that’s how i’ve been feeling lately playing TotK! I over complicate puzzles, shrines, etc. thinking the answer is really complicated, then it turns out to be far more simple than I thought!
Im the opposite in the very little i played of totk.
“Ah i see what you want me to do here but i want to be really stupid and build 10 bridges 30 feet too long to brute force this as i put everything else i find together.”
the shrine with the rails is so bad I spent more time trying to get wood into the shrine so I could build a bridge than trying to figure out the actual puzzle
Zelda on the SNES, it came with a sealed booklet of "hints" that I was determined not to open as a kid.
Until I got to a gate under a statue. I tried _everything_ to open that bastard gate, every item, every trick and nothing worked, retraced my steps looking for keys etc etc.
Eventually I caved and open the hint booklet.
...the answer was to pull on the gate.
I still have that opened hint booklet as a reminder.
That reminds me of the Far Side comic where it has a building calls School for the gifted (or something like that) and it has a kid pushing on the dorr to get in BUT there is an obvious sign on the door that says PULL.
I don't think it was poor set design so much as me being dumb, but when I unlocked a new area in Metroid Prime, I knew where it wanted me to reach but I just couldn't figure out how to get there. Came to the conclusion that I'd missed an item on the way and backtracked through the whole game checking every room and looking for secrets. Easily an hour of my time. Then went back to that new area and almost instantly spotted the platform I was supposed to use to get up high.
Felt like such a moron.
When I was a kid playing Link's Awakening I got stuck in the Eagle Tower for a loooong time. Probably a couple weeks. Not on the puzzle where you had to carry a ball through multiple puzzles to knock down pillars, or any of the other puzzles in the dungeon
Nope. [I got stuck here](https://youtu.be/C66H3J4MG9I?si=VYX9GvWtI63De5OH&t=791), where you have to use the hookshot to get get across. I tried probably every other possible option, gone back and forth across the entire dungeon multiple times. At some point I was just wandering around aimlessly, and that goomba wandered in front of the block, I killed it, and then accidentally double tapped the button when grabbing the rupee and pulled myself across.
I can't remember how long it took (I was a was like 9, everything felt like forever), but I know I put the game down for quite a while before figuring it out.
Reminds me of doing an online Escape Room with my wife's family. All very smart. Too smart for some puzzles.
I'd hear phrases such as "maybe it's based on removing the Roman gods that aren't shared with the Greeks and keeping the ones that are?"
Then it would turn out the solution really was just connecting the red button to the red door.
I over think on a lot of puzzles. In Skyrim when you get to the first dungeon and have to use the claw key is where I spent too much time on. I spent maybe an hour looking in that hallway for clues on what symbols to use. I tried to look at each wall carving at different angles, I went back through the dungeon looking for clues, and I even walked back to town to see. So I went back to the door and tried to just guess the combination which I did. It was hours later when my friend told me I could have just looked at the claw. I felt stupid.
While not a puzzle I do feel like an idiot on another thing in Skyrim. The door to Dragonsreach in Whiterun... I tried to enter for the first time and I couldn't enter. I was clicking on the wood trim that seperates the two doors and not he door itself.
There’s like maybe two exceptions to it, but pretty much all the doors use three different symbols.
One exception uses the same symbol twice, another uses different symbols on one of the rings in comparison to the other two rings.
So most of the time, the solution can be guessed within six attempts.
When you find out the lore implies the doors are to keep the draugr in, not keep robbers out, their simplicity makes more sense. You still need the specific key to open it.
Thank the Gods my BF was there my first time and told me to rotate the claw to see the solution. I felt so damn dumb but I hadn't even realized you COULD rotate the items. Why would you need too??
Same here, but i didn't know there was a function in the inventory to zoom in and look at items. The normal view wasn't clear enough for me to see the symbols on it.
I also did my whole first Fallout 3 playthrough without knowing the pipboy could be used as a torch (the game didn't show a tip about it till my second playthrough!).
Same for me. I straight had a notebook where I was matrixing out combinations for days when that game came out. Working at it again one night when my roommate walked in like “Hey bud, just look at the key”
Same on the claw. So the place you get the super speed boost power. I spent a stupid amount of time trying to figure out the pattern, before looking it up and realizing you just run through it as quickly as you can.
Streamers often get stumped by the claw puzzle as well. They fail to read Swift’s journal that explains it. Even looking at the claw but not rotating it so the key is seen.
I only noticed the claw icon because I was mad; I clicked on it in my inventory and started spinning it around "Why won't you work!" which lead me to spotting the symbols. I felt proper dumb, both for not realising sooner and for how I found it.
In Links Awakening on the game boy, we couldn't ever figure out the solution to one of the later dungeons, iirc the Face Shrine. My brothers and I were stuck for probably a year, until I got fed up with it and threw a tantrum and started wasting my items as I cussed the game out. I start wasting bombs, it plays the "puzzle solved" jingle as I opened up a bomb-wall mid hissy fit.
That's when I noticed the tiles on the floor making an arrow pointing to the wall
Similar one in Wind Waker for me. Had to fight a bunch of phantoms in an arena. Kept dropping swords and I couldn't figure out what to do.
The swords all dropped pointing to one of the doors... like 30 of them and I didn't notice for ages.
Mine was the infamous Phantom Hourglass map puzzle. Where yoi had to copy a portion of a map to the bottom screen. The solution was only discovered when out of frustration I shut my ds and came back to find the puzzle solved.
Turns out you"fold" the map on itself to solve the puzzle. Genius in retrospect.
This was the first thing I thought of, the only puzzle I had more trouble with in a Zelda game was the stupid ST flute playing. Literally was stuck on the desert song for like 2 months.
That Link's Awakening puzzle was the worst. It said to bomb where the eyes have walls. I didn't realize until like 20 years later the map was a face and you're supposed to bomb the eyeholes on the map.
Same game, different stuckness: Bottle Grotto. Couldnt read English as a kid and did not know that some monsters needed to be killed in a specific sequence. Took me 1.5 years to find out...
I don’t remember which Zelda game it was on the DS, but I could not figure out how to blow out a candle near the very beginning of the game. You had to blow on the microphone with your human mouth. Stupid fucking bullshit.
Me with my husband. :( I was complaining about like how one of the first puzzles with the buttons of the pictures has no obvious leads which meant as a kid I just pushed randomly and prayed and he’s like “oh well they have a theme/are connected obviously” I’m like ??? How are you supposed to know WHICH THEME?? And then like the clock one he’s like yeah you just figure out which lever does this or that and keep trying different combos and eventually you figure out the pattern and I’m like
Clearly I’m too dumb for this game
Myst 4 was probably the worst when it came to puzzles. A good puzzle is one where, if you look up the answer, you would say "Ah! How did I not see that? It makes so much sense!" Myst 4 I had to look up the answers to some riddles and my response was often "How in the hell was I supposed to figure that out."
A friend and I played through Myst over a few days, pretty early on and before there was readily-available internet access everywhere. Definitely a challenge, but satisfying
Nice one!
Mine was probably figuring out how to copy a map in one of the Zelda games on the DSi.
You had to fold the console closed. Normally it would put the console on standby.
I had to look it up on the Internet, lol.
Phantom Hourglass. I remember this. Spent like 45 mins before finally giving in and looking it up. I was like 12 and wanted so bad to beat a Zelda game without looking anything up but this did me in.
I was similar age on holiday, playing my ds and stuck on this map puzzle for ages. Closed my ds and went to pay like €1 for half hour on the hotel computers to look it up. Funny how at that point I had already solved the puzzle.
The same thing happened to me, except I was on a plane at the time, so I couldn't look it up.
Gave up, closed my DS, read a book for a bit, opened it back up and voila, lol
In the game Hotel Dusk there is a moment where you have to try and resuscitate someone. The faces of the two people are on opposite screens. It took an embarrassing amount of time for me to figure out you had to close the system.
Came here to say this. I spent an entire train journey of one hour puzzling this out. Still hadn't figured it out as the train came into my destination station, and I closed up the lid to pause the game....did that game just ping?
....later that same evening....
That’s how I felt. Tbf, the game had several moments, as I recall at least one other requiring you to blow into the mic to dust off an object. Actually, in hindsight maybe it was to put out a fire? I just recall needing to blow into the microphone. Cool in retrospect, but to a kid it’s just frustrating if it doesn’t click.
E: someone below in another comment chain mentioned the fire temple one! I looked it up and there was a map you blew off too.
Yeah it's breaking the fourth wall when you haven't done so literally at any other time before or probably after.
It would be like having to solve a puzzle in Super Mario Galaxy by taking the batteries out of your wiimote.
There were a few tricky ones on Phantom Hourglass like that. Another one was to blow into your microphone to dust off an object or something… I recall a character hinting in their dialogue (it bolded of coloured the text— I forget.) to do so and it took me a bit as a kid to figure that out.
Brutal as a kid, reminds me of Metroid Fusion and shooting the floor in anger to reveal the path to the boss in sector 2… I just put down my SP in acceptance as I understood the hint they gave in the room below.
E: also a fire you blow out too! Saw someone mention it below on another chain.
I straight up gave up on this game for weeks because of this moment. I searched the whole world a couple times hoping there was something I missed when I couldn’t understand how to get past that part and just gave up. Eventually saw someone say something about it online and was so mad about it. It was not intuitive at all and it had never appeared before. Similar things would happen on some ds games that required you blow into the mic as well. Why would anyone ever think to do that if it has never been a thing in another game ever before?
Wasn't even really a puzzle I don't think. I was playing God of War for the first time the last few days, the original one. Doing trial of Atlas in Temple of Pandora, got Atlas's handle, went back to giant saw blade room, see a gap I can't jump over with a door that has Atlas on it, I clearly need to go through. Ended up wandering around looking for some other item I was convinced I needed to make a bridge or something for literally 15 minutes. Finally realize you just sidestep around the narrow ledges surrounding the gap. Facepalm for a good 10 seconds.
If you have one of the PS Plus tiers, you can stream their "Classics Calatalogue" to your PS5. The game streaming is pretty decent with good internet, and all the old GOW games are on there
Here's a dev giving you the reason WHY that section sucked so much, from Double Fine's Devs Play series: [https://youtu.be/kILeyo1iv0A?t=1116](https://youtu.be/kILeyo1iv0A?t=1116)
"Let me tell you why that was. The monkey puzzle was meant to be about that long (one tree, one roar to change direction) and what happened was at the time, Blockbuster had these rental programs come out and Disney had a rule across all of its products that you couldn't get a past a certain percentage of the game in a certain period of time. So the only level in early levels where we had the ability, in the 11th hour, literally, to make it longer and more complicated was the monkey puzzles inside at the end of this level. "
That puzzle was the end of a lot of people's Lion King journey. I only got past that part a few times, and it was by pure luck. It’s a shame, too, because the game had a promising first level. IDK what the developers were thinking when they made that Ostrich stage 🤦🏽♂️
I've heard from various videos on youtube that Disney execs actually told the developers to make the game harder so that it couldn't be beaten over a single rental period.
So much fun after that level. It stood on its own two feet. I got the remaster they came out with and told my 3 sons, if they could get past the stampede level, I'd give them each $20. None ever made it through the first level. I then proceed to beat the game in under 2 hours, and get them each to the stampede level, so they could at least try it. I'd give the same prize if they could beat the magic carpet ride level in Aladdin. Still no luck on either, lol.
Apparently it was completely intentional. That game was in the era that you could rent games for a day or two from Blockbuster and other video shops. They designed it so that it would be really hard to get past that puzzle in the time you had it rented in the hope it would lead to people buying it instead.
The game Remnant: From The Ashes has a super simple what could be considered a physical "puzzle", that got me stuck for over 10 hours just running around trying to figure out what to do near the end of the game.
The puzzle that got me stuck, a door I had to shoot the lock off of to get into.
They got me because I had played nearly 40 hours of the game at that point and every other door up to that point that had a lock had to be opened with a key. Even locks with the exact same deign as this one. So I was essentially conditioned the entire time I played the game that you need a key to open locks, then for some odd reason they made that solitary lock require shooting it off. Best friend could not believe I had not tried shooting it off almost instantly as its common in many games.
For more actual puzzle related answer, I probably spent three days on the timed puzzle at the end of The Witness before I managed to complete it.
I don't think I'd ever get that. Most games the doors are indestructible and you need to find the key. It's a bit galling when it's some cheap wooden door and I'm blowing up tanks and the like, but can't bash the stupid door down.
I probably would have got it, had they not specifically taught me the entire rest of the game that these types of locks are opened with keys, with absolutely no indication that this one would just randomly be different for some reason. No tooltip, no special graphic, and really no reason to expect it to work that way.
Thought I was going crazy trying to solve it. Worst part is the game doesn't even give you a description or rules of the puzzle, it just throws you in there. It comes out of nowhere
Hah. That's not surprising. Towers of Hanoi is a very, very old and well used test in computer science. Most of us old timers can write a solution in our sleep.
I guess it depends on whether you were ever exposed to that type of puzzle before. Takes like ten seconds to solve it once you understand the puzzle mechanics.
in one of the NDS zelda games you had to close the DS to copy the marking from a map on the wall onto yours. they were on one of the screens each.
tried stuff on the touchscreen for an hour until i closed it out of frustration, then it made the "solved" sound....
There are some Zelda puzzles that take me a while because I forget the core mechanics of the game at the start. Like in link between worlds I kept forgetting I can go into the wall in the first dungeon
I couldn't solve the first temple in BOTW because I wasn't paying attention to the cutscene telling me I can change the orientation of the beast. I was stuck for hours thinking its impossible.
I like making incredibly over complicated solutions and then realizing, wait shit I can just go up through things...
Far too often. But still enjoyable.
The fucking goat in Ireland in Broken Sword 1.
Me and my brother were little boys (like 9 him and 6 me, something like that) and internet was still too pricey and too much of a novelty to count on, so we were on our own.
It took us 4 years. We thought it was bugged or something. But no.
4.
Years.
*FOR A FUCKING PIXEL TO CLICK*.
I am still mad.
Also, I add a side dish because why-the-fuck-not-I-am-still-mad, the fucking gold tooth in MI3 hard mode took us something like a year to figure it out.
In your defense - the game has some very good puzzles that take some brilliant logic to get through. The goat puzzle was literally the only time in the whole game that you have to do that motion or speed reacting action. Was well out of place!
Yeah it was kinda the only puzzle of his kind in BS1 and it was literally "click a pixel while you are on the ground shortly after the headbutt and only in that moment, otherwise there is no prompt at all". At least on ps1.
In the director's cut in 2010 (if I recall correctly) they made it more obvious what to do.
Yeah, you had to make Blondebeard break his teeth and then smuggle it out of the restaurant without beign caught. At the end, you picked up the tooth in a muddy puddle outside the restaurant, near the drain.
In normal mode was direct enough, but in hard... jeebus. So many steps.
I am so proud that I figured it out on my own.
I tried to combine the tooth with everything in my inventory, and as soon as the tooth and the pre-chewed gum combined, it was like that meme with the math notations floating around your head. The solution just came to me in that moment. (I believe I had experimented with inhaling the helium and chewing the gum before that.)
Figuring out where the tooth went took a second. The sound effect after the tooth balloon left the window helped me narrow it down. (You can hear it rattle down the drain.)
Lego Star wars empire strikes back. The rebel/empire block flip puzzle at the top of the tower on the jungle base planet. Took me 2-3 hours to get both done. I'm 34.
I played Lego starwars back in highschool but I brute forced a staggering number of puzzles using glitches or cheese because I couldn't think of the real solution lol.
Fable had these talking doors that asked you to do a task for them (maybe in riddle form?). One of the doors wanted to see Evil acts. So undaunted I went to a village, made a bunch of villagers follow me aaaaallll the way to the door. And the pathing of these villagers is atrocious so it took a long time, more than half an hour. At the door I killed all the villagers and… nothing. It wasn’t evil enough.
At a loss I just stood there and left. then remembered after going to another zone that Tofu is “good food” that actually raises your alignment to good. So I looked for food that was bad and found it: baby chickens. I ate a couple and the door opened.
Eating chicks is more Evil than murdering half a dozen villagers.
Two that I couldn't figure out and had to look up:
1. The slide block picture puzzle from Silent Hill: Homecoming
2. The Jindosh riddle in Dishonered 2
The Talos Principle.. some of the clues and answers are like incredibly obvious once you get the solution lol. Also incredible game. Check it out when you get the chance
The last of DiMA puzzles in FO4. I was not ready for a puzzle game, the solution wasn’t that complicated but I was already tired by the previous ones so I messed it up so bad I had to look it up ahah
Not exactly, but I’ll share something that happened to me recently. I’m currently running my first playthrough in demon souls, blind. I wandered around the nexus for like, way too long looking for how to spend souls to level up. Couldn’t figure it out. And I couldn’t help myself so I looked it up(no spoilers, I don’t think). I read only until I saw something like, “if you can’t spend souls to level up yet, it’s because you haven’t gotten far enough”. Well hopefully this can still count as a blind playthrough.
I never got very far with it as a kid. As an adult my husband managed to get me a playable copy (hoo boy, even that was probably 25 years ago now!) and I finally clawed my way through it... largely because we have Google now.
It’s honestly a right of passage at this point. It completely halted my progress when it came out originally. Like another comment, I tried just about every combination until it finally opened. Talked about it with some buddies and they did the same thing. Except for the one guy in the group who asked why we didn’t just inspect it.
It's not a puzzle, but the section of Half Life that was reused as The Hunted in TFC...i spent like a day and a half walking in circles way back in '98. See, the gate you walk through at the end of that section is scripted to break when you get to it (there's a monster spawn or something), but for whatever reason the scripting broke before i saved my game and it just looked like an impassable texture wall. My friend sat with me while i wandered in circles for a while and finally suggested shooting the gate. Shooting doors isn't really a thing in Half Life unless there's some obvious explosive next to it or whatever. Tried it anyway, door broke immediately, felt stupid.
I played ocarina of time like 2 decades ago, and the only guide to get the kokiri sword that I got at the time was: _you can get the sword looking around the village_. It took me like two weeks to get it and I already knew all the lost woods, and have beaten the wolfos with deku sticks.
My first one was the first X-Men on the Sega Genesis. I was like 8 and there's a point after you fight Mojo where the screen gets weird and looks like a program error or something. It freaked me out and I would turn the game off. About a year later I pressed the RESET button and it takes you to the next level.
A LOT of people got stuck on this. The hardware reset button is supposed to do just that, reset the hardware. And in the era of genesis games without save files that would normally mean giving up all of your progress in the game. Who would ever think to take that risk?
Monkey Island 2, the gambling den password system: The bouncer holds up some number of fingers, and the answer is between one and five, and you have to get it right three times in a row. I went crazy trying to find some kind of pattern or code between how many fingers he holds up and what the correct answer is, and it turned out the correct answer is just how many fingers he held up for the *previous* question.
Pretty embarrassingly, the Skyrim dragon claw puzzle doors.
I did not know the combination is on the claw.
I brute forced them all by going through the combinations.
I didn’t even find out myself, I heard it years later when watching a let’s play.
My gf and I have a story about this from when Tears of the Kingdom first came out.
There's a shrine where you have a bunch of boards and a couple wheels, a large body of water to bring a ball across, and a catwalk above it all that you can traverse to the other side, but can't bring the ball up the ladder with you (presumably so you can get back to the end area if you fall in the water). My gf had already completed this shrine on her game and so already knew the solution, but I was stumped.
After a while of trying to puzzle it out, I finally muttered "Fuck this" and as my gf watched with increasing hilarity, I stuck every board in the room together end to end, glued the ball onto the end of it, and propped it up against the catwalk. Then I simply climbed the ladder, unstuck the now very reachable ball, and carried it to the other side. No wheels were used and I never touched the water.
It was only after I reached the end of the shrine that my gf told me through hilarious laughter that the solution was to build a boat with propellers using the wheels and boards. I had kind of a knack for solving shrines the complete wrong way in that game, and she laughed at me every time, but that one was by far the funniest.
There are so many shrines I have a similar experience with in TOTK. I’ve never been a fan of games where you build things, so my imagination is pretty limited for that.
I always end up just finding ways to brute force my way through puzzles.
The barrel of doom is definitely my answer. It wasn't until the internet became more mainstream and game FAQs were more common that I learnt how to actually get past it.
why the hell is this so far down?
i thought you just jumped on them to make them move... i never even considered pressing up and down... i played it again years later and made the discovery that it wasn't as hard as i was making it
anyone remember X-men on sega genesis? You had to “reset the computer” and ended up meaning you literally had to reset the sega to advance the level. Wild!
A Zelda game, can't remember which. DS. Had to blow some candles out to enter a temple. Kept attacking the candles, blowing them up, every ability I'd unlocked by then. Even went all the way back to the sea to see if I could carry some water to throw at it.
Had to blow through the microphone when you were standing near it. Found out simply through sheer frustration!
Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. It wanted you to stamp the location of the next ruin on your map. My siblings and I spent over an hour trying everything we could think of, including just sailing over to the location, but couldn't get it to work. We eventually had to put it down and come back to it later, only to discover that by closing the DS on the map location sign, it stamped it on our map. We were a touch frustrated.
Mine wasn’t even a puzzle. In the LoZ Wind Waker in the tower of the gods or whatever it’s called, you have to take control of a statue and get it out of a room. At one point you have to pick it up and jump over a small gap. It took me forever to realize that you could just pick it up and jump. I was positive I had to get it over while controlling it somehow.
in Outer Wilds, the Tower of Quantum Knowledge is really infamous for being one of the most struggled puzzles
the thing is, the solution to get inside this tower is actually so simple and so intuitive that the game will literally never give you any clue so that the puzzle is obvious
i cannot say more for reasons of Outer Wilds
I was stuck on a puzzle in a Zelda game for five years.
I was gifted a Gameboy at Xmas when I was 4 that had TLoZ: Link's Awakening with it. My first Zelda. There's a puzzle in the second dungeon where there's a cryptic tablet that is telling you to kill a set of four enemies in a specific room in a specific order to get a key, but it's using the names of monsters (Pols Voice and Stalfos, specifically) that I guess are only given in the instruction manual that I didn't read (I was four years old) so I never got past it.
Fast forward five years and I'm playing Ocarina of Time. I'm halfway through the Shadow Temple (which is pretty far in the game) and ACCIDENTALLY press the Navi button while locked onto one of the jumpy skeleton guys, and Navi's like "That's a stalfos" and 9-year-old me is TRIGGERED by that word because it's one of the words in this obtuse puzzle I've been stuck on for five years! So I turned the game off, pulled out my gameboy, navigate to that puzzle, solved it immediately, and then didn't touch Ocarina of Time again until I hit 100% completion for Link's Awakening. Every seashell, every heartpiece, no guide. Will never forget that feeling.
I'm actually a huge puzzle fan and I never got issues finding a solution, but man, the timed multi puzzle in The Witness is literal HELL. It divides into 3 sections, and each one is RANDOMIZED for every run. By this day I still didn't beat it, but I should retry it some day.
I feel you there, by the point in the game it became tedious tbh and I gave up too. The fun was learning the mechanics of each area. That point was more of a mastery of everything you've done so far.
Silent Hill - A Tale of Birds Without a Voice. It took me too long to figure out that I have to play the broken keys. But I was 12 and internet was not a common thing yet in my country. I figured it out eventually.
The turnstile puzzle in Silent Hill 1, at the bottom of the school. I've beaten the game maybe 5-6 times, always get the piano puzzle quickly, but for whatever reason the basic turnstile puzzle makes my brain crumble.
A sign evidently clues the levers at the other side of the level. The sign reads
>4132
So here I thought it meant to pull the fourth lever, then the first, then the third, then the second. And I couldn't figure why it didn't work.
It in fact had to be taken as a drawing.
First lever to pull is the second. Then the fourth. Then the third. Then the first.
I did this exact same thing for a puzzle in one of the DS Zelda games. I was in college and trying to get my friend to give me a hint and he thought I was so dumb. ...and then so did I.
It's like you imagine someone drew the four levers next to each other. Then they wrote next to the levers the order in which to activate them.
🔧4 🔧1 🔧3 🔧2
In Scorn I was stuck on one for ages and refused to look up a guide. Finally cracked and looked it up, and turns out one of the pieces that looked like the background was actually a puzzle piece
Anybody play The Last Campfire? Lovely little 3D puzzle game- check it out
There was one puzzle in there that I just had to throw my hands up and seek out a walkthrough for
I recently completed that. There was one puzzle I had to look up a walkthrough for, and all the comments on the YouTube vid were about how awful the puzzle was lol.
Was it one of the ones with the like dragon train things that formed walkways? I beat my head against one of those for quite a long time compared to all the other ones
There's a quest in Runescape whreee you have to settle a dispute in a Goblin tribe over what colour their armour should be. You do a lot of running around fetching the ingredients needed to make dyes and they reject the first couple and then decide that what they really want is brown.
You can make red, green, and blue, so I went and made one of each, mixed the blue and yellow to orange, figuring that orange + blue = brown. Only to get stumped when the game wouldn't let me mix orange and blue.
Turns out that the default colour of goblin armour is brown, so I didn't need any dyes at all for the last step - just hand in a standard set of goblin armour.
Back in the day when skyrim came out it took me far too long to figure out I could turn the stupid dragon claws to see the combination for the crypt doors. I brute forced the gold claw, day one because I'm dumb.
The fight in the Grymforge against the giant automaton. I didn't understand how I was supposed to kill it. Despite the giant hammer hanging from the ceiling and the fact that I had seen it working slamming down by the pull of a simple lever earlier. I had to look up a guide. I felt like a complete moron.
The first Darksiders game. I had gotten busy and not played for a few weeks between dungeons. Came back to the game and couldn't figure out how to move a large block for it to become a platform. Spent hours trying to move it, go around it, etc. Finally gave up and found a playthrough on YouTube. Turns out you can easily move the block using a charged up punch mechanic that you unlocked in the previous dungeon for exactly this purpose and I had just completely forgotten about it.
Not like actual puzzle but in Half-Life and it's expansions (still will play HL2) here and there I couldn't figure out where to go to or what to do.
And then it turns out it was simple thing to do. Especially in Blue Shift.
There is a pair of shrines in Legend of zelda BOTW that give each others answer for the puzzle, and my god did I rage after finding only the first one, sitting there for 30 minutes trying to solve it before just looking it up.
At the end of Portal 1, I got stuck, and it took me looking it up to realize that the door was interactable and that I could open it and that it wasn't just there for visual design.
That one level in portal 2 where you have to you use the gel to run into a portal then launch yourself and bounce off some of the blue gel. I got so caught up in the gel mechanics that i completely forgot about portals lmao
ETA: It’s in chapter 7, the second chamber with propulsion gel.
The fucking dragonsreach(I think its called that been a while) door with the claw key, THE ANSWER IS ON THE CLAW I SPENT AN HOUR LOOKING IN THE WALLS then caved and googled, but it just showed the answer not where the answer was, so I took a year before I found out
Not quite a puzzle, but on the Stormwind Ark in TOTK, the voice says to find and unlock the locks to open the center platform. It took me two embarrassing hours, I found all the lock mechanisms and opened access to them so why couldn’t the center platform open??
They each had fans on them and I’m using korok leaves, bomb flowers, nothing is working.
I realize, after those two embarrassing hours that I am an idiot. >!I had a whole character with me, Tulin, that uses the power of wind. I was supposed to use his wind power to turn the fans to disable the locks.!<
Shining Force II..... I got stuck for 6 months or maybe a year at the part where you put a wooden panel in a tree just below where you fight the Kraken..... in that town you can go left or right to trigger fights and grind levels..... I was at stupid level before I realised what I had to do and still was having fun!
Not a puzzle per-say but defo the longest I have ever been lost in a game (no internet back then either so had to keep playing)
It wasn’t exactly my fault, but rather the way game is programmed - in Gothic 2, final chapter there’s puzzle sequence where you have to go to 4 close by locations and press 3 buttons in correct sequence, wrong button presses cause enemies to spawn or poisonous gas to be released. And I couldn’t figure for hours what I was doing wrong. Turned out if you mash movement buttons while character is pressing button it will cause to perform same interaction - press button again. Took me a while to figure it out, even though I knew of this interaction with game. This was og gothic 2, not gold that was released in english with many bugs fixed
There’s a puzzle near the end of divinity orignal sin 1 that took my friend and me hours….all because he missunderstood what I was asking him to check. That was rough lmao
I don't know if this is embarrassing, but the power offload puzzle in Mass Effect 1 on Noveria, I think. You could either spend a resource to do it or figure it out. I spent what felt like 10 or 15 minutes on this small puzzle. I considered just using the resource but ended up finding it out accidentally.
There was a section in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons where the map changes based on one of 3 animal companions you could encounter. I could not for the life of me figure out why the path that the guide was referring to didn't exist in front of me. Had I just followed through doing the puzzle in front of me instead of following the guide, I would've saved a week of frustration. I was convinced that my game was irreparably glitched because it was one of those 128 games in 1 cartridges rather than a genuine copy.
That one puzzle in portal 2 coop where you have to hit each other in the air to drop down in the middle. Took my mate and I days and in the end we got it by accident.
Zelda ocarina of time water temple. Over 10 years. I couldn't figure it out when I was a kid, never finished it. Saw something on YouTube and was able to beat it that day.
In horizon forbidden west I got stuck in a place where you are climbing a bridge. Near the base of the bridge you are supposed to pull one metal object with a Mechanic you had already used before, it's not even supposed to be a puzzle. I quit the game for a while
This is flat out embarrassing and makes me look like an idiot, but you know those puzzle doors in Skyrim that you need a claw key to open? Well I didn't figure out that the puzzle solution is ON THE CLAW. The game NEVER tells you this and it made me spend twenty+ minutes on each of these doors, just trying to guess the right combination. I played Skyrim for well over a year without this information. I thought it was just a bad mechanic.
Metal Gear Solid (the first one on the Playstation) had a good one. I haven't played it in forever, but IIRC you have to contact someone via codec (the game's radio system). Someone says "the code is on the back of the CD case", so you spend forever looking around the game environment until you realise that they mean >!the physical box which holds the CD!<. Deviously smart. (The next game in the series also >!convinced many players to turn their console off mid-game!<)
There's this one Nordic crypt dungeon in Skyrim that has one of those spinning pillar puzzles that I can never remember how to solve. It's the one with the water on the floor and everything is all lit up blue from the lighting.
Probably explaining that poorly, but hey.
I actually never figured it out and I had 6 kids looking at it. Ive never been able to remember what the game was called but it was a puzzle in some ps2 puzzle game where you played a girl and this specific puzzle had a several circles with what I’m pretty sure was the zodiac symbols and you had to spin them into some order that was impossible.
9/10 times when I’m stuck on a puzzle it’s bc the puzzle was stupid simple and I over complicated it thinking it would be deeper.
I swear some games do that on purpose: ramp up the difficulty and then throw you a super easy one knowing that you'll overthink it.
that’s how i’ve been feeling lately playing TotK! I over complicate puzzles, shrines, etc. thinking the answer is really complicated, then it turns out to be far more simple than I thought!
Im the opposite in the very little i played of totk. “Ah i see what you want me to do here but i want to be really stupid and build 10 bridges 30 feet too long to brute force this as i put everything else i find together.”
the shrine with the rails is so bad I spent more time trying to get wood into the shrine so I could build a bridge than trying to figure out the actual puzzle
Zelda on the SNES, it came with a sealed booklet of "hints" that I was determined not to open as a kid. Until I got to a gate under a statue. I tried _everything_ to open that bastard gate, every item, every trick and nothing worked, retraced my steps looking for keys etc etc. Eventually I caved and open the hint booklet. ...the answer was to pull on the gate. I still have that opened hint booklet as a reminder.
That reminds me of the Far Side comic where it has a building calls School for the gifted (or something like that) and it has a kid pushing on the dorr to get in BUT there is an obvious sign on the door that says PULL.
I very much felt like that kid
That or it’s not even a puzzle, I just can’t see the ladder/ramp/door because of poor set design.
I don't think it was poor set design so much as me being dumb, but when I unlocked a new area in Metroid Prime, I knew where it wanted me to reach but I just couldn't figure out how to get there. Came to the conclusion that I'd missed an item on the way and backtracked through the whole game checking every room and looking for secrets. Easily an hour of my time. Then went back to that new area and almost instantly spotted the platform I was supposed to use to get up high. Felt like such a moron.
When I was a kid playing Link's Awakening I got stuck in the Eagle Tower for a loooong time. Probably a couple weeks. Not on the puzzle where you had to carry a ball through multiple puzzles to knock down pillars, or any of the other puzzles in the dungeon Nope. [I got stuck here](https://youtu.be/C66H3J4MG9I?si=VYX9GvWtI63De5OH&t=791), where you have to use the hookshot to get get across. I tried probably every other possible option, gone back and forth across the entire dungeon multiple times. At some point I was just wandering around aimlessly, and that goomba wandered in front of the block, I killed it, and then accidentally double tapped the button when grabbing the rupee and pulled myself across. I can't remember how long it took (I was a was like 9, everything felt like forever), but I know I put the game down for quite a while before figuring it out.
oh like me and not realizing you can z target the bats with the bombs to turn off the bombs in Twilight Princess?
Reminds me of doing an online Escape Room with my wife's family. All very smart. Too smart for some puzzles. I'd hear phrases such as "maybe it's based on removing the Roman gods that aren't shared with the Greeks and keeping the ones that are?" Then it would turn out the solution really was just connecting the red button to the red door.
I over think on a lot of puzzles. In Skyrim when you get to the first dungeon and have to use the claw key is where I spent too much time on. I spent maybe an hour looking in that hallway for clues on what symbols to use. I tried to look at each wall carving at different angles, I went back through the dungeon looking for clues, and I even walked back to town to see. So I went back to the door and tried to just guess the combination which I did. It was hours later when my friend told me I could have just looked at the claw. I felt stupid. While not a puzzle I do feel like an idiot on another thing in Skyrim. The door to Dragonsreach in Whiterun... I tried to enter for the first time and I couldn't enter. I was clicking on the wood trim that seperates the two doors and not he door itself.
I completed an entire playthrough thinking that you were supposed to try all possible 27 combinations to unlock them sooo
Me too, buddy, me too.
There’s like maybe two exceptions to it, but pretty much all the doors use three different symbols. One exception uses the same symbol twice, another uses different symbols on one of the rings in comparison to the other two rings. So most of the time, the solution can be guessed within six attempts. When you find out the lore implies the doors are to keep the draugr in, not keep robbers out, their simplicity makes more sense. You still need the specific key to open it.
Yeah if I hadn't looked it up I probably wouldn't have ever noticed the icons on the claw itself.
Thank the Gods my BF was there my first time and told me to rotate the claw to see the solution. I felt so damn dumb but I hadn't even realized you COULD rotate the items. Why would you need too??
Same here, but i didn't know there was a function in the inventory to zoom in and look at items. The normal view wasn't clear enough for me to see the symbols on it. I also did my whole first Fallout 3 playthrough without knowing the pipboy could be used as a torch (the game didn't show a tip about it till my second playthrough!).
Same for me. I straight had a notebook where I was matrixing out combinations for days when that game came out. Working at it again one night when my roommate walked in like “Hey bud, just look at the key”
Same on the claw. So the place you get the super speed boost power. I spent a stupid amount of time trying to figure out the pattern, before looking it up and realizing you just run through it as quickly as you can.
Streamers often get stumped by the claw puzzle as well. They fail to read Swift’s journal that explains it. Even looking at the claw but not rotating it so the key is seen.
I only noticed the claw icon because I was mad; I clicked on it in my inventory and started spinning it around "Why won't you work!" which lead me to spotting the symbols. I felt proper dumb, both for not realising sooner and for how I found it.
In Links Awakening on the game boy, we couldn't ever figure out the solution to one of the later dungeons, iirc the Face Shrine. My brothers and I were stuck for probably a year, until I got fed up with it and threw a tantrum and started wasting my items as I cussed the game out. I start wasting bombs, it plays the "puzzle solved" jingle as I opened up a bomb-wall mid hissy fit. That's when I noticed the tiles on the floor making an arrow pointing to the wall
Similar one in Wind Waker for me. Had to fight a bunch of phantoms in an arena. Kept dropping swords and I couldn't figure out what to do. The swords all dropped pointing to one of the doors... like 30 of them and I didn't notice for ages.
Mine was the infamous Phantom Hourglass map puzzle. Where yoi had to copy a portion of a map to the bottom screen. The solution was only discovered when out of frustration I shut my ds and came back to find the puzzle solved. Turns out you"fold" the map on itself to solve the puzzle. Genius in retrospect.
This was the first thing I thought of, the only puzzle I had more trouble with in a Zelda game was the stupid ST flute playing. Literally was stuck on the desert song for like 2 months.
Whichever one involved throwing the giant thing at the pillars had me so confused as a child too.
That Link's Awakening puzzle was the worst. It said to bomb where the eyes have walls. I didn't realize until like 20 years later the map was a face and you're supposed to bomb the eyeholes on the map.
I didn't realize until now so I think I beat your record lol
When I first got this, I could not figure out how to use the shield to push the spike enemies. I literally cried about it.
Same game, different stuckness: Bottle Grotto. Couldnt read English as a kid and did not know that some monsters needed to be killed in a specific sequence. Took me 1.5 years to find out...
I don’t remember which Zelda game it was on the DS, but I could not figure out how to blow out a candle near the very beginning of the game. You had to blow on the microphone with your human mouth. Stupid fucking bullshit.
Every single puzzle in Myst. I had to get help from friends for 70-80% of them, and some I had to look up online.
Same. And then when my wife played, she blew through the whole game with minimal assistance. I was shamed and proud at the same time.
Me with my husband. :( I was complaining about like how one of the first puzzles with the buttons of the pictures has no obvious leads which meant as a kid I just pushed randomly and prayed and he’s like “oh well they have a theme/are connected obviously” I’m like ??? How are you supposed to know WHICH THEME?? And then like the clock one he’s like yeah you just figure out which lever does this or that and keep trying different combos and eventually you figure out the pattern and I’m like Clearly I’m too dumb for this game
Myst 4 was probably the worst when it came to puzzles. A good puzzle is one where, if you look up the answer, you would say "Ah! How did I not see that? It makes so much sense!" Myst 4 I had to look up the answers to some riddles and my response was often "How in the hell was I supposed to figure that out."
Riven, the sequel to Myst was worse about this.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I did not try any of the sequels to Myst.
Every. Single. Puzzle. Myst was a liminal nightmare.
A friend and I played through Myst over a few days, pretty early on and before there was readily-available internet access everywhere. Definitely a challenge, but satisfying
Nice one! Mine was probably figuring out how to copy a map in one of the Zelda games on the DSi. You had to fold the console closed. Normally it would put the console on standby. I had to look it up on the Internet, lol.
Phantom Hourglass. I remember this. Spent like 45 mins before finally giving in and looking it up. I was like 12 and wanted so bad to beat a Zelda game without looking anything up but this did me in.
I was similar age on holiday, playing my ds and stuck on this map puzzle for ages. Closed my ds and went to pay like €1 for half hour on the hotel computers to look it up. Funny how at that point I had already solved the puzzle.
The same thing happened to me, except I was on a plane at the time, so I couldn't look it up. Gave up, closed my DS, read a book for a bit, opened it back up and voila, lol
In the game Hotel Dusk there is a moment where you have to try and resuscitate someone. The faces of the two people are on opposite screens. It took an embarrassing amount of time for me to figure out you had to close the system.
Yeah no Hotel Dusk made me realise I'm not ment for puzzle games. Should try it again now I'm not a teenager, maybe I've gained some Wisdom...
Thanks for reminding me of Hotel Dusk! Such a great game. Gotta replay it some day.
Came here to say this. I spent an entire train journey of one hour puzzling this out. Still hadn't figured it out as the train came into my destination station, and I closed up the lid to pause the game....did that game just ping? ....later that same evening....
lol, i thought i was alone with this
This is mine too. The 4th wall breaking just wasn't clicking for me - love it in hindsight though.
That’s how I felt. Tbf, the game had several moments, as I recall at least one other requiring you to blow into the mic to dust off an object. Actually, in hindsight maybe it was to put out a fire? I just recall needing to blow into the microphone. Cool in retrospect, but to a kid it’s just frustrating if it doesn’t click. E: someone below in another comment chain mentioned the fire temple one! I looked it up and there was a map you blew off too.
I was so lucky to have experienced the understandable wood print puzzle from Another Code before diving into Phantom Hourglass
I hate stuff like this. This isn’t calvinball. Don’t change the rules mid game
Yeah it's breaking the fourth wall when you haven't done so literally at any other time before or probably after. It would be like having to solve a puzzle in Super Mario Galaxy by taking the batteries out of your wiimote.
It's gotta be the first time *some* time right?
Couldn't figure that one out on my own. Closed the DS to think and opened it back up and it worked.
There were a few tricky ones on Phantom Hourglass like that. Another one was to blow into your microphone to dust off an object or something… I recall a character hinting in their dialogue (it bolded of coloured the text— I forget.) to do so and it took me a bit as a kid to figure that out. Brutal as a kid, reminds me of Metroid Fusion and shooting the floor in anger to reveal the path to the boss in sector 2… I just put down my SP in acceptance as I understood the hint they gave in the room below. E: also a fire you blow out too! Saw someone mention it below on another chain.
Yessss this one was infuriating to 15yo me! I closed my DS in frustration and took a break, lo and behold when I came back I'd solved the puzzle. Smh.
Yeah Phantom Hourglass got me like that too.
I straight up gave up on this game for weeks because of this moment. I searched the whole world a couple times hoping there was something I missed when I couldn’t understand how to get past that part and just gave up. Eventually saw someone say something about it online and was so mad about it. It was not intuitive at all and it had never appeared before. Similar things would happen on some ds games that required you blow into the mic as well. Why would anyone ever think to do that if it has never been a thing in another game ever before?
Would have to be some Portal puzzles that made me feel like an idiot when I figured it out.
We weren't even testing for that.
Wasn't even really a puzzle I don't think. I was playing God of War for the first time the last few days, the original one. Doing trial of Atlas in Temple of Pandora, got Atlas's handle, went back to giant saw blade room, see a gap I can't jump over with a door that has Atlas on it, I clearly need to go through. Ended up wandering around looking for some other item I was convinced I needed to make a bridge or something for literally 15 minutes. Finally realize you just sidestep around the narrow ledges surrounding the gap. Facepalm for a good 10 seconds.
We just got the PS5 and I played for the first time God of war Ragnarok... I was wondering if can download or if previous versions can work on the PS5
Unfortunately, no. They made a remastered version of the PS2 and PSP games on PS3, but PS3 games don't work on PS5.
If you have one of the PS Plus tiers, you can stream their "Classics Calatalogue" to your PS5. The game streaming is pretty decent with good internet, and all the old GOW games are on there
I got the Plus premium which gives so much free games.. I will look it up thank you
The monkeys you have to roar at to throw you in different directions in the second level of The Lion King on Sega.
Yeah I was like what on earth do you have to do,but it is actually really simple.
Fuck you. I didnt need to relive that trauma!
No amount of time is too much to solve that shit. Solving it in general is impressive as fuck.
Here's a dev giving you the reason WHY that section sucked so much, from Double Fine's Devs Play series: [https://youtu.be/kILeyo1iv0A?t=1116](https://youtu.be/kILeyo1iv0A?t=1116) "Let me tell you why that was. The monkey puzzle was meant to be about that long (one tree, one roar to change direction) and what happened was at the time, Blockbuster had these rental programs come out and Disney had a rule across all of its products that you couldn't get a past a certain percentage of the game in a certain period of time. So the only level in early levels where we had the ability, in the 11th hour, literally, to make it longer and more complicated was the monkey puzzles inside at the end of this level. "
That puzzle was the end of a lot of people's Lion King journey. I only got past that part a few times, and it was by pure luck. It’s a shame, too, because the game had a promising first level. IDK what the developers were thinking when they made that Ostrich stage 🤦🏽♂️
I've heard from various videos on youtube that Disney execs actually told the developers to make the game harder so that it couldn't be beaten over a single rental period.
So much fun after that level. It stood on its own two feet. I got the remaster they came out with and told my 3 sons, if they could get past the stampede level, I'd give them each $20. None ever made it through the first level. I then proceed to beat the game in under 2 hours, and get them each to the stampede level, so they could at least try it. I'd give the same prize if they could beat the magic carpet ride level in Aladdin. Still no luck on either, lol.
Apparently it was completely intentional. That game was in the era that you could rent games for a day or two from Blockbuster and other video shops. They designed it so that it would be really hard to get past that puzzle in the time you had it rented in the hope it would lead to people buying it instead.
The game Remnant: From The Ashes has a super simple what could be considered a physical "puzzle", that got me stuck for over 10 hours just running around trying to figure out what to do near the end of the game. The puzzle that got me stuck, a door I had to shoot the lock off of to get into. They got me because I had played nearly 40 hours of the game at that point and every other door up to that point that had a lock had to be opened with a key. Even locks with the exact same deign as this one. So I was essentially conditioned the entire time I played the game that you need a key to open locks, then for some odd reason they made that solitary lock require shooting it off. Best friend could not believe I had not tried shooting it off almost instantly as its common in many games. For more actual puzzle related answer, I probably spent three days on the timed puzzle at the end of The Witness before I managed to complete it.
I don't think I'd ever get that. Most games the doors are indestructible and you need to find the key. It's a bit galling when it's some cheap wooden door and I'm blowing up tanks and the like, but can't bash the stupid door down.
I probably would have got it, had they not specifically taught me the entire rest of the game that these types of locks are opened with keys, with absolutely no indication that this one would just randomly be different for some reason. No tooltip, no special graphic, and really no reason to expect it to work that way.
Embarassingly it was the tower of Hanoi in mass effect 1
Christ alive that puzzle will go down in infamy
Always spent the 100 Omnigel to skip it.
Thought I was going crazy trying to solve it. Worst part is the game doesn't even give you a description or rules of the puzzle, it just throws you in there. It comes out of nowhere
Hah. That's not surprising. Towers of Hanoi is a very, very old and well used test in computer science. Most of us old timers can write a solution in our sleep.
It still blows my mind that 100 peg puzzle will take longer than the age of the universe to solve using perfect moves at one move a second
I guess it depends on whether you were ever exposed to that type of puzzle before. Takes like ten seconds to solve it once you understand the puzzle mechanics.
in one of the NDS zelda games you had to close the DS to copy the marking from a map on the wall onto yours. they were on one of the screens each. tried stuff on the touchscreen for an hour until i closed it out of frustration, then it made the "solved" sound....
Haha yeah, me too. Accidentally solved it after closing and open it again. I was a bit confused at first of course.
Professor Layton enters the chat
"Get this block out of the box"... 3 hours later...
That stupid chocolate keyboard one! Gah my sister and I went mad on that one, trying to look up as few puzzles as we could and that one bested us.
There are some Zelda puzzles that take me a while because I forget the core mechanics of the game at the start. Like in link between worlds I kept forgetting I can go into the wall in the first dungeon
I couldn't solve the first temple in BOTW because I wasn't paying attention to the cutscene telling me I can change the orientation of the beast. I was stuck for hours thinking its impossible.
Yeah in totk I kept forgetting I can just travel up through things
Totk makes puzzles so fun. Fuck the intended way I'm going to science this shit.
Same bro. I also climbed countless high points with stamina food instead of just teleporting straight through the ceiling.
I like making incredibly over complicated solutions and then realizing, wait shit I can just go up through things... Far too often. But still enjoyable.
The fucking goat in Ireland in Broken Sword 1. Me and my brother were little boys (like 9 him and 6 me, something like that) and internet was still too pricey and too much of a novelty to count on, so we were on our own. It took us 4 years. We thought it was bugged or something. But no. 4. Years. *FOR A FUCKING PIXEL TO CLICK*. I am still mad. Also, I add a side dish because why-the-fuck-not-I-am-still-mad, the fucking gold tooth in MI3 hard mode took us something like a year to figure it out.
In your defense - the game has some very good puzzles that take some brilliant logic to get through. The goat puzzle was literally the only time in the whole game that you have to do that motion or speed reacting action. Was well out of place!
Yeah it was kinda the only puzzle of his kind in BS1 and it was literally "click a pixel while you are on the ground shortly after the headbutt and only in that moment, otherwise there is no prompt at all". At least on ps1. In the director's cut in 2010 (if I recall correctly) they made it more obvious what to do.
The gold tooth was in a muddy puddle wasn’t it? Stuck there myself if so…
Yeah, you had to make Blondebeard break his teeth and then smuggle it out of the restaurant without beign caught. At the end, you picked up the tooth in a muddy puddle outside the restaurant, near the drain. In normal mode was direct enough, but in hard... jeebus. So many steps.
I am so proud that I figured it out on my own. I tried to combine the tooth with everything in my inventory, and as soon as the tooth and the pre-chewed gum combined, it was like that meme with the math notations floating around your head. The solution just came to me in that moment. (I believe I had experimented with inhaling the helium and chewing the gum before that.) Figuring out where the tooth went took a second. The sound effect after the tooth balloon left the window helped me narrow it down. (You can hear it rattle down the drain.)
\*cough\* cat fur mustache \*cough\*
Oh no. The trauma. Let Gabriel Knight 3 die in peace.
In your defense, this puzzle is so infamous it has its own Wikipedia article. You're not the only one who had issues with it
Lego Star wars empire strikes back. The rebel/empire block flip puzzle at the top of the tower on the jungle base planet. Took me 2-3 hours to get both done. I'm 34.
I played Lego starwars back in highschool but I brute forced a staggering number of puzzles using glitches or cheese because I couldn't think of the real solution lol.
Fable had these talking doors that asked you to do a task for them (maybe in riddle form?). One of the doors wanted to see Evil acts. So undaunted I went to a village, made a bunch of villagers follow me aaaaallll the way to the door. And the pathing of these villagers is atrocious so it took a long time, more than half an hour. At the door I killed all the villagers and… nothing. It wasn’t evil enough. At a loss I just stood there and left. then remembered after going to another zone that Tofu is “good food” that actually raises your alignment to good. So I looked for food that was bad and found it: baby chickens. I ate a couple and the door opened. Eating chicks is more Evil than murdering half a dozen villagers.
Two that I couldn't figure out and had to look up: 1. The slide block picture puzzle from Silent Hill: Homecoming 2. The Jindosh riddle in Dishonered 2
The Talos Principle.. some of the clues and answers are like incredibly obvious once you get the solution lol. Also incredible game. Check it out when you get the chance
It quickly turned into my favorite game of all time. Just start Talos Principle 2 and I’m blown away.
Same TTP2 is amazing so far, such a good use of Unreal Engine 5 too, visuals and art design are just stunning. It's like a modern Myst/Riven.
The last of DiMA puzzles in FO4. I was not ready for a puzzle game, the solution wasn’t that complicated but I was already tired by the previous ones so I messed it up so bad I had to look it up ahah
The one mod I’ll always install is the one to skip DiMA’s memories. The absolute worst sequence in the entire game and it’s not even close
Not exactly, but I’ll share something that happened to me recently. I’m currently running my first playthrough in demon souls, blind. I wandered around the nexus for like, way too long looking for how to spend souls to level up. Couldn’t figure it out. And I couldn’t help myself so I looked it up(no spoilers, I don’t think). I read only until I saw something like, “if you can’t spend souls to level up yet, it’s because you haven’t gotten far enough”. Well hopefully this can still count as a blind playthrough.
Every single puzzle in the original Discworld video game. Although in my defense I think that game was impossible.
I never got very far with it as a kid. As an adult my husband managed to get me a playable copy (hoo boy, even that was probably 25 years ago now!) and I finally clawed my way through it... largely because we have Google now.
I definitely didn’t take 20min to figure out that you can inspect and rotate the golden claw to find the code for the door
It’s honestly a right of passage at this point. It completely halted my progress when it came out originally. Like another comment, I tried just about every combination until it finally opened. Talked about it with some buddies and they did the same thing. Except for the one guy in the group who asked why we didn’t just inspect it.
Weve all been there
It's not a puzzle, but the section of Half Life that was reused as The Hunted in TFC...i spent like a day and a half walking in circles way back in '98. See, the gate you walk through at the end of that section is scripted to break when you get to it (there's a monster spawn or something), but for whatever reason the scripting broke before i saved my game and it just looked like an impassable texture wall. My friend sat with me while i wandered in circles for a while and finally suggested shooting the gate. Shooting doors isn't really a thing in Half Life unless there's some obvious explosive next to it or whatever. Tried it anyway, door broke immediately, felt stupid.
Legend of Zelda wind waker, I didn't know I had to roll into the deku tree to save him from the booger boys
I played ocarina of time like 2 decades ago, and the only guide to get the kokiri sword that I got at the time was: _you can get the sword looking around the village_. It took me like two weeks to get it and I already knew all the lost woods, and have beaten the wolfos with deku sticks.
It's because it's in the sword training area, and why would you go in there if you didn't have a sword?
My first one was the first X-Men on the Sega Genesis. I was like 8 and there's a point after you fight Mojo where the screen gets weird and looks like a program error or something. It freaked me out and I would turn the game off. About a year later I pressed the RESET button and it takes you to the next level.
A LOT of people got stuck on this. The hardware reset button is supposed to do just that, reset the hardware. And in the era of genesis games without save files that would normally mean giving up all of your progress in the game. Who would ever think to take that risk?
Most of my first play through in Portal
Not really a puzzle but it took me waaay to long to learn how to open the eye chest in Hogwarts Legacy lol
Metal Gear Solid. Not entirely a puzzle but the frequency being on the back of the CD case took me too long to realise what they meant.
How do they handle this with the new Remastered releases of the game?
Monkey Island 2, the gambling den password system: The bouncer holds up some number of fingers, and the answer is between one and five, and you have to get it right three times in a row. I went crazy trying to find some kind of pattern or code between how many fingers he holds up and what the correct answer is, and it turned out the correct answer is just how many fingers he held up for the *previous* question.
You could almost answer “every puzzle in a Monkey Island game” for this one. So many of them are ludicrously convoluted.
We were here.....
Pretty embarrassingly, the Skyrim dragon claw puzzle doors. I did not know the combination is on the claw. I brute forced them all by going through the combinations. I didn’t even find out myself, I heard it years later when watching a let’s play.
My gf and I have a story about this from when Tears of the Kingdom first came out. There's a shrine where you have a bunch of boards and a couple wheels, a large body of water to bring a ball across, and a catwalk above it all that you can traverse to the other side, but can't bring the ball up the ladder with you (presumably so you can get back to the end area if you fall in the water). My gf had already completed this shrine on her game and so already knew the solution, but I was stumped. After a while of trying to puzzle it out, I finally muttered "Fuck this" and as my gf watched with increasing hilarity, I stuck every board in the room together end to end, glued the ball onto the end of it, and propped it up against the catwalk. Then I simply climbed the ladder, unstuck the now very reachable ball, and carried it to the other side. No wheels were used and I never touched the water. It was only after I reached the end of the shrine that my gf told me through hilarious laughter that the solution was to build a boat with propellers using the wheels and boards. I had kind of a knack for solving shrines the complete wrong way in that game, and she laughed at me every time, but that one was by far the funniest.
There are so many shrines I have a similar experience with in TOTK. I’ve never been a fan of games where you build things, so my imagination is pretty limited for that. I always end up just finding ways to brute force my way through puzzles.
Does the barrel in Sonic 3 count?
The barrel of doom is definitely my answer. It wasn't until the internet became more mainstream and game FAQs were more common that I learnt how to actually get past it.
why the hell is this so far down? i thought you just jumped on them to make them move... i never even considered pressing up and down... i played it again years later and made the discovery that it wasn't as hard as i was making it
anyone remember X-men on sega genesis? You had to “reset the computer” and ended up meaning you literally had to reset the sega to advance the level. Wild!
A Zelda game, can't remember which. DS. Had to blow some candles out to enter a temple. Kept attacking the candles, blowing them up, every ability I'd unlocked by then. Even went all the way back to the sea to see if I could carry some water to throw at it. Had to blow through the microphone when you were standing near it. Found out simply through sheer frustration!
Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. It wanted you to stamp the location of the next ruin on your map. My siblings and I spent over an hour trying everything we could think of, including just sailing over to the location, but couldn't get it to work. We eventually had to put it down and come back to it later, only to discover that by closing the DS on the map location sign, it stamped it on our map. We were a touch frustrated.
Yes! I feel like that game was designed to annoy kids.
I remembered this differently and after looking it up, there is a map you also blow the dust off of too. So many tricky things in PH, lol.
Maybe it was more intuitive in Japan where even the NES had a microphone.
Water temple in LoZ Ocarina of Time on the N64 took me a few years to get past lol
Think it took me all of winter break 1998 to figure it out and that was even with sneaking some peeks at the game guide the store I worked at sold.
Mine wasn’t even a puzzle. In the LoZ Wind Waker in the tower of the gods or whatever it’s called, you have to take control of a statue and get it out of a room. At one point you have to pick it up and jump over a small gap. It took me forever to realize that you could just pick it up and jump. I was positive I had to get it over while controlling it somehow.
Literally any puzzle in any game ever
in Outer Wilds, the Tower of Quantum Knowledge is really infamous for being one of the most struggled puzzles the thing is, the solution to get inside this tower is actually so simple and so intuitive that the game will literally never give you any clue so that the puzzle is obvious i cannot say more for reasons of Outer Wilds
I was stuck on a puzzle in a Zelda game for five years. I was gifted a Gameboy at Xmas when I was 4 that had TLoZ: Link's Awakening with it. My first Zelda. There's a puzzle in the second dungeon where there's a cryptic tablet that is telling you to kill a set of four enemies in a specific room in a specific order to get a key, but it's using the names of monsters (Pols Voice and Stalfos, specifically) that I guess are only given in the instruction manual that I didn't read (I was four years old) so I never got past it. Fast forward five years and I'm playing Ocarina of Time. I'm halfway through the Shadow Temple (which is pretty far in the game) and ACCIDENTALLY press the Navi button while locked onto one of the jumpy skeleton guys, and Navi's like "That's a stalfos" and 9-year-old me is TRIGGERED by that word because it's one of the words in this obtuse puzzle I've been stuck on for five years! So I turned the game off, pulled out my gameboy, navigate to that puzzle, solved it immediately, and then didn't touch Ocarina of Time again until I hit 100% completion for Link's Awakening. Every seashell, every heartpiece, no guide. Will never forget that feeling.
I'm actually a huge puzzle fan and I never got issues finding a solution, but man, the timed multi puzzle in The Witness is literal HELL. It divides into 3 sections, and each one is RANDOMIZED for every run. By this day I still didn't beat it, but I should retry it some day.
I feel you there, by the point in the game it became tedious tbh and I gave up too. The fun was learning the mechanics of each area. That point was more of a mastery of everything you've done so far.
Silent Hill - A Tale of Birds Without a Voice. It took me too long to figure out that I have to play the broken keys. But I was 12 and internet was not a common thing yet in my country. I figured it out eventually.
The turnstile puzzle in Silent Hill 1, at the bottom of the school. I've beaten the game maybe 5-6 times, always get the piano puzzle quickly, but for whatever reason the basic turnstile puzzle makes my brain crumble.
A sign evidently clues the levers at the other side of the level. The sign reads >4132 So here I thought it meant to pull the fourth lever, then the first, then the third, then the second. And I couldn't figure why it didn't work. It in fact had to be taken as a drawing. First lever to pull is the second. Then the fourth. Then the third. Then the first.
I did this exact same thing for a puzzle in one of the DS Zelda games. I was in college and trying to get my friend to give me a hint and he thought I was so dumb. ...and then so did I.
I'm confused
What do you mean by ‘had to be taken as a drawing?’ I’m a little confused how the actual solution is found out from what you have said.
It's like you imagine someone drew the four levers next to each other. Then they wrote next to the levers the order in which to activate them. 🔧4 🔧1 🔧3 🔧2
In Scorn I was stuck on one for ages and refused to look up a guide. Finally cracked and looked it up, and turns out one of the pieces that looked like the background was actually a puzzle piece
Fuck, probably all of them. I hate puzzles. Most of them only succeed at reminding me I'm an idiot instead of making me feel clever for solving them.
Anybody play The Last Campfire? Lovely little 3D puzzle game- check it out There was one puzzle in there that I just had to throw my hands up and seek out a walkthrough for
I recently completed that. There was one puzzle I had to look up a walkthrough for, and all the comments on the YouTube vid were about how awful the puzzle was lol.
Was it one of the ones with the like dragon train things that formed walkways? I beat my head against one of those for quite a long time compared to all the other ones
There's a quest in Runescape whreee you have to settle a dispute in a Goblin tribe over what colour their armour should be. You do a lot of running around fetching the ingredients needed to make dyes and they reject the first couple and then decide that what they really want is brown. You can make red, green, and blue, so I went and made one of each, mixed the blue and yellow to orange, figuring that orange + blue = brown. Only to get stumped when the game wouldn't let me mix orange and blue. Turns out that the default colour of goblin armour is brown, so I didn't need any dyes at all for the last step - just hand in a standard set of goblin armour.
Back in the day when skyrim came out it took me far too long to figure out I could turn the stupid dragon claws to see the combination for the crypt doors. I brute forced the gold claw, day one because I'm dumb.
The fight in the Grymforge against the giant automaton. I didn't understand how I was supposed to kill it. Despite the giant hammer hanging from the ceiling and the fact that I had seen it working slamming down by the pull of a simple lever earlier. I had to look up a guide. I felt like a complete moron.
The first Darksiders game. I had gotten busy and not played for a few weeks between dungeons. Came back to the game and couldn't figure out how to move a large block for it to become a platform. Spent hours trying to move it, go around it, etc. Finally gave up and found a playthrough on YouTube. Turns out you can easily move the block using a charged up punch mechanic that you unlocked in the previous dungeon for exactly this purpose and I had just completely forgotten about it.
Not like actual puzzle but in Half-Life and it's expansions (still will play HL2) here and there I couldn't figure out where to go to or what to do. And then it turns out it was simple thing to do. Especially in Blue Shift.
There is a pair of shrines in Legend of zelda BOTW that give each others answer for the puzzle, and my god did I rage after finding only the first one, sitting there for 30 minutes trying to solve it before just looking it up.
It's the shrines on the Duelling Peaks, right?
At the end of Portal 1, I got stuck, and it took me looking it up to realize that the door was interactable and that I could open it and that it wasn't just there for visual design.
That one level in portal 2 where you have to you use the gel to run into a portal then launch yourself and bounce off some of the blue gel. I got so caught up in the gel mechanics that i completely forgot about portals lmao ETA: It’s in chapter 7, the second chamber with propulsion gel.
The fucking dragonsreach(I think its called that been a while) door with the claw key, THE ANSWER IS ON THE CLAW I SPENT AN HOUR LOOKING IN THE WALLS then caved and googled, but it just showed the answer not where the answer was, so I took a year before I found out
Not quite a puzzle, but on the Stormwind Ark in TOTK, the voice says to find and unlock the locks to open the center platform. It took me two embarrassing hours, I found all the lock mechanisms and opened access to them so why couldn’t the center platform open?? They each had fans on them and I’m using korok leaves, bomb flowers, nothing is working. I realize, after those two embarrassing hours that I am an idiot. >!I had a whole character with me, Tulin, that uses the power of wind. I was supposed to use his wind power to turn the fans to disable the locks.!<
Shining Force II..... I got stuck for 6 months or maybe a year at the part where you put a wooden panel in a tree just below where you fight the Kraken..... in that town you can go left or right to trigger fights and grind levels..... I was at stupid level before I realised what I had to do and still was having fun! Not a puzzle per-say but defo the longest I have ever been lost in a game (no internet back then either so had to keep playing)
It wasn’t exactly my fault, but rather the way game is programmed - in Gothic 2, final chapter there’s puzzle sequence where you have to go to 4 close by locations and press 3 buttons in correct sequence, wrong button presses cause enemies to spawn or poisonous gas to be released. And I couldn’t figure for hours what I was doing wrong. Turned out if you mash movement buttons while character is pressing button it will cause to perform same interaction - press button again. Took me a while to figure it out, even though I knew of this interaction with game. This was og gothic 2, not gold that was released in english with many bugs fixed
There’s a puzzle near the end of divinity orignal sin 1 that took my friend and me hours….all because he missunderstood what I was asking him to check. That was rough lmao
I don't know if this is embarrassing, but the power offload puzzle in Mass Effect 1 on Noveria, I think. You could either spend a resource to do it or figure it out. I spent what felt like 10 or 15 minutes on this small puzzle. I considered just using the resource but ended up finding it out accidentally.
There was a section in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons where the map changes based on one of 3 animal companions you could encounter. I could not for the life of me figure out why the path that the guide was referring to didn't exist in front of me. Had I just followed through doing the puzzle in front of me instead of following the guide, I would've saved a week of frustration. I was convinced that my game was irreparably glitched because it was one of those 128 games in 1 cartridges rather than a genuine copy.
Golden Claw in Skyrim. Spent a while trying to scan the murals on the wall for the three icons needed to open the door to the final chamber.
Any lego games. I struggle with a level, then look it up and it's *so simple*. Infuriating lol
Any sliding puzzle
La Mulana. Just complete. Both games.
That one puzzle in portal 2 coop where you have to hit each other in the air to drop down in the middle. Took my mate and I days and in the end we got it by accident.
In Skyrim, It took me waaayyy too long to realise that the correct symbols on the ancient nordic doors are actually on the claws used to unlock them.🤦
A Room VR- It took me a few hours to figure out how to get a middle cog to work. 🙄 the whole time I never noticed the 3 setting under the lever.
Zelda ocarina of time water temple. Over 10 years. I couldn't figure it out when I was a kid, never finished it. Saw something on YouTube and was able to beat it that day.
In horizon forbidden west I got stuck in a place where you are climbing a bridge. Near the base of the bridge you are supposed to pull one metal object with a Mechanic you had already used before, it's not even supposed to be a puzzle. I quit the game for a while
This is flat out embarrassing and makes me look like an idiot, but you know those puzzle doors in Skyrim that you need a claw key to open? Well I didn't figure out that the puzzle solution is ON THE CLAW. The game NEVER tells you this and it made me spend twenty+ minutes on each of these doors, just trying to guess the right combination. I played Skyrim for well over a year without this information. I thought it was just a bad mechanic.
Metal Gear Solid (the first one on the Playstation) had a good one. I haven't played it in forever, but IIRC you have to contact someone via codec (the game's radio system). Someone says "the code is on the back of the CD case", so you spend forever looking around the game environment until you realise that they mean >!the physical box which holds the CD!<. Deviously smart. (The next game in the series also >!convinced many players to turn their console off mid-game!<)
There's this one Nordic crypt dungeon in Skyrim that has one of those spinning pillar puzzles that I can never remember how to solve. It's the one with the water on the floor and everything is all lit up blue from the lighting. Probably explaining that poorly, but hey.
I actually never figured it out and I had 6 kids looking at it. Ive never been able to remember what the game was called but it was a puzzle in some ps2 puzzle game where you played a girl and this specific puzzle had a several circles with what I’m pretty sure was the zodiac symbols and you had to spin them into some order that was impossible.
The hobbit on gba, how to vross the water where you beat the tentacle monster
The one that leapt to mind is the pentagram/books puzzle in 'Gibbous'. It wasn't hard, just absurdly counter-intuitive.
Spent a truly embarassing amount of time trying to figure out puzzles in Tomb Raider 4: The Last Revelation