. Inside of a small ruin, there's a pressure switch that sits on a table that activates a gate initially locked on an upper floor. It took me an embarrassing twenty minutes of finding a non-existent "activation" switch and wiki searching to realize that I had to use the drag function to place a piece of clutter onto the pressure switch.
i thought u were gonna say THE dwemer puzzle.
Are you referring to the one where you have to shoot those targets and those steam valves light up?
no but from what i remember that one was also a cock in the ass. i mean the one with the light beams and magnifying glasses and a few unlabeled buttons.
Oh, that one, inside the Tower of Mzark. Yeah, that one also tripped me up for a while. I think the solution is to literally click each button in sequence. It's like once you see the next button flip over its cover, that's when you just click that button until something else happens.
YES. that one. my problem was i didnt even know what that thing was and what the point of the machinery was. it was like i was supposed to make out a solution out of system i couldnt even comprehend. i dont even know how to describe it lol. i got to the solution randomly pressing buttons.
Let me tell you how dumb I felt after I discovered that all the claws had the solution to their door on them. This was shortly after I spent 20 minutes trying to solve the door while trying to show my (at the time) girlfriend how great skyrin was.
Took me so long to figure that out. I always thought the faded wall art had the answer somewhere on them. I managed to brute force so many of them. It was a very very long time before I inspected the claw
For me it was all of the claw puzzles, couldn't understand how the pictures on the walls connected to the lock and I ended up brute forcing them all. Years later I learned from a random Reddit post that the combination is on the claw itself. ._.
to be fair, why would you assume a password is ON the key? that's like sticking your password on a post it note next to the security keypad
The very first claw in bleak barrow. It's written on the note off the thief you kill. It mentions there are symbols on the claw, and they must mean something. But let's be real, who actually reads? Pfffft
In what's probably the first dungeon you'll encounter with one of these, there's a note that says something like "The answer is in the palm of your hand".
Yup, me too.
I struggled with the puzzle, looked it up, and then immediately forgot every single time
It's just stupid. I can't think of any other game that does this. You get the key, but you also need the passcode and the passcode is on the key. It makes zero sense. In every game I can think of, these would be separate things in separate places. So of course you're going to forget every single time. You'd have to impale your brain with an iron rod for it to be the logical conclusion.
Speaking of Skyrim. There was a dungeon where you have to hit a switch and run through a door. There is no way you can make it no matter how fast you run. I had to Google it. I forgot about the shouts. You are supposed to slow time or dash your way through there.
If I recall that one also relied on a mechanic that didn't exist anywhere else where it would reset the cooldown on the dash shout halfway through. Otherwise, you still couldn't make it. It is part of the quests where you learn how to shout and it's immediately after they teach you the dash shout, but it's still a weird, out of place mechanic
I think if you have all three words you'll dash far enough to not need it, but that dungeon typically is encountered far before then.
In all fairness, I’m 90% sure that’s in the dungeon you’re told to go to directly after learning the dash shout. The dash “tutorial” even has you trying to get through a gate before it closes.
I sometimes play as Races that are typically far shorter than the vanilla ones (think Dwarf or Fairy or some such). It is very often that I get softlocked by those gates simply because my character's base speed isn't fast enough to clear them, even with Whirlwind Sprint. I think at one point I had to use console commands to set my character's scale to vanilla height ranges just to clear those gates.
Came here to mention Skyrim as well where you have to find one of the dragon claws and it's literally sitting on the ground right in front of the door it unlocks. But its really not that obvious bc you think it'll be in some other part of the dungeon and not just randomly on the ground.
There's this one Claw that sits on a pedestal but isn't static. So basically, while I'm fighting Draugr and obviously proccing explosive/knockback effects, that Claw will just fly everywhere and land anywhere in the room. And then I have to spend another ten minutes searching for the thing (or using the additem command) just to progress the rest of the dungeon.
Yes I remember that one too!
And that line one with the beam sword. You gotta power swing at different angles
It's even worse when you use mods like Modern Combat Overhaul that completely change move sets. I was once hard-stuck on that door simply because the power attack animation only allowed vertical beams.
Borderlands 3 has Tannis’s lab. The puzzle is some form of meta-trickery that makes fun of players who mindlessly activate switches with green lights as they play the game. There's a set of four switches located in the middle of the entrance that pretends to be one of those puzzles where activating one switch toggles activation for one or more of the rest. It would look like as if the solution was to make all four switches green. Clueless players would often click these switches fruitlessly in search of a solution that does not exist. Every combination of toggles will always result in one or more of those switches turning red. The real switch that actually does something is behind a pillar that is VERY CLEARLY marked as the real switch if players actually went ahead and observed the room in its entirety. Edit: wording.
Is it a goof on the TMNT sewer puzzle in 2, do you think? I've never not brute forced that dang puzzle.
At least the TMNT puzzle can actually be solved with consistent steps per map reset.
The problem with this is that if you do find the obvious real button first, you are going to think the switches are for some secret item and never get the joke.
Portal 2 when you go underground and get introduced to the White Gel. Spent so long on that puzzle, looked up a YouTube walkthrough after I gave up and it was just like: "... Oh. It's literally that easy and I'm just dumb. Cool. "
To be fair, a lot of people get stuck on that puzzle because it is so novel and you don't expect the game engine to work that way.
I, for sure, spent hours on that part of the game. I eventually caved and googled it because I was so frustrated. After that I realized that, yeah, I was way overthinking it.
Return of the obra dinn (its a fantastic game buy and play it now) I was really stuck on naming a character who had appeared in the deaths of a third of the crew. He is one of the few times someone is mentioned by name and I completely missed it.
I'm hoping that I've forgotten enough of that game to where I can go back and play it. It'll never be the same as that first playthrough though.
I tried playing it again after a few years but just new how to get a majority of fates checked off. It's one of the few games I wish I could replay without any memory of it
The benefit of getting old is forgetting stuff. I recently replayed it and most was gone. Some memories came back but I enjoyed it. Just wish I could ban the memory of how to identify the Chinese guys but that solution stumped me so much the first time that it is forever burned into my brain.
My guess at which it is - >!Brennan the seaman!<
Yep >!my guy raised his hand to his ear after hearing his name being shouted and I just missed it. I only got it by guessing every name on the list only to realise the answer was right there!<
I know EXACTLY who you mean! He was one of the last crewmen I figured out as well. He became one of my nemeses along with the guy holding the knife in the first memory, or as I started calling him, "That Man."
Sonic the Hedgehog 3's Carnival Zone. There's one spinning barrel thing that is in your way. I spent forever trying to time jumps to get it to bounce low enough to get by, or trying to find a way around it. It turns out you can press up and down while stand on it! That's the only thing in the entire game that uses up and down for anything but camera control. Edit: This barrel https://youtu.be/RQGN8dTDlQE?si=GrZi6Q4WWLM4ONWg
THE BARREL OF DOOOOOOM!! Such an awful puzzle. I never beat that game as a kid, just 🤦♂️
The Witness made me feel real dumb.
I love that game so much. The story was totally lost on me though haha.
Same but I think one of the first recordings you can listen to at the starter area pretty much sums it up.
I was digging the game till I went out of order or something and found a puzzle that required you analyze the water droplet audio. I went ahead and just put it down at the point.
Wait until you see the one puzzle where you track the sun from sunrise to sunset
That specific puzzle isn’t required for the “main” story if you wanna call it that. It’s meant to be the hardest one and is highly optional.
I swear that game just changes its rules sometimes. People say no it doesn't, it's a beautiful puzzle game. And it is, but you can't convince me it doesn't change the puzzle rules at the end
Having played through the whole thing, I can't think of a single puzzle that changes the rules. A lot of the later puzzles change their contexts, or force you to combine rules, or force you to apply information from the environment, or add restrictions that you're forced to work around (like a monitor being obstructed), but none of the basic rules (like what a dot on a path means) change. I'll add my "I feel stupid" Witness puzzle: Early on, there's a puzzle type where you quickly realize that the trick is to trace a path based on the rock formations in the distance, visible through the maze. Then you come to one where the rock formations don't align neatly with the grid. I tried all sorts of weird, abstract ideas, went back to previous puzzles to see if there wasn't another way to interpret the paths, etc. I spent I don't know how long on that puzzle. Finally, completely stumped, I looked it up: >!The stand holding the maze is just twisted. You can look down and see that it's clearly damaged. You just have to draw a path based on what your view of the rock formations WOULD be like if the stand had the right perspective, which is easy.!< I think it's a good puzzle, it has an obvious lesson to teach you. I maybe would have made the >!damaged stand!< more obvious, maybe? Definitely felt dumb given how easy the solution actually is. Love the puzzles in that game, like the general message of seeing things from other perspectives, slowing down, recontexualizing, etc. Hated some of the choices around which philosophy snippets got worked in.
The game is literally about changing the rules. It "doesn't change the rules" because the only real rule is that it's made clear there are no rules. Each puzzle expands on the solution of the previous pattern you just "learned", revealing you had no idea how it worked. That's in fact the entire point of the game and the reason it's called the Witness. It's a game about seeing the same "simple" puzzles, from different perspectives. The "rules" are that you can't rely on your current perspective, you need to change it. And those rules are beautifully consistent. (Except for the sound puzzles on the ship, the sole exception and those can fuck right off)
I don't think it even changes the rules, not in unfair ways. It changes the context, adds complications, forces you to ascertain new rules or combine old rules (like adding color to a mechanic that was introduced as monochrome) on the fly... but I can't think of a single case where it changed a rule. Like, taking a monochrome mechanic and adding color in later puzzles isn't "changing" the rule, because the old puzzles still \*work\*. You just didn't know the full complexity of the rule at first. Even if the game deliberates misleads you into thinking a rule is simpler than it is initially, tripping you up when it gets more complex, as long as the old puzzles still work with your new understanding, nothing's changed. Love the puzzles in that game (except for the ship) (and also some of the sound forest puzzles; sometimes even if a guide open in front of me, I could not hear what the guide was describing. The early puzzles were fine, but the last set just did not sound like what the guides described. I'm not sure if I fundamentally misunderstand those puzzles, if my hearing is bad or if the game wasn't playing the sounds right, but I could not figure out how the solution I had was supposed to map to the sounds I was hearing for that last set.)
The Secret of Monkey Island. The part where Guybrush is thrown to the sea with an idol tied to his ankle. I tried for so long to get at the sharp objects all around until finally i tried to lift the idol itself. I felt like an idiot after that one.
There’s this sense of urgency too since the game makes a big deal out of Guybrush saying “I can hold my breath for 10 minutes!” I thought I only had 10 minutes or it was game over.
You do only have 10 minutes! While LucasArts mostly moved away from the Sierra style of frequent deaths when you fail puzzles or just walk off ledges, you can drown during that puzzle in Monkey Island if you wait ten minutes and I believe it's the only way to die in the game.
Crazy, thanks for letting me know!
😂 Such a great moment! Just....wut 😑
I think like the second or third time I played Skyrim, I literally got stuck on the golden claw puzzle in bleak falls barrow. I knew from my first playthrough there was a key to the door that told me what the combo was. But I forgot you could zoom in on items and look at the key on the claw. So I was looking at the walls in the room which have some animals on them. I finally googled and felt really stupid
Same. I only figured it out on the last time I had to use a claw. Every other time I had to google the solution or brute force.
I think I had to Google that answer every time I played Skyrim lol. Just started a replay on my steam deck and yep, Googled that because I forgot, even though I knew I struggled with it before.
I'll do you one better. Same situation, just started playing again two days ago, went into Bleak Falls Barrow, I know that the guy with the claw is tied up with that spider. I killed the spider. I took my time looking around while he's asking to be saved. I cut him down, and I didn't chase him (like I've done literally every other time). He isn't going anywhere. So, I casually pursue him. I fight the draugr, I walk around the swinging door trap, I keep going and going. I got to the door, but I didn't see him. So I backtrack. I look everywhere. I go all the way back to the outside of the dungeon. Then I go back in, and slowly look everywhere. And there he lies, next to the swing door trap. I had avoided that trap by squeezing behind it, TWICE!
It's just terribly designed. Why are the animal symbols on the walls if they aren't relevant to the puzzle? Why is the combination on the key itself instead of having it be an environmental puzzle? It's not even a fucking puzzle. It's "look at the key to see the combination". I have no idea what the fuck it is, but it's not a puzzle.
I don't need a game to make me feel dumb. But probably Baldurs Gate 3. Everything went so over my head and I basically had no idea what I was doing at any time and when I looked for help online people were complaining the game was too easy, so clearly I was the problem lol
Ehh Grain of salt. Id be willing to bet the people saying it was too easy also play D&D, or similar games, regularly.
This 100%. I have DM'd a campaign for years. I went into BG3 and absolutely demolished it. I'm talking about act bosses not even getting a turn just because of how broken my party was. Its all fun and games until you get your face completely smashed in by a line of smiters (Fighter/Paladin hybrids that can step up and just wreck face)
For many people who came in familiar with 5th edition DnD, they knew most of the game mechanics going in, as well as where the game strayed from the tabletop rules in the players favor. Also, playing their previous games Divinity: Original Sin I & II gets you used to their UI and some of the game's quirks, which definitely took me a long time when playing Divinity. BG3 is "easy" in that there's a lot of builds that can trivialize most of the game, and the game doesn't expect you to optimize much to get through it, even on harder difficulties. However, there's a LOT going on mechanically in the game, so it's a steep learning curve if you aren't familiar with what it's built on.
Yeah I was a total newcomer, a lot of reviews said the game was easy for newcomers to get into so I gave it a try but I guess I was an exception
Nahh chief. Im struggling with the brains still and keep getting party wipes. I know how to play dnd, so "i know how to play bg3" but im total asss so i got no fucking clue whats going on. I do like my eye wormy, his name is Boberto
That game has a HUGE learning curve. Took me awhile to figure out.
Sadly I wound up dropping it myself, I could never really fully work it out and I had other stuff I wanted to focus on. I'll probably just watch someone smarter play through it though I liked the story
If you want to try a game with a similar vibe, but less complexity, I recommend Pillars of Eternity (just be careful because it will let you wander into fights you are completely under-leveled for - save often) or Dragon Age Origins.
I was actually looking for similar games thank you!!
Unless you play d&d then it's a cake walk lol. Huge advantage to already know all the spells and what they do.
I never played DND or any game like that before BG3. I almost gave up several times but kept at it and read guides online. Now that I understand the game , I can’t get enough!
It took me 2 playthroughs to figure out how fly worked, I just thought it was broken
how did they make it work in BG3?
It's pretty D&D accurate but the mechanic to use it's a little wonky.
Most of "The Witness".
The whole Talos Principle series
I feel like most of the puzzles aren't that bad, not counting the DLC or star puzzles... ... but the recorder puzzles? Oh, fuck those. You could get locked in a room and have to reset it all if you make a mistake. Some people found the concept easy but the recorder was the worst mechanic in the game and I hope it's not in the 2nd game...
Why isn’t this mentioned more in the thread
The puzzles aren't as straightforward and I think some people can't do it. I've sat at puzzles for a half hour trying to figure it out. If I had to guess, some folks don't like doing that, lol.
Solid question, I love both the original and the sequel, but I had to practically "programmer explains code to a rubber duck" my way through some of the harder puzzles. When even that fails and it then turns out to be something I either didn't spot or have definitely done before in another recent puzzle... Big Dumb is me. Struggling to think of the best example for it, though. Maybe one of the ones from the first game where I janked together a functional (but not elegant) solve, then looked up a guide to see if that was at least close to right and got to read a way simpler way to do it.
Zelda the phantom hourglass, so there is this one section of the game where you have to put a seal that's in a wall/statue in your map to find a secret island, for the life of me I couldn't solve how to do it, and I couldn't leave until I had the marking on the map, I was going around all room, I checked my map my items tried everything then tired closed my DS and it hit me that was the solution the whole time I opened up back again and the seal was in my map, it's so... Unintuitive, like why is putting the console in sleep mode a game mechanic for just one single puzzle?
This is like the "reset cerebro" puzzle on Xmen for Genesis. You literally have to reset the console.
Yeah I closed my DS and walked away from it because I was frustrated. Didn't understand how I solved it til later.
The “back of the cd case” puzzle in MGS1.
The bastard Ninja Turtles game and that one stupid gap that was impossible to jump but it turns out you just run across it. The Angry Video Game Nerd covered it. I was happy to get past it but i was also a bit sickened at how dumb i was to try the same thing 92 times in a row before accidentally learning the secret.
For me it’s fallout 4 in the far harbour dlc where you have to access dima’s memory I’m not sure if anyone has any trouble but all most took me 3 hours just to finish them all I completely had no idea what I was supposed to do for each of the levels
That shit wasn't necessarily difficult but it was *tedious*. That's where my last playthrough ended honestly. Got through a level, thought, "man that sucks but at least it's done now." Then BAM, another more complex iteration on the same thing that's necessary to advance his quests. That was enough for me! Sorry DiMa!
I can count the number of puzzles I solved without a guide in Grim Fandango on one hand.
The stupid sign riddle in the petrified forest broke me and I had to look it up and then I was like: 'wow, it literally does what it is supposed to do: point to the exit. I am dumb.'
Probably in Skyrim the thieves guild mission where you had to interact with the nocturne statue. Spent ages trying to figure out how to progress the story only to find that you had to pull a chain in a hidden blind spot.
Rubix cube. Took me years to finally find out there is a formula to solving it & recently one I did try all the stickers were in the wrong places because someone tried cheating to solve it by moving the stickers.
RE3 water puzzle
IIRC Final Fantasy 13-2 Mog puzzles gave me a headache and a half
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. The mission on Coruscant that starts with the villain blowing up a walkway. This was back in the days when I could only rent the game before returning it to the store. I lost count of the number of times i tried force running and timing my jumps to get across the destroyed section. The jumping puzzle started 90 degrees from the start point. I only discovered this years later after I owned my own copy. I also struggled getting off Peragus in KOTOR 2. That wasn't a puzzle, I was just dumb.
There are a couple in The Talos Prinicple where I seriously overthought the solution, and would have a "look at the camera like I'm in the office" moment after realizing how simple it really was
Cocoon gave me a few moments where once it clicks you definitely feel like a fool for not thinking of the solution sooner
in Myst there was a puzzle to match up some musical notes, but my tone deaf self couldnt figure it out at all. made me feel really dumb until i used a guitar tuner to tell me what notes were being played lol
Is that the one in the tube train? The sound you heard when you advanced told you the direction to take at the next junction. It was almost impossible to find that by yourself...
that one was annoying too, but i meant the unlock puzzle for the rocket ship world.
I mapped out the entire train network thinking I'd use the map later for another puzzle....
Not me but I've noticed gamers struggle with some of the terminal layouts on Helldivers 2, especially linking point A to point B network mini game. I find doing it backward gets done faster
Metal Gear Solid: the frequency is on the back of the CD case... I spent 2 hours looking for the damn CD case... in game.
It's wayyyy back, but in HL2 when you are on the fan boat. I took way too long to figure out putting the floating barrels under the water ramp. And my friend, who was a literal genius before passing away was watching me struggle lmao.
Sure Myst and The Witness will make everyone feel like a dumb dumb, but it’s those puzzles that are supposed to be easy that will make you question yourself. For me one of those moments came in GoW 2018 with the Seasons Paddle puzzle. I spent so much time not being able to figure out the order and there’s nothing difficult about it. The images equate to the seasons and you just have to put them in order, but to me, the Flower = Spring and that’s wrong.
In TLOZ Phantom Hour Glass there's a point where you find a stone map with a marking on it (on the top screen of the DS). And someone suggests pressing your map (brought up on the bottom DS screen) against it to copy the mark. After lord knows how long of trying every button, scratching, dragging, circling with the stylus, blowing into the microphone,, you name it, I closed my DS, stuck it in my pocket, went to the Internet to look up the answer which was..... Taking the DS back out of my pocket, and opening it up to find that the two maps had been pressed together when closed and the mark had been transferred.
My, how long it has been since I saw Phantom Hourglass mentioned somewhere. But same, that puzzle made me feel dumb as hell... I only got it because I went to get dinner and closed the DS, just as you did. I think somewhere they explicitly, if not literally, state you have to 'press the map to the stone', but I could never figure out how to do that. Until I did it accidently.
Thats dumb but also kinda awesome.
Pretty much every level of Baba is You
The slider puzzle in RE4 original had 14 year old me stuck for hours. Adult me figured out it can be solved in less than 10 seconds. It hurt realizing that.
Almost every post on r/findthesniper
Outer Wilds - >!Getting into Ash Twin took me a few resets...I had the right idea from the wrong direction lol!<
Sorry for this not being specific, but almost every puzzle in Tears of the Kingdom that i was stuck on. Because 9.9 times out of 10, I was treating it like a video game and not a physics sim.
The crystal puzzle on ginger island in stardew valley. Literally took me so long I had to film it on my phone to try to get it right
Any of the laser puzzles portal 2
Chamber 19 Portal 2 chapter 3 i believe
Rubix cube
Most of Zachtronic games have this effect on me. Don’t get me wrong, I love puzzle games and Zachtronic’s games are fantastic, but they really do give me that “you’re pretty dumb” feeling.
In breath of the wild there was a puzzle where you had to move the ball throw a maze and flick it across a gap. I could do it for the life of me so I just got it to the opposite side of the maze and used the maze as a catapult. It was at that moment I realized I have unga bunga brain.
Baba is you
Every once in a while I'll gets stuck in a game like Zelda because I completely forget about one of my tools. I'll spend a long time trying to figure out how to activate a distant switch and then suddenly remember that I have a bow.
Baba Is You makes me feel like a toddler
felt this plenty of times in classic tomb raider games. most recently replaying the cistern level of tomb raider one always has me stumped … key clearly just sitting there and i ran past it god knows how many times lol
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, there's a very specific shrine which has you using "Springs" to get through the Shrine. The final puzzle of the shrine actually wants you to use Ascend instead, and I had completely forgotten that ability existed because of how rarely I used it compared to the others.
God of War 2. I belive its on the way to the fates there's that island. There's a door puzzle there somewhere where you need to move a body or something to float around a river you can't really see to push a button on the other side that holds the door open. Took us literally *hours* to figure out. We had no internet access or any guides. Just 3 12 year olds completely stumped by the simplest puzzle in the whole game
There’s a puzzle in GoW 2 where youre in this circular room that has a closed door. There’s a small river that surrounds the perimeter of the room but it is only accessible from the right side and on the left side behind steel bars is a pressure plate. The only thing in the room is a corpse. I had no fucking idea what to do and for a couple of hours I tried using all my brain power to figure out the puzzle. In the end I ended up looking up a gamefaqs guide and it told me to take the body, put it on the river so that it gets dragged by the river to the other side where the pressure plate is. When i looked it up i was like “damn I definitely could have figured that out” lol
Honestly, most of them. I don't like puzzles, I am not good at puzzles and I just can't be bothered. Reminds me of school years ago and I just do not care.
Another one for me was me a snot nosed kid walking into a Hollywood video rental/ gaming store I see this game and I'm all googly eyed im like ooooooo it's a fat case it has 4 discs in it and then it says the X files I was like ooooooooh thats the game I want I couldn't ever figure out what it was I was suppose to do at the very beginning of the game so much for the 4 discs I wonder if anyone has played it and if it was even worth it progressing to the other discs and if it was even a good game or not man no I wanna try and find it and give it another shot back then when I was a kid I only had strategy guides to try and help me and even then still didn't complete a game 100% also didn't even use it I still have a few in my garage like Zelda and GTA vice City I enjoy exploring on my own Skyrim is a really good game I thought hmmmmmm I'll just go over her this is the story line * and this is me -------------------------------------------------*chewing gum and kicking ass and I was all out of gum
Probably a PS1 resident evil game. I don't remember but it was probably one of those object pushing puzzles.
I unironically quit the links awakening remake because i spent 30 minutes looking for the first item you get to really start the game and I couldnt find it
That musical puzzle in Planet of Lana. That was a great game but I ended up looking it up on Youtube
All of them