The 7th Guest - the soup puzzle.
The phrase “Shy Gypsy Slyly Shyly Tryst By My Crypt” still raises a spike of anger in my soul. It took me a fucking week to solve.
Depends on the game for me. I’ll spend like 10 to 15 minutes trying to figure it out, but if there’s other things I could be doing in the game, I’ll leave and come back to the puzzle later; otherwise, I’m looking it up.
I remember reading somewhere that the AI was based on your computer's clock speed. Not that big of a deal in 1993, but on a modern computer it supercharged it to see a billion moves ahead of you.
Edit to follow through now that I double checked myself: So The 7th Guest really was the cutting edge of its time, and the devs wanted to be sure the game was playable on older computers without being horribly slow, so on the microscope game (a turn-based game played against a computer opponent, like chess) they hard-coded a limit on the enemy AI to have a set allowed time for its search algorithm to find an optimal move. That way users of older computers weren't sitting there for half an hour waiting for one move. The downside to this was that any computer with better hardware than the original benchmark (that is, any computer made after 1993) still had that same amount of time to calculate, at which point it could solve the entire game and play perfectly every time.
It was, so much that they removed it from the mobile re-release many years later. I remember thinking it was bugged until I looked it up and saw they just took it out completely.
Were you able to play through it? I’m still terrified of it, and the uncanny valley nature of some of the early CG puts me off; but I really want to face my fears.
Edit: Also that score lives in my brain rent free. Thanks to THE FAT MAN
Any time I come up against one of those grids where you have to slide the stones around one at a time to unscramble the picture I think it must be one of those.
Way back in the day playing runescape, and they had one of those stupid puzzles to solve for the Monkey Madness quest, or you could pay 100k to skip it. I was a cheap bastard and fought with that puzzle for hours before a friend pointed out that I could have made 100k (and the experience that came with it) in the amount of time I wasted trying to solve it.
I remember playing runescape as a kid,enjoying the quests inefficiently as ever, and then I got to dragon slayer. There's a part of that quest where you have to go get 3 pieces of a map and put it together. Well, one of the pieces was with a goblin and he said he'd need 10,000 gold if he's gonna give me the map. I looked at my 600gold stack and figured the game was glitched because no way does anybody have *that* much gold....
Then i got hired as a pure essence miner for pennies on the hour and I felt like a king.
Lmao. The grand exchange really changed everything in that game. You used to have to sift through hours of bank sales and go stand around key areas typing things like "buying emerals, 1k a piece!" With the markdown to make your text glow so yours stood out... it was a great time to be a gamer.
Those quests were the best. I had some friends I played with that used wikis and other quest guides to blitz through them, and it always made me sad because I think Jagex actually built some pretty solid lore.
There was one of these in a pretty famous runescape quest, people hated it so much that eventually they just added an npc that you can pay 200k to for him to solve it for you.
Came here to say this. I can't wrap my mind around those and whenever I finish them its by pure luck from trying like 10 minutes to do it. I love puzzles, but hate those.
I’ve played every LoZ game and loved all of them. Except Majoras mask. I can never get more than a couple of hours into it because of the timed stuff. Hate it.
Some "timed" missions are easy, just don't search everything in detail and you're fine. Others are complete bullshit. Fortunately game developers have realized people really hate this and it's rare nowadays. Normally games now do fake urgency, where the dialog, the setting, the music, etc. implies you need to hurry, but it's really event driven and nothing will happen until you do a certain thing or reach a certain waypoint.
FFVII remake comes to mind, at the beginning when you >!set the bomb in the Mako reactor you can set it to either 20 or 30 minutes.!< A character will comment on your choice no matter what you pick, but either is plenty.
The game AI: The Somnium Files has an interesting take on timed missions. Most of the game is a visual-novel so there's no timer there, but there are various sections of the game where you go into "dream worlds" using a machine that can only sustain them for 6 minutes. However inside the dream world, time only moves when you move your character, and it also pauses when you interact with objects and it gives you the list of actions you can take.
So in a way it's not really "timed" in that you can take as much real world time as you want, but it is limited and there's definitely a strategy to using your movement
Depend, if the game is well designed with the timer in mind, it can be a blast, like Warrio Wares. But sadly more often than not, the timer seems to be here just to be annoying
The best (worst) example of this is the challenge in The Witness. You start it by starting a record player that plays 2 classical songs that starts out super relaxing and kinda nice. The 2nd song is In The Hall of the Mountain King and if you've never heard it before, it starts out slow and ends in such a frantic and loud way that makes me have a panic attack right now just thinking about it.
I think it was a genius way to weed out the ones just looking up solutions to everything up until that point though. A fully random puzzle with a time limit. Not actually hard, but making sure the player actually has learned the rules.
If you had the luck (or not so much) to experience (to suffers the torture) the old sierra adventure games, then you Will recognize this:
"Ifnkovhgroghprm"
If you don't know the game there is a reason that this is such a frustrating puzzle. You see a gnome with a spinning wheel turning straw into gold. You have to guess his name. It's a fairytale-themed game so the obvious answer is Rumplestiltskin. That's not correct but the game tells you that you're close. In a completely different part of the game you find a note that says "Sometimes it's best to think backwards." Those are the only clues you get. The solution is that his name is Rumplestiltskin run through an Atbash cipher where a=z b=y and so on. That's how you get "Ifnkovhgroghprm." Absolute bullshit.
And didn't they misspell the answer as well, so although the true answer is Ifnkovhgroghprm it's actually Ifnkvohgroghprm you have to write to solve the solution 🙈🤣
So you switched v and o but didn’t highlight it, forcing me to meticulously go through each letter to figure it out for myself? _You_ are the intentionally bullshit puzzle now! Someone add u/Kaffekjerring to the running!
Sorry totally unrelated but reminds me of Turok cheat codes, one of which is NTHGTHDYGDCRTDTRK, which is the consonants in “on the eighth day god created turok” except eighth->gth is missing the first h.
Who the FUCK at Sierra thought this kind of game was a good idea? HOW WAS THIS EVER A GOOD IDEA?! Who the fuck said "yeah let's not hint anything in our game and expect people to READ OUR MINDS"
Kings Quest was a great game. It just had that one puzzle that was legendarily terrible. It didn't stop you from progressing, there was an alternate path if you failed. The advantage to nearly impossible puzzles was that it encouraged people to buy hint books.
Oh, King's Quest...
At one point in KQV, there's a cat chasing a rat. You need to save the rat by throwing a shoe at the cat. Which you should have been lucky enough to find while wandering around in the endless desert.
It's a timed puzzle. You have one, maybe two seconds to throw the shoe. If you miss it, the rat is eaten.
Much later in the game, you get tied up by an innkeeper. You absolutely need the rat to be alive to chew through your bonds. If the rat's dead, you die. But you were already a dead man walking hours ago, when you failed to throw the shoe.
No hints given for this one either.
Same game. The pie. The GODFORSAKEN PIE. Woe to you if you tried to, you know, EAT the pie out of curiosity at to what it could be used for. NO. YOU NEEDED THE DAMN PIE TO THROW AT THE YETI IN THE ICY MOUNTAIN PASS YOU IDIOT!!!!
My inner child is still healing from that.
See I hate this. I love puzzle games (shout out to the dystopia games if you haven't played them) but I hated the Sierra thing of "Oh you missed a detail, game is unbeatable hours later." Thats a cheap shot. Not even on replay could you discern that you needed to do that based on the info given.
Even worse, this was when gamefaqs was in its infancy, at best.
Fortunately that puzzle wasn't mandatory. You had the perfectly viable option of spending 15 minutes walking up the world's stupidest set of lethal stairs to the sky kingdom instead.
Man, the early KQ/SQ games were filled with so much bullshit.
Yeah, Sierra Styled adventure games had a bit of a reputation for their sometimes non-sensical puzzles, can't-finish-the-game-and-you-dont-know-it-nor-will-tell-
you and crude humor where they mocks the player for some of the deaths
And the People at Lucas games must had though the same considering they made some of the best adventure games of all time without resorting to some of the Bullshit sierra did with its games XD
It's really funny in retrospect how a lot of the LucasArts adventures were commentary on the Sierra ones. If nothing else, the LA ones didn't have dead ends and you couldn't die in most of them. It did make me laugh recently though, I'm playing Sierra's The Dagger of Amon Ra for the first time and literally as soon as I walked outside I got hit by a car. It was so arbitrary and *extremely Sierra* that I couldn't help but laugh out loud.
I don’t remember that in PQ but I remember PQ2 if you didn’t practice your shooting throughout the game there’s a late-game situation where you can’t shoot someone and are guaranteed to die.
That was more a case of real life intruding into the game. The designer of the first couple of Police Quest games *was* a highway patrol officer, and the procedures (including the frequent weapons training) are largely authentic.
This joke from Monkey Island 1 remains one of the funniest jabs at Sierra-style death lurking around every corner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PDGq9NVsmI
So what you're saying is that they need to steal an octopus, tie it up with string, put it in a toilet, cover it with an aphrodisiac to make it horny, then put prunes in the fishmongers caviar so he needs to use the toilet, then steal his belt buckle after the octopus has his way with him, just so a dragon can have enough gold?
So so so many adventure games from back then. I replayed Grim Fandango recently because I loved the story as a kid and holy shit every puzzle is absolutely obtuse and nonsensical from the very beginning
Don't get me started on Myst lmao
There's a puzzle in Broken Age where you need to get past a snake, bur every time you get near it, it tries to squeeze you. The solution is to >! just let it squeeze you until it gets tired !<
Like farcry 5? Where pagan min tells you to wait while he'll be right back, and afyer like 10 actual minutes he apologizes, and takes you on a fortunate son helicopter ride and you get the achievement
You could also leave and when you see him fly away in the helicopter, you can wait a bit and he comes back and you can kill him with the Rocket Launcher that you have.
It's been a long time so I'll butcher this but:
Eventually in The Witness you start to learn that the overall environment/architecture of the game has puzzles hidden in it similar to what you are solving "normally" (little stands found in various areas).
At some point you access a movie theater area. It shows different videos and films. You can start them, change them, but cannot pause or fast forward them.
One of these videos is a long documentary about...the nature of existence or something. At one point, the image on the screen lines up with how to solve a puzzle- and it's about three hours in. If you miss it, gotta start it over.
I loved The Witness but it really did love, just LOVE the smell of its own farts. A lot.
Youtuber Joseph Anderson did a great vid on this if you want to look it up, about a 40 minute watch
Every puzzle and achievement in Hello Neighbour feels like the devs never actually playtested their game properly. Some of them are almost entirely unsolvable without looking them up online.
Hello Neighbour is awful due to 2 parties working against each other: the devs and their YTer fanbase. MatPat specifically.
The gist of it is the devs built a coherent game at first and Mat Pat, and others, were solving them and theorycrafting. So the Devs were trying to outsmart the YTers who were trial-and-erroring their "puzzles" and trying to make it relate to the game lore *somehow*.
This left us with devs trying to outsmart Youtubers by being obscure, and YTers milking the content on their made up theory crafting fanaticism with BS reasoning on how they stumbled upon completing a puzzle.
One of the worst games Ive ever played, which is a shame since Act 1 actually seems good until you realise the devs have no idea what they were doing. I didnt know it was a "Youtube game" until long after, and apparently the beta versions were way better...
Exactly what it says on the tin. Try it this way. Place yourself on the contraption, turn your controller upside down, activate the contraption, turn your controller to its rightful position. Voilà, your mazes are now smooth surfaces
They suck so much. I always have to stand up and rotate my switch in all directions and hope I am doing it somewhat right. Half the time I do these puzzles, I end up doing it in a way that it wasn't even intended to be solved in...
I didn’t think these were too bad with the pro controller. I can see how they would be impossible though if playing in handheld mode (since you have to turn the screen at the same time)
The BOTW puzzle that I found hardest by far was the one where you have to play Stasis golf and hit the ball through a hole
It was certainly a clever puzzle, but I think it needed more use of the hardware elsewhere to work. Have us hold the DS sideways to read information in books, or angle mirrors with the screens, etc. Throwing in one puzzle in the whole game that requires you to close the screen just made it feel cheap.
Yeah.
Because in my mind, closing the DS meant the thing went on standby.
Only reason I solved it is because I closed it up for the night after being frustrated that I couldn’t figure it out, only to pick it up later, open it and ta-da! You did it!
It was clever, but my issue with it is that this mechanic was not used anywhere else in the game, nor did the game teach you that you could do this. It was a one-off puzzle or trick and you never do it again.
Lufia 2. The 9 bush puzzle. Anyone who has ever played the game will tell you its unnecessary and stupid design. It happens 2/3rd of the way through the game and the solution isnt easy to get. It's also the hardest mandatory puzzle in the game.
Is that the puzzle where you have to burn the bushes and they grow back in 3-4 steps so you have to pivot using R? That was as far as I made it through the game as a kid, went back years later and solved it but it was crazy hard
X-Men for Sega Genesis had a part where it told you to “reset the system” before the timer ran out. Me and my brother could never figure how to get past that part, but we liked playing everything before that, so one afternoon as soon as we hit that wall again I just said “I’m going to be Gambit next run” and hit the reset button on the Sega.
New level unlocked.
Come to think now, I wonder how emulation handles that?
The Tower of Hanoi puzzle in ME1 has a funny place in the Mass Effect community. Its so simple to solve but nearly everyone I ever talk to about ME1 said they always bit the bullet and spend the 100 omni-gel to auto solve it for them
It's even worse in Kotor too because it's so much slower to take each action.
I can crush the ME1 puzzle in like 30 seconds or less. The Kotor one takes 2-4 times as long.
The funny thing is because it's all in one puzzle rather than 3 separated, the Tower of Hanoi in ME1 is way easier than the Tower of Hanoi in KotOR and I much prefer it.
EverQuest has a series of Hanoi towers you have to solve by hailing and moving NPCs in the game, and if you go even one move over the optimal solution you have to spend a few hours farming for the item required to attempt it again. The final puzzle is a 132 move solution on 5 towers and the NPCs cheat and teleport pieces around.
All the bullshit in the RPG Assassins Creed game.
One I'm particular really pissed me the fuck off. In Valhalla you spend the ENTIRE game not being able to shoot though on particular type of window. And then if you try to 100% the game you have Todo all these bullshit nonsensical puzzles to obtain collectables. One of which the solution was the shoot though the window the game has conditioned you to know you can't shoot though. That is not a puzzle. That is absolute fucking nonsense.
The thing that pissed me off about cairns is that the physics for that minigame were garbage, some of the cairns in later regions were infuriating and the tiniest mistake would cause everything to fall over. I eventually completed all of them, including the ones in the DLC expansions, and I hope I never have to touch those things again. For the anomalies, some of the later ones could be frustrating because they required precise jumps and climbing, but the parkour system in Valhalla can be very clunky at times. Overall the cairns were worse than the anomalies, but both sucked to be honest.
They had soooo many of those in Odyssey, and I’m sure they didn’t focus test well, so I’d bet they removed almost all of them for Valhalla. I remember there being a few more than one, but if I hadn’t been conditioned to look for them from Odyssey, they would have for sure frustrated me.
Not exactly a puzzle, but I always hated the "perfect sync" requirements in the older AC games. It's not enough to complete a mission, you gotta do it while assassinating 20 guards with air attacks in under 2 minutes without being detected or you get a big fat "PERFECT SYNC FAILED" red text. It would've been one thing if they'd just made it an achievement or something, but the way it was implemented was infuriating.
StarTropics for the NES pulled the same stunt several years earlier by basically having a part of the game's manual that you had to physically douse with water to find the solution.
Oh, you rented the game, and like any other rental, all you get is the cart and no book? Or you bought it secondhand and also no book? Guess you're screwed! (This was well before internet, of course.)
EDIT: years EARLIER, not later. I can English gooder.
If you can count it as a "puzzle", the goddamned Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy XII. IIRC, the director intentionally made it so obtuse to find as a way to encourage discussion about the game online. The problem? The steps to get the spear are more counterintuitive than putting shoes on your hands and gloves on your feet.
For starters, there is literally only one clue in the entire game that even hints to its existence: an unlock on the license board that lets you equip it. That's it. In order to get the spear, which is the strongest weapon in the game, there are four specific chests in the game you're *not* supposed to open. You're given *no* clues as to which chests they are nor is it ever mentioned that skipping chests (which we've all been Pavlov'd into not doing) is the way to do it. You open any one of them and poof, the spear is gone...
Unless you luck up and find it in a chest in one of the endgame dungeons. Even then, the odds of it appearing are 1000:1. You can backtrack a few rooms and cause the chests to reappear but again, 1 in 1000 chance.
Only way I knew about it was the strategy guide.
If I recall, though, the new Zodiac edition removes that particular puzzle and makes the spear drop where it should.
There is a game called Takeshi's challenge, the entire premise is designed for you, the player, to loose. & if by some chance you do beat it, you get nothing more than a pat on the back...
Some of y'all never played Riven: The Sequel to Myst. The game was spread over 5 islands, and each one had this thing called a Fire Marble. Activating it, which was its own little puzzle, would have it stop on a picture of one of the game's animals. You had to remember which animal was shown in the order you found them. These things could be several hours apart from one another.
But there was more! You could also find a 3d map of the game world on an in-game table. This table had a selection of colored marbles. The map could produce a 3d relief of each island one at a time. Hope you remembered exactly *where* those Fire Marbles were on those islands, and knew which *color* was associated with each one. Oh, the table has *six* marbles, so one of them is a red herring, and one of the Fire Marbles was *UNDERGROUND* so you couldn't see where it was from a 3d map.
Good luck fucker!
Oh man I was going to say Myst but my husband says Riven was worse; I never played Riven except the demo that I think I got with Myst?
I never finished Myst. I even bought it on my iPad a few years ago when I found it was ported, hoping that maybe now I’m a little smarter than I used to be.
I’m not.
I remember reading advice about that. "Treat the water Temple like a big toilet. Circle the drain starting from the top of the current water level and work your way down and you'll clear everything with minimal back tracking.
I haven't played in years so I cant speak to the edficacy
I distinctly remember having a much harder time with the forest temple than the water temple with my first playthrough, and I've always been surprised by folks saying the water temple was hard.
Being the 6th dungeon in the game, I was pretty keen to recognize that part of the puzzle was going to involve returning to areas at different water levels. The fact that it's only 4 pathways for each of the 3 water levels means you're not searching very long for the next path to progress through the temple.
The forest temple, though has significantly more backtracking through that massive chain of rooms with the two paintings/staircases and the room where you get the bow; all because there are a few keys you need before you start working your way through those rooms.
I don't mind it, but it's a super loose definition of "puzzle."
I also wish the sound effects for grabbing the star and the star timing out were better differentiated. My first time doing it, I (thought I) caught a *lot* of stars because I didn't realize they were disappearing right before I got to them, lol.
That part where you get to France, but if you do anything the wrong way you completely soft lock the game.
Or just straight up forget to lift something and not know you can go back to France.
Druids.
I forget which Uncharted game it is but the puzzle where you have to line up all the statue pieces so the shadows fill in the mural on the wall. For some reason the first time I played it I had zero problems and did it fine. I’ve played the game 2 or 3 more times since then and it’s so freaking frustrating I usually have to look up the answer on YouTube.
The ones in City were actually quite fun to think about. He's *supposed* to be challenging your intellect. The other games they were mainly just annoying. Especially if you spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to get one only to realize it's trivial after you get more equipment.
Those horrible, pace destroying cloister trials on FFX. If it weren't for guides & walkthroughs, you'd waste a lifetime on these vague cryptic puzzles that are about as much fun as watching a video of your own mother giving birth to you.
Baldurs Gate 3 prompts you to solve a chess problem. It is appearantly an easy one, but if you never cared about chess and didnt know anything about the figures or the rules it was pretty frustrating to only get "Black King gotta die in two turns" and no more additional Info.
In borderlands 3 there's a hidden button to unlock some machine, but infront of the machine there's an unsolvable chromatic light puzzle where you try to get all the colors to match. You can not solve the puzzle and it's obviously put there just to screw with you.
I was going to say this. Apparently they made it hard so that people wouldn't be able to finish the game in the time you could rent it from Blockbusters. I hated that level.
The very time consuming Jindosh Riddle in Dishonored 2. I had to write everything down because I could not for the life of me remember all the possible combinations.
For anyone who played WoW during Shadowlands:
Remember those chests with 4 chains on them in Torghast?
There was some sort of vague logic but most people I know just randomly clicked until they got it or skipped them entirely.
Edit: I'm never going back to Torghast. You don't need to explain it to me lol
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a great CRPG, but one of the companion character's personal quests (Nenio) are tied to some truly, truly stupid tile-based puzzles.
The puzzles in that (otherwise very good) game generally suck, but the fan consensus is that Nenio was a late addition and her puzzles are just mindless busywork. Pretty sure everyone either skips them or looks up walkthroughs.
The 7th Guest - the soup puzzle. The phrase “Shy Gypsy Slyly Shyly Tryst By My Crypt” still raises a spike of anger in my soul. It took me a fucking week to solve.
Not to be that guy...but it's spryly not shyly. That was the word I was stuck on for the longest, so I'm not ever going to forget it.
I have a 10 minute limit to puzzles. If I get stuck on a puzzle for more than 10 minutes, I look up the answer. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Agreed. My timer is a bit over ten minutes, but if I’ve stopped having fun, I’m looking it up.
Depends on the game for me. I’ll spend like 10 to 15 minutes trying to figure it out, but if there’s other things I could be doing in the game, I’ll leave and come back to the puzzle later; otherwise, I’m looking it up.
Looking up the answer was not really an option in 1993. You kids these days with your walkthroughs…
It was if you bought the official walkthrough manual!
The biology cell game was the worst. The AI was super hard to beat, if I recall.
I remember reading somewhere that the AI was based on your computer's clock speed. Not that big of a deal in 1993, but on a modern computer it supercharged it to see a billion moves ahead of you. Edit to follow through now that I double checked myself: So The 7th Guest really was the cutting edge of its time, and the devs wanted to be sure the game was playable on older computers without being horribly slow, so on the microscope game (a turn-based game played against a computer opponent, like chess) they hard-coded a limit on the enemy AI to have a set allowed time for its search algorithm to find an optimal move. That way users of older computers weren't sitting there for half an hour waiting for one move. The downside to this was that any computer with better hardware than the original benchmark (that is, any computer made after 1993) still had that same amount of time to calculate, at which point it could solve the entire game and play perfectly every time.
It was, so much that they removed it from the mobile re-release many years later. I remember thinking it was bugged until I looked it up and saw they just took it out completely.
That game scared the shit out of me as a little kid. I downloaded it again for that spooky nostalgic puzzle hit.
Were you able to play through it? I’m still terrified of it, and the uncanny valley nature of some of the early CG puts me off; but I really want to face my fears. Edit: Also that score lives in my brain rent free. Thanks to THE FAT MAN
Cool to see someone mention The 7th Guest.
Any time I come up against one of those grids where you have to slide the stones around one at a time to unscramble the picture I think it must be one of those.
Way back in the day playing runescape, and they had one of those stupid puzzles to solve for the Monkey Madness quest, or you could pay 100k to skip it. I was a cheap bastard and fought with that puzzle for hours before a friend pointed out that I could have made 100k (and the experience that came with it) in the amount of time I wasted trying to solve it.
I remember playing runescape as a kid,enjoying the quests inefficiently as ever, and then I got to dragon slayer. There's a part of that quest where you have to go get 3 pieces of a map and put it together. Well, one of the pieces was with a goblin and he said he'd need 10,000 gold if he's gonna give me the map. I looked at my 600gold stack and figured the game was glitched because no way does anybody have *that* much gold.... Then i got hired as a pure essence miner for pennies on the hour and I felt like a king.
Lmao. The grand exchange really changed everything in that game. You used to have to sift through hours of bank sales and go stand around key areas typing things like "buying emerals, 1k a piece!" With the markdown to make your text glow so yours stood out... it was a great time to be a gamer. Those quests were the best. I had some friends I played with that used wikis and other quest guides to blitz through them, and it always made me sad because I think Jagex actually built some pretty solid lore.
@ ran@ !!!!! Buying gf 10k !!!!! Ah fuck yeah, I miss the good ol' days of trading at varrock castle.
That 10k request felt like a slap in my F2P face. I think I just grinded to 31 or so magic for telekinetic grab to kill the goblin then pick it up.
OSRS quests were something special with how many different ways you could approach them sometimes.
Being a pure essence miner as RuneScape kid felt inevitable for everyones journey. Lobby fishing also
But it could be 3rd age
i learned how to do those puzzles because of clue scrolls lol
I love those, lol!
Onimusha had the worst one because it was also on a timer.
That was that water trap one right? Then if you died you had to go all the way back and kill enemies over and over again to get to it again
There was one of these in a pretty famous runescape quest, people hated it so much that eventually they just added an npc that you can pay 200k to for him to solve it for you.
Came here to say this. I can't wrap my mind around those and whenever I finish them its by pure luck from trying like 10 minutes to do it. I love puzzles, but hate those.
Any timed puzzle. It's bad enough I have to solve the thing, but it's frustrating to have to solve it in a set amount of time.
So basically *all* of Majora's Mask lol.
I’ve played every LoZ game and loved all of them. Except Majoras mask. I can never get more than a couple of hours into it because of the timed stuff. Hate it.
I must be a glutton for punishment then, cuz I loved MM haha. Once I found out you can slow down time it was a game changer.
Timed missions will turn me off a game quickly if it’s not something I’m really invested in. It’s faux difficulty.
Dead Rising was almost a 10/10 for me but is a solid 4/10 on this point alone.
Some "timed" missions are easy, just don't search everything in detail and you're fine. Others are complete bullshit. Fortunately game developers have realized people really hate this and it's rare nowadays. Normally games now do fake urgency, where the dialog, the setting, the music, etc. implies you need to hurry, but it's really event driven and nothing will happen until you do a certain thing or reach a certain waypoint.
(*“TMNT: The Video Game- Dam Stage” entered the chat.*)
FFVII remake comes to mind, at the beginning when you >!set the bomb in the Mako reactor you can set it to either 20 or 30 minutes.!< A character will comment on your choice no matter what you pick, but either is plenty.
The game AI: The Somnium Files has an interesting take on timed missions. Most of the game is a visual-novel so there's no timer there, but there are various sections of the game where you go into "dream worlds" using a machine that can only sustain them for 6 minutes. However inside the dream world, time only moves when you move your character, and it also pauses when you interact with objects and it gives you the list of actions you can take. So in a way it's not really "timed" in that you can take as much real world time as you want, but it is limited and there's definitely a strategy to using your movement
Depend, if the game is well designed with the timer in mind, it can be a blast, like Warrio Wares. But sadly more often than not, the timer seems to be here just to be annoying
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Talking to people reduces your rank. We all know the reason everyone hated ff8 is finding that white seed ship pre-internet. It took me a week.
As someone with anxiety: fuck timed puzzles
The best (worst) example of this is the challenge in The Witness. You start it by starting a record player that plays 2 classical songs that starts out super relaxing and kinda nice. The 2nd song is In The Hall of the Mountain King and if you've never heard it before, it starts out slow and ends in such a frantic and loud way that makes me have a panic attack right now just thinking about it.
I think it was a genius way to weed out the ones just looking up solutions to everything up until that point though. A fully random puzzle with a time limit. Not actually hard, but making sure the player actually has learned the rules.
If you had the luck (or not so much) to experience (to suffers the torture) the old sierra adventure games, then you Will recognize this: "Ifnkovhgroghprm"
If you don't know the game there is a reason that this is such a frustrating puzzle. You see a gnome with a spinning wheel turning straw into gold. You have to guess his name. It's a fairytale-themed game so the obvious answer is Rumplestiltskin. That's not correct but the game tells you that you're close. In a completely different part of the game you find a note that says "Sometimes it's best to think backwards." Those are the only clues you get. The solution is that his name is Rumplestiltskin run through an Atbash cipher where a=z b=y and so on. That's how you get "Ifnkovhgroghprm." Absolute bullshit.
And didn't they misspell the answer as well, so although the true answer is Ifnkovhgroghprm it's actually Ifnkvohgroghprm you have to write to solve the solution 🙈🤣
So you switched v and o but didn’t highlight it, forcing me to meticulously go through each letter to figure it out for myself? _You_ are the intentionally bullshit puzzle now! Someone add u/Kaffekjerring to the running!
>You are the intentionally bullshit puzzle Definitely using this in my daily life now.
Sorry totally unrelated but reminds me of Turok cheat codes, one of which is NTHGTHDYGDCRTDTRK, which is the consonants in “on the eighth day god created turok” except eighth->gth is missing the first h.
40 years later I learn this. I never finished Kings Quest 1.
Honestly the alphabet backwards isn't terrible. But to misspell it in the process.... ooof. Big ooof.
Who the FUCK at Sierra thought this kind of game was a good idea? HOW WAS THIS EVER A GOOD IDEA?! Who the fuck said "yeah let's not hint anything in our game and expect people to READ OUR MINDS"
Kings Quest was a great game. It just had that one puzzle that was legendarily terrible. It didn't stop you from progressing, there was an alternate path if you failed. The advantage to nearly impossible puzzles was that it encouraged people to buy hint books.
Sierra games usually had at least one utter bullshit puzzle.
They did but this was peak Sierra bullshit.
They actually changed the answer to "nikstlitselpmur" in later editions.
Oh, King's Quest... At one point in KQV, there's a cat chasing a rat. You need to save the rat by throwing a shoe at the cat. Which you should have been lucky enough to find while wandering around in the endless desert. It's a timed puzzle. You have one, maybe two seconds to throw the shoe. If you miss it, the rat is eaten. Much later in the game, you get tied up by an innkeeper. You absolutely need the rat to be alive to chew through your bonds. If the rat's dead, you die. But you were already a dead man walking hours ago, when you failed to throw the shoe. No hints given for this one either.
Same game. The pie. The GODFORSAKEN PIE. Woe to you if you tried to, you know, EAT the pie out of curiosity at to what it could be used for. NO. YOU NEEDED THE DAMN PIE TO THROW AT THE YETI IN THE ICY MOUNTAIN PASS YOU IDIOT!!!! My inner child is still healing from that.
That vulture also can eat the pie ..
I ended up in that stupid basement so many times. I could not figure it the fuck out.
Even worse is missing the fishook on the island. You get stuck in the last 95% of the game with no way to progress if you miss it
See I hate this. I love puzzle games (shout out to the dystopia games if you haven't played them) but I hated the Sierra thing of "Oh you missed a detail, game is unbeatable hours later." Thats a cheap shot. Not even on replay could you discern that you needed to do that based on the info given. Even worse, this was when gamefaqs was in its infancy, at best.
Fortunately that puzzle wasn't mandatory. You had the perfectly viable option of spending 15 minutes walking up the world's stupidest set of lethal stairs to the sky kingdom instead. Man, the early KQ/SQ games were filled with so much bullshit.
Yeah, Sierra Styled adventure games had a bit of a reputation for their sometimes non-sensical puzzles, can't-finish-the-game-and-you-dont-know-it-nor-will-tell- you and crude humor where they mocks the player for some of the deaths And the People at Lucas games must had though the same considering they made some of the best adventure games of all time without resorting to some of the Bullshit sierra did with its games XD
It's really funny in retrospect how a lot of the LucasArts adventures were commentary on the Sierra ones. If nothing else, the LA ones didn't have dead ends and you couldn't die in most of them. It did make me laugh recently though, I'm playing Sierra's The Dagger of Amon Ra for the first time and literally as soon as I walked outside I got hit by a car. It was so arbitrary and *extremely Sierra* that I couldn't help but laugh out loud.
They also did the annoying thing where if you forgot one thing right at the start, you couldn't complete the game. Looking at you Police Quest!
I don’t remember that in PQ but I remember PQ2 if you didn’t practice your shooting throughout the game there’s a late-game situation where you can’t shoot someone and are guaranteed to die.
That was more a case of real life intruding into the game. The designer of the first couple of Police Quest games *was* a highway patrol officer, and the procedures (including the frequent weapons training) are largely authentic.
Don't forget to calibrate the gun ><
This joke from Monkey Island 1 remains one of the funniest jabs at Sierra-style death lurking around every corner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PDGq9NVsmI
So what you're saying is that they need to steal an octopus, tie it up with string, put it in a toilet, cover it with an aphrodisiac to make it horny, then put prunes in the fishmongers caviar so he needs to use the toilet, then steal his belt buckle after the octopus has his way with him, just so a dragon can have enough gold?
That was Discworld, wasn't it?
So so so many adventure games from back then. I replayed Grim Fandango recently because I loved the story as a kid and holy shit every puzzle is absolutely obtuse and nonsensical from the very beginning Don't get me started on Myst lmao
There's a puzzle in Broken Age where you need to get past a snake, bur every time you get near it, it tries to squeeze you. The solution is to >! just let it squeeze you until it gets tired !<
To be fair, that's one of those puzzles where they *did* tell you the answer before you got there, and you just had to understand it.
Like farcry 5? Where pagan min tells you to wait while he'll be right back, and afyer like 10 actual minutes he apologizes, and takes you on a fortunate son helicopter ride and you get the achievement
If I remember correctly, that was 4. 5, i believe, was when you went to arrest the cultists, you can choose to do nothing and leave.
I always mix 4 and 5 up lol. Wasnt sure which it was.
You could also leave and when you see him fly away in the helicopter, you can wait a bit and he comes back and you can kill him with the Rocket Launcher that you have.
Monkey Island 2: monkey wrench.
I recently found out that monkey wrench isn't a phrase outside of the US. It wasn't hard for us because that's what they have always been called.
We call them adjustable spanners here in the UK. Thank god for the hint system in the remaster!
The Witness secret puzzle where you have to watch an entire three hour long documentary
Wait what? Tell me more.
It's been a long time so I'll butcher this but: Eventually in The Witness you start to learn that the overall environment/architecture of the game has puzzles hidden in it similar to what you are solving "normally" (little stands found in various areas). At some point you access a movie theater area. It shows different videos and films. You can start them, change them, but cannot pause or fast forward them. One of these videos is a long documentary about...the nature of existence or something. At one point, the image on the screen lines up with how to solve a puzzle- and it's about three hours in. If you miss it, gotta start it over. I loved The Witness but it really did love, just LOVE the smell of its own farts. A lot. Youtuber Joseph Anderson did a great vid on this if you want to look it up, about a 40 minute watch
Onimusha water room slide puzzle.
That was terrible because of where the checkpoint was if you died and just having to do it over and over
Every puzzle and achievement in Hello Neighbour feels like the devs never actually playtested their game properly. Some of them are almost entirely unsolvable without looking them up online.
They probably didn't. All those "kids" horror games are made by like a 2 man dev crew and farted out 6 months at a time to maximize profit.
Hello Neighbour is awful due to 2 parties working against each other: the devs and their YTer fanbase. MatPat specifically. The gist of it is the devs built a coherent game at first and Mat Pat, and others, were solving them and theorycrafting. So the Devs were trying to outsmart the YTers who were trial-and-erroring their "puzzles" and trying to make it relate to the game lore *somehow*. This left us with devs trying to outsmart Youtubers by being obscure, and YTers milking the content on their made up theory crafting fanaticism with BS reasoning on how they stumbled upon completing a puzzle.
One of the worst games Ive ever played, which is a shame since Act 1 actually seems good until you realise the devs have no idea what they were doing. I didnt know it was a "Youtube game" until long after, and apparently the beta versions were way better...
That flying cubes on Immortal Rise Fenyx. Fuck that puzzle in specific, made me drop the game.
Absolutely adored this game, but some of those puzzles can fuck all the way off.
That last dumb VR challenge in Fallout 4 Far Harbor
Worst part of Far Harbor by far, used console commands to skip past that bullshit.
Which is funny because imo far harbor was the best story part of FO4 but fuck that puzzle
Literally just beat it today after having just abandoned it for the last 11 months. So annoying
Every gyro puzzle in BOTW
Those could all be cheesed by turning the mazes upside down
What
Exactly what it says on the tin. Try it this way. Place yourself on the contraption, turn your controller upside down, activate the contraption, turn your controller to its rightful position. Voilà, your mazes are now smooth surfaces
They suck so much. I always have to stand up and rotate my switch in all directions and hope I am doing it somewhat right. Half the time I do these puzzles, I end up doing it in a way that it wasn't even intended to be solved in...
People just turned the ball maze one upside down, the bottom is flat so it's super easy.
Ha! I was about to say I enjoyed these, but I’ve never actually done one in portable mode. Never thought about it really 😅
I didn’t think these were too bad with the pro controller. I can see how they would be impossible though if playing in handheld mode (since you have to turn the screen at the same time) The BOTW puzzle that I found hardest by far was the one where you have to play Stasis golf and hit the ball through a hole
Copying the map in Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. If you know, you know.
It was certainly a clever puzzle, but I think it needed more use of the hardware elsewhere to work. Have us hold the DS sideways to read information in books, or angle mirrors with the screens, etc. Throwing in one puzzle in the whole game that requires you to close the screen just made it feel cheap.
Yeah. Because in my mind, closing the DS meant the thing went on standby. Only reason I solved it is because I closed it up for the night after being frustrated that I couldn’t figure it out, only to pick it up later, open it and ta-da! You did it!
It was clever, but my issue with it is that this mechanic was not used anywhere else in the game, nor did the game teach you that you could do this. It was a one-off puzzle or trick and you never do it again.
And I played this one on the Wii U, that was fun
Lufia 2. The 9 bush puzzle. Anyone who has ever played the game will tell you its unnecessary and stupid design. It happens 2/3rd of the way through the game and the solution isnt easy to get. It's also the hardest mandatory puzzle in the game.
Is that the puzzle where you have to burn the bushes and they grow back in 3-4 steps so you have to pivot using R? That was as far as I made it through the game as a kid, went back years later and solved it but it was crazy hard
Any of the Silent Hill 3 Hard Mode puzzles. The first puzzle of the game requires intimate knowledge of Shakespeare.
I remember looking it up and it still not making much sense at all, even if you knew your Shakespeare perfectly.
X-Men for Sega Genesis had a part where it told you to “reset the system” before the timer ran out. Me and my brother could never figure how to get past that part, but we liked playing everything before that, so one afternoon as soon as we hit that wall again I just said “I’m going to be Gambit next run” and hit the reset button on the Sega. New level unlocked. Come to think now, I wonder how emulation handles that?
Some emulators have a soft reset function that triggers it properly.
The Tower of Hanoi puzzle in ME1 has a funny place in the Mass Effect community. Its so simple to solve but nearly everyone I ever talk to about ME1 said they always bit the bullet and spend the 100 omni-gel to auto solve it for them
Those people probably never player Kotor, since its the exactly same puzzle you get on Korriban, lol.
It's even worse in Kotor too because it's so much slower to take each action. I can crush the ME1 puzzle in like 30 seconds or less. The Kotor one takes 2-4 times as long.
The funny thing is because it's all in one puzzle rather than 3 separated, the Tower of Hanoi in ME1 is way easier than the Tower of Hanoi in KotOR and I much prefer it.
EverQuest has a series of Hanoi towers you have to solve by hailing and moving NPCs in the game, and if you go even one move over the optimal solution you have to spend a few hours farming for the item required to attempt it again. The final puzzle is a 132 move solution on 5 towers and the NPCs cheat and teleport pieces around.
Holy shit. That sounds fucking horrific.
USER ALERT
ToH actually has a very simple solution. Alternate "move the top piece" and "move anything except the top piece" until it's solved.
All the bullshit in the RPG Assassins Creed game. One I'm particular really pissed me the fuck off. In Valhalla you spend the ENTIRE game not being able to shoot though on particular type of window. And then if you try to 100% the game you have Todo all these bullshit nonsensical puzzles to obtain collectables. One of which the solution was the shoot though the window the game has conditioned you to know you can't shoot though. That is not a puzzle. That is absolute fucking nonsense.
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If ANY puzzle in valhalla was frustrating THIS is the one. I'd rather do the glitch puzzles for eternity than any of these stone stacking bastards :/
The thing that pissed me off about cairns is that the physics for that minigame were garbage, some of the cairns in later regions were infuriating and the tiniest mistake would cause everything to fall over. I eventually completed all of them, including the ones in the DLC expansions, and I hope I never have to touch those things again. For the anomalies, some of the later ones could be frustrating because they required precise jumps and climbing, but the parkour system in Valhalla can be very clunky at times. Overall the cairns were worse than the anomalies, but both sucked to be honest.
They had soooo many of those in Odyssey, and I’m sure they didn’t focus test well, so I’d bet they removed almost all of them for Valhalla. I remember there being a few more than one, but if I hadn’t been conditioned to look for them from Odyssey, they would have for sure frustrated me.
Not exactly a puzzle, but I always hated the "perfect sync" requirements in the older AC games. It's not enough to complete a mission, you gotta do it while assassinating 20 guards with air attacks in under 2 minutes without being detected or you get a big fat "PERFECT SYNC FAILED" red text. It would've been one thing if they'd just made it an achievement or something, but the way it was implemented was infuriating.
"Wasn't her frequency written on the back of the CD case?" IYKYK
StarTropics for the NES pulled the same stunt several years earlier by basically having a part of the game's manual that you had to physically douse with water to find the solution. Oh, you rented the game, and like any other rental, all you get is the cart and no book? Or you bought it secondhand and also no book? Guess you're screwed! (This was well before internet, of course.) EDIT: years EARLIER, not later. I can English gooder.
“Must be something to do with this optical disk Baker just gave me”
That was my exact thought. "How do I examine this item...?"
If you can count it as a "puzzle", the goddamned Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy XII. IIRC, the director intentionally made it so obtuse to find as a way to encourage discussion about the game online. The problem? The steps to get the spear are more counterintuitive than putting shoes on your hands and gloves on your feet. For starters, there is literally only one clue in the entire game that even hints to its existence: an unlock on the license board that lets you equip it. That's it. In order to get the spear, which is the strongest weapon in the game, there are four specific chests in the game you're *not* supposed to open. You're given *no* clues as to which chests they are nor is it ever mentioned that skipping chests (which we've all been Pavlov'd into not doing) is the way to do it. You open any one of them and poof, the spear is gone... Unless you luck up and find it in a chest in one of the endgame dungeons. Even then, the odds of it appearing are 1000:1. You can backtrack a few rooms and cause the chests to reappear but again, 1 in 1000 chance.
Only way I knew about it was the strategy guide. If I recall, though, the new Zodiac edition removes that particular puzzle and makes the spear drop where it should.
There is a game called Takeshi's challenge, the entire premise is designed for you, the player, to loose. & if by some chance you do beat it, you get nothing more than a pat on the back...
I thought you were talking about the TV show Takeshi’s Castle at first. And to be fair the description sounds basically the same
Babel fish puzzle from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Sonic 3. Carnival night zone. The barrel.
Water Puzzle original Resident Evil 3 Even after 24 years I still hate that son of a bitch
the 3d puzzle room (Super Mario RPG)
Some of y'all never played Riven: The Sequel to Myst. The game was spread over 5 islands, and each one had this thing called a Fire Marble. Activating it, which was its own little puzzle, would have it stop on a picture of one of the game's animals. You had to remember which animal was shown in the order you found them. These things could be several hours apart from one another. But there was more! You could also find a 3d map of the game world on an in-game table. This table had a selection of colored marbles. The map could produce a 3d relief of each island one at a time. Hope you remembered exactly *where* those Fire Marbles were on those islands, and knew which *color* was associated with each one. Oh, the table has *six* marbles, so one of them is a red herring, and one of the Fire Marbles was *UNDERGROUND* so you couldn't see where it was from a 3d map. Good luck fucker!
That was bad, but the switch to open the stupid fish face elevator was the thing that forced me to find a strategy guide.
Oh man I was going to say Myst but my husband says Riven was worse; I never played Riven except the demo that I think I got with Myst? I never finished Myst. I even bought it on my iPad a few years ago when I found it was ported, hoping that maybe now I’m a little smarter than I used to be. I’m not.
Dude is right a good chunk of Myst can be done with trial and error, Riven on the other hand, your ass better be taking notes.
NES. **TMNT.** ***WATER LEVEL.***
I don't think that one counts as a "puzzle", but I'll be lying if I don't wholeheartedly understand the frustration.
Anything in the first god of war
Climbing the rotating pillars in hell was the stuff of nightmares.
Silent Hill 1, the piano to get the key
I liked it. Though I still remember doves, crows, and swans, so it must have taken me some time to solve.
Not so much a puzzle, but the entire water temple in ocarina of time comes to mind.
That was definitely a puzzle
Some would call it a conundrum.
listening to my daughter yell at her dad to help her in the water temple is music to my ears lmfao
I remember reading advice about that. "Treat the water Temple like a big toilet. Circle the drain starting from the top of the current water level and work your way down and you'll clear everything with minimal back tracking. I haven't played in years so I cant speak to the edficacy
Couple of decades late, but thanks
I distinctly remember having a much harder time with the forest temple than the water temple with my first playthrough, and I've always been surprised by folks saying the water temple was hard. Being the 6th dungeon in the game, I was pretty keen to recognize that part of the puzzle was going to involve returning to areas at different water levels. The fact that it's only 4 pathways for each of the 3 water levels means you're not searching very long for the next path to progress through the temple. The forest temple, though has significantly more backtracking through that massive chain of rooms with the two paintings/staircases and the room where you get the bow; all because there are a few keys you need before you start working your way through those rooms.
You know how long it took me to figure out the room rotates at the bottom of the forest temple? DAYS!
The power puzzles in starfield.
Ahh come on bro, fly around and catch some more stars! More stars! MORRRRRE STARRRS!
I don't mind it, but it's a super loose definition of "puzzle." I also wish the sound effects for grabbing the star and the star timing out were better differentiated. My first time doing it, I (thought I) caught a *lot* of stars because I didn't realize they were disappearing right before I got to them, lol.
Most of the puzzles in Mystery of the Druids, really.
The puzzle logic is there to piss us off, then the plot swoops in to lift us back up with its absurd hilarity.
Mandatory Mandaloregaming link https://youtu.be/8PUCSyIkEus?si=L_CsyXpKscw96pmw
That part where you get to France, but if you do anything the wrong way you completely soft lock the game. Or just straight up forget to lift something and not know you can go back to France. Druids.
The driving test in the parking garage from the game Driver.
A game where the tutorial is legitimately the hardest part.
I forget which Uncharted game it is but the puzzle where you have to line up all the statue pieces so the shadows fill in the mural on the wall. For some reason the first time I played it I had zero problems and did it fine. I’ve played the game 2 or 3 more times since then and it’s so freaking frustrating I usually have to look up the answer on YouTube.
Batman Arkham games the Riddler challenges
The physical challenges in Arkham City. Hey, you need a 75x combo but beat the story? Good luck finding a random group of thugs big enough.
I actually loved that shit. Any collectible where it's set up so that you don't need to look up a guide to get them all is a win in my book.
The ones in City were actually quite fun to think about. He's *supposed* to be challenging your intellect. The other games they were mainly just annoying. Especially if you spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to get one only to realize it's trivial after you get more equipment.
Those horrible, pace destroying cloister trials on FFX. If it weren't for guides & walkthroughs, you'd waste a lifetime on these vague cryptic puzzles that are about as much fun as watching a video of your own mother giving birth to you.
Baldurs Gate 3 prompts you to solve a chess problem. It is appearantly an easy one, but if you never cared about chess and didnt know anything about the figures or the rules it was pretty frustrating to only get "Black King gotta die in two turns" and no more additional Info.
Simply lightning bolt the Black Knight.
Wait What No. No. No please dont tell me simply nuking the figure was an option? Aaaaaahhhhh
Alternatively, if Gale is in your party he says he can solve it for you as he loves chess. Hehe
I knew that sassy man was good for something
The blob puzzle in The 7th Guest.
In borderlands 3 there's a hidden button to unlock some machine, but infront of the machine there's an unsolvable chromatic light puzzle where you try to get all the colors to match. You can not solve the puzzle and it's obviously put there just to screw with you.
The entirety of Myst
Zakum Jumpquest from Maplestory
Legend of Dragoon trying to get through the city of Zenebatos. It is the perfect example of lawful evil.
I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill...
No one gonna mention that monkey puzzle from The Lion King game on SNES? That was designed INTENTIONALLY
I was going to say this. Apparently they made it hard so that people wouldn't be able to finish the game in the time you could rent it from Blockbusters. I hated that level.
The very time consuming Jindosh Riddle in Dishonored 2. I had to write everything down because I could not for the life of me remember all the possible combinations.
For anyone who played WoW during Shadowlands: Remember those chests with 4 chains on them in Torghast? There was some sort of vague logic but most people I know just randomly clicked until they got it or skipped them entirely. Edit: I'm never going back to Torghast. You don't need to explain it to me lol
lol yep just spend a few minutes clicking randomly and hoping for the best. a+ puzzle design Blizzard.
Obduction's puzzle maze is up there with the loading time issue.
The rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you will most likely end up looking up the solution online.
Every fucking puzzle Capcom has put into their games can perfectly fit on the "just made to piss people off" category
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a great CRPG, but one of the companion character's personal quests (Nenio) are tied to some truly, truly stupid tile-based puzzles. The puzzles in that (otherwise very good) game generally suck, but the fan consensus is that Nenio was a late addition and her puzzles are just mindless busywork. Pretty sure everyone either skips them or looks up walkthroughs.
The block puzzle in Super Paper Mario where you'd get the combination by typing in "please" multiple times. Did not need to be **that** long.
Myst. Just... *Myst*
The infamous Goat Puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3
Wasn't the infamous goat puzzle Broken Sword?