What are your favorite/most hated Adventure Game Puzzles

[IM NOT TEH SPAM]

My favorite adventure game puzzle was in Quest for Glory 1, when you had to knock over the candelabra, swing on the chandelier and slam the door shut when the bandits brigands came.  It required percise timing, nimble fingers, and it was one of the few things the hero did without looking like a moron or falling on his head. :

[Paper Carnival]

The worst puzzle ever is in The Serpent's Shadow or whatever it's called. A bit before the end when the cannibals are coming and you have the bow. You're supposed to shoot the guy on the right, but (a bug?) you shoot him again and again and it won't work. I've mailed walkthrough authors and they don't know how to solve it either, one of them accidently did it once but doesn't know how (so did I, after all those times I tried). I also did it once after a lot of trying, but I wasn't doing anything different than before.

[magintz]

My favorite adventure game puzzle was in Quest for Glory 1, when you had to knock over the candelabra, swing on the chandelier and slam the door shut when the bandits brigands came.  It required percise timing, nimble fingers, and it was one of the few things the hero did without looking like a moron or falling on his head. :

I've never been a fan of adventure games requiring timing, or nimble fingers. Mainly for the fact, I like my adventure games to be very laid back and play through at my own pace working thing's out as I go along. I do admit I do like the occasional action scene, and I do like them even more when it is puzzle oriented, but I can't say that I'd make any of them my favourites, perhaps my least favourite maybe.

Things like the new Yahtzee game where you have to be real quick on the dance machine to progress, I hated. I managed to do Easy and Medium, but Hard mode was just a joke. This would not allow me to progress without having a fast enough reaction time (although this was only a side-quest). I can't think of any puzzle in particular that I did not find satisfying in some way, but I always found some of the ones in Kings Quest to be very nice, such as using the red cloth with the Minatour to destroy the wall etc...

Any puzzle that has walking deads I HATE!!!!! More than anything and it is because of this I strayed away from playing any other Kings Quest (I've only played 1 and 5). Not only that is excessive death scene's like in Leisure Suit Larry really put me off, where even the slightest mistake would kill you, rather than a more logical conclusion.

I've rambled on about puzzle's and puzzle types I dislike, but haven't really mentioned ones I do like. I've always been a fan of the Monkey Island spit contest (don't consider me a hypocrit because I said I don't like precise timing and nimble fingers), but all you had to do was to spit at the right time, and if you failed... no death, no imprisonment and best of all you could re-try. Also I very much liked how the end puzzle worked out in Monkey Island 2 (making the voodoo doll). This was nicely done and took you back to the first real puzzle and had to remember how to make a voodoo doll, and gather items close enough to make the mix work.

I'll leave you all now as I'm rushing out the door.

[Corey]

My most favorit puzzle is if you have to search something and you have to talk to many people to collect clue of where the object could be.

my most hated puzzle is a puzzle that is totally not logic, like you have to catch flys with a fork (or something like that) 

[IM NOT TEH SPAM]

My least favorite puzzle is one of those things where the answer to your problem is staring at you in the face, yet the only thing you can do is click in random spots and hope you land on the right thing eventually.  There really is no thinking or anything involved aside from dumb luck.

[Dambuilder]

One of the worst "puzzles" (if you can call it one) must be the one in LSL2, involving a boat and a spinach dip. It was useless, senseless and could get you killed. But if you don't do it, you'll be missing some 30 points or so. WTF!?

As for the best, getting the navigator's head in MI was pretty brilliant. I rarely encountered such a well thought wordplay in an adventure.

[Floskfinger]

Best puzzle: in "amozon qeen" when you make the monkey disapear by telling him that he doesen't exist. It really made me laugh

Whorst puzzle: "Nine men's morris" game in "conquest of the longbow". It's not really the whorst puzzle, but at least the most enoying!

I quoted my own post becouse I changed my mind. The whorst puzzle is not "Nine men's morris", it the "Getting Across the Ice" puzzle in conquest of Camelot. It's a shame because I'd love the game otherwise but I can't get across that damn ice!

[Wellington]

Floskfinger: There are two items that can show you the way across the ice with relative ease. One requires that you have the Liber Ex Doctrina that came in the game box (copy protection), and that you listened to somebody carefully earlier, and put two and two together. The other requires that you visit Glastonbury Tor before the ice scene.

Worst puzzle:

Hands down, it's the gems and the bowls in The Legend of Kyrandia. There is no logic at all. None. None. Half of the puzzle is RANDOMIZED, for crying out loud, which basically proves that the designers were going out of their way to make me suffer for no good reason. Just horrible trial and error. And you have to collect objects with an inventory limit, and traipse back and forth over the game map, and use save-and-restore if you want to solve it without wasting hours of your life, and there's no obvious REASON to be doing any of this except that you CAN, and... argh.

I've seen puzzles that have frustrated me, have made me say "What on earth were the designers smoking?", and have wasted my time. But this was the worst. That game was a waste of thirty dollars.

Best puzzle:

Trinity is a brilliant text adventure with a few truly unfair and nasty puzzles, and a few really incredible ones. The Klein bottle puzzle falls into the second category. You walk through this strange topological space, and then the entire game map is mirror-reversed. Or are you mirror-reversed? In any case, the result is the same, and you need to exploit it to solve that puzzle and set up ANOTHER really cool puzzle involving a strange sundial...

[RocketGirl]

My least favorite kinds of puzzles: Mazes or big empty areas.

Think of the desert in King's Quest 5, where not only is it a big empty wasteland, but unless you can find the oasis, you DIE of dehydration after walkign a few screens, but it's absolutely vital that you traverse several locations in this desert. GRAAAGH! I hate that.
Legend of Kyrandia 1 did the same thing, sort of, with these fire berries or something that could light up caverns but which burned out after you walked a few screens, though they somehow stayed lit if you dropped them... So you spend HOURS trying to put a fireberry in every cavern just so you can walk around without getting eaten...
That's not fun, that's frustrating busy-work!

And then there's that stupid in-the-dark ladder-and-cavern maze in SpaceQuest 2...

Or the labyrinth in King's Quest 6.

Or--and this is going back a ways--the maze of little twisty passages, all alike, in Adventure and Zork and all those others.

See, okay, I could enjoy a maze if it wasn't simply the same room over and over with no distinguishing features to help figure out whereintheheck you ARE, but geez!

In fact, I guess ANY puzzle that's there just to artificially make a game longer without actually adding more content bugs the holy drek out of me. Like the slot machine in Space Quest 1 (the original; in the VGA version you could bypass it with a widget). One can spend endless HOURS trying to get past something like that without ever encountering another puzzle of any kind. I really hate that.

[ManicMatt]

It's a shame that the annoying puzzles stick in my mind, but..

in Broken Sword 3, i was stuck for ages on the bottle wine puzzle in a cellar. The bottles would make a different noise every time you pulled one out, so I spent ages writing down different combinations to get the same sound for each bottle pulled. It drove me mad because there didn't seem to be a combination. And there wasn't. It was just revolution's attention to detail, by having different bottle pulling sound effects. (and yes, I had to use a walkthrough there)

Using the skin on the manhole in monkey island 4. never occured to me until i tried every item on every object in the level!


"Simon the Sorcerer 2: 'Wear dog' "

Oh right. I just got that game recently! You've probably spared me from a frustrating puzzle, right?

[gameboy]

My least favourite was in Indy 4': FoA, (in one of the paths) where you had to find the stone (don't wemember wich stone) from the streets of Monte Carlo. You had to remember twoFrench street names, in the corner of these streets was the stone.

And my favourite was in InCreator's Henri 3, where you had to give dog some beer, connect his chain with the car, then talk to the guys in the jail, make them really angry, then go to the police-office room, the guys will get the cop's attention, you can take the car key, and then rescue the guys!

[GarageGothic]

In Broken Sword 3, i was stuck for ages on the bottle wine puzzle in a cellar. The bottles would make a different noise every time you pulled one out, so I spent ages writing down different combinations to get the same sound for each bottle pulled. It drove me mad because there didn't seem to be a combination. And there wasn't. It was just revolution's attention to detail, by having different bottle pulling sound effects. (and yes, I had to use a walkthrough there)

Spoiler

Actually there's a much easier solution, which took me about two minutes to figure out. The wine bottles come from different countries, and you just pull them in the order of the countries that the templars came through or something (I believe it's entered in the diary/log thing). I think what gives it away is that there's a bottle of Israeli wine, which doesn't seem like the obvious thing to have in an old French wine cellar.

[close]

Edit:

yeah I know from seeing the walkthrough, I was just trying not to ruin the puzzle for others, it being not as old as most of the games we talk about!

I misread this: "It drove me mad because there didn't seem to be a combination. And there wasn't." As meaning that there wasn't a proper solution to the puzzle. I realize now that you meant there wasn't a pattern to the sounds.

[ManicMatt]

yeah I know from seeing the walkthrough, I was just trying not to ruin the puzzle for others, it being not as old as most of the games we talk about!

I'm sure if I hadn't concentrated on different bottle sound effects I would have sussed it out. I guess I did that because of the many games before where you have to get a combination right.

[RocketGirl]

My least favourite was in Indy 4': FoA, (in one of the paths) where you had to find the stone (don't wemember wich stone) from the streets of Monte Carlo. You had to remember twoFrench street names, in the corner of these streets was the stone.

See, if we're talking Fate of Atlantis, my least favorite was fumbling about in the dark trying to find/remember various hotspots trying to get a generator working to turn on the lights. The only thing that saved this from being a game-breaker was the LucasArts system that displayed the name of the hotspot your mouse was over, so at least you weren't just clicking on a black screen.

Still obnoxious, tho.

[Dan2552]

My least favourite was in Indy 4': FoA, (in one of the paths) where you had to find the stone (don't wemember wich stone) from the streets of Monte Carlo. You had to remember twoFrench street names, in the corner of these streets was the stone.

See, if we're talking Fate of Atlantis, my least favorite was fumbling about in the dark trying to find/remember various hotspots trying to get a generator working to turn on the lights. The only thing that saved this from being a game-breaker was the LucasArts system that displayed the name of the hotspot your mouse was over, so at least you weren't just clicking on a black screen.

Still obnoxious, tho.

that room wasnt pitch black! i could see the generator quite clearly. just turn your brightness up next time you play 

[Nikolas]

Sorry Dan, but it was almost pitch black and the creators intended it to be like that. If you have to change the brightness of the monitor everytime you change rooms in a game, well that sucks...

But anyway I like Indy4 a lot! Nice game, logical puzzles, Sophia and her animation while waiting (with that hair...)

[Mugs]

My most hated Adventure Game puzzle of all time is:

:-XÃ,  The first puzzle in Space Quest 4, where you need to take the batteries from the bunny.Ã,  First of all, I couldn't even get the bunny with the rope without that stupid thing killing me.Ã,  Second, there was a bug. Everytime I would go to the top screen, I couldn't go back.Ã,  Ã, If IÃ, tried, I would see the screen fading and bringing me back to the top screen.

My fravorite puzzle:

8)Ã,  Any other puzzle.Ã,  Ã, 

[Revan]

Broken Sword 3, near the end you have to pull out coloured wine bottles in a certain order for a door to open. Me and a friend where playing it (refuse to use any type of guides by the way) and in the end I ended up writing down every posibble order that the bottles could go in (ennded up being about 500) and we started.... guess what, it was the second to last one possible!!!! damn puzzles that doesnt make sence to me... (Still don't know how your ment to know what to do unless you try every one!)

[Uku]

The most hated puzzle is MI2 monkey wrench.-i tried monkey on these pipes -nothing, and i rode walktrough over and over and tried and tried and finaly after like 3 days i figured it out?(WTF?!)

and the most favourite puzzle?
FoA-finding moonstone in arheologist site probably(and desert action, with generator and car was such a pixel hunt )also that (still unfinished)how doi go away from shop without paying for sword in MI1?

[Snarky]

Sorry Dan, but it was almost pitch black and the creators intended it to be like that. If you have to change the brightness of the monitor everytime you change rooms in a game, well that sucks...

Actually, that puzzle had a really nice system where the room started out almost pitch black, but slowly got brighter and brighter. This meant that for people who couldn't solve it straight away, the game made it easier and easier. Also, it was realistic, see, because Indy's eyes were adjusting to the dark.