Worst. Puzzle. Ever.

[TheJBurger]

I say, some of the worst puzzles ever were--

1) Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, both of the Nazi mazes. I died SO MUCH during them. The one in Castle Brunwald was nothing compared to the second one but they both made me want to rip my hair out!

2) Night of the Hermit, whole game. I'm not dissing the game, don't get the wrong message, because it just looks so cool-- but it's just that nearly all the puzzles really made no sense and left me clueless. I like a challenge and difficult games but it truly was a bit much-- the endless combination of inventory items and not knowing what to do with them, what was expected and unexpected...never really got anywhere in the game as a result

I actually liked Night of the Hermit. I agree that there were some puzzles that made hardly any sense, but for the most part I thought it was straight-forward.

About the mazes in Last crusade, I wouldn't really consider Castle Brunwald a maze, more like a ... "Interactive Dungeon."  The 2nd maze (The blimp right?) I didn't have too much trouble on, so I didn't hate it at all.

Speaking of KQ5... I really hated how there were so many wrong things you could do with each item, that would (I think) get you stuck. You could trade away your gold items to random people, even though you needed them for other purposes.

[FamousAdventurer77]

No, I'm not saying Night of the Hermit is a bad game at all-- I just think I'd like it better if some of the puzzles were just a TAD more straightforward. I couldn't really get much farther than just gathering a huge amount of inventory items then having no idea what to do with them all. It just really tore my brain up trying to figure out what to do with everything! I kinda gave up on that game as a result.

Yep, I remember like you could give the eagle the pie and then you'd have nothing to defend yourself against the yeti. Or, could end up eating the pie and/or the entire leg of lamb.
I think most early Sierra games had this though-- like in QFG1, if you drank the Dispel Potion you were totally screwed because you could find all the other ingredients all over again except for the magic acorn.

Still, that thing with the cheese really just didn't make sense...

[Radiant]

If you think that's bad, in the original version of KQ1 you could drop any and all of your items, thus losing them irretrievably - and that included the Three Treasures. It's kind of funny that you can drop the treasures just before meeting King Edward again, thus ending up there empty handed. Since this also causes you to lose the points you got for finding the items, I spent some time completing KQ1 with the lowest possible score, which IIRC was about 40 points.

[thomasregin]

I wonder why no one has mentioned the amazingly annoying last "monkey-attack" puzzle in MI IV.

Once you figured it out (after 10 hours of constantly getting it wrong) you had to draw a huge coordinate system that you could only use once (because the puzzle changed for every new game).

Syberia had a few very illogical puzzles as well. It's been a while, but I remember getting very stuck at some horse-caroussel in a bar somewhere. Had to cheat big time to get through that one. Something that I usually not do!

/tom..

[big brother]

The monkey attack system took you 10 hours to get through? I guess it could be slightly more difficult if you've never played rock-paper-scissors before. But still, I think it took me less time to beat the whole game.

[thomasregin]

The monkey attack system took you 10 hours to get through? I guess it could be slightly more difficult if you've never played rock-paper-scissors before. But still, I think it took me less time to beat the whole game.

Well.. What can I say? It was extremely easy once you figured out how to do it. I don't know if it took 10 hours, but it sure felt like it! But there's no way that this could be done without writing it down in a system unless you got a photographic memory!

/tom..

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

But there's no way that this could be done without writing it down in a system unless you got a photographic memory!

Put like that it reads like a fault. Well, while it's certainly not to everyone's taste and appeal (I certainly don't really care for them), several adventure games have this *characteristic* - you have to take notes, or you have to write stuff down, or you have to draw diagrams. Myst and Riven and etc are naturally champions at this stuff, and many games have nothing of the sort. It's just the way they are.

Unless you're criticizing the whole Monkey Kombat. It IS true that the original insult swordfight (quite a masterpiece, puzzle-wise) didn't rely on writing anything down, all you needed were your wits and an ability to cross-reference sentences.

[thomasregin]

But there's no way that this could be done without writing it down in a system unless you got a photographic memory!

Put like that it reads like a fault. Well, while it's certainly not to everyone's taste and appeal (I certainly don't really care for them), several adventure games have this *characteristic* - you have to take notes, or you have to write stuff down, or you have to draw diagrams. Myst and Riven and etc are naturally champions at this stuff, and many games have nothing of the sort. It's just the way they are.

Unless you're criticizing the whole Monkey Kombat. It IS true that the original insult swordfight (quite a masterpiece, puzzle-wise) didn't rely on writing anything down, all you needed were your wits and an ability to cross-reference sentences.

I know exactly how adventure games work. I guess I played my first ones long before you were even born back on the Commodore 16, Vic20 and C64 where everything was text-based. No graphics at all. "Go west" "You have encountered a bit troll. What would you like to do?"

And I'm not at all arguing against writing anything down. I'm bashing the Monkey Kombat-concept because I found it very frustrating and illogic compared to the previous insult swordfights! It had no place in that game. Up until the Monkey Kombat everything had been pretty straight forward and then you are presented with something that makes absolutely no sense unless you spend a long, long time writing everything down.

In the "old days" you often had to write down phonenumbers, passwords and even family trees etc., but having to write down an entire coordinate system with "Uuh aah aah" and so on made little sense to me at the time!

If people found this puzzle easy and a nice feature of MI IV, then by all means I'm happy for them! I just found it very annoying!

/tom.

[ManicMatt]

I was stuck on the monkey kombat for ages, thinking I'd finally got it sussed before getting beaten again. I think I had to look up a guide for that one.

I think Monkey Kombat was really out of place in the world of monkey island. Except that slightly annoying safe puzzle in the first one. I hate "chore" puzzles, where it feels like work and not fun.

When in a game I come across a numbered password, I like it much more when the main character remembers it for me, so I'm not rushing back to the keypad saying out loud to myself: "6389375" over and over again when there isn't any pens or paper around.

(Thomas just posted before I did)

[F1ak3r]

The "where to sail to" puzzle in Indiana Jones and The Fate Of Atlantis. It's a bit foggy in my mind, but you had to try something like 12 different combinations of directions and distances, completely at random and go through the same long sequence every time before you got to the right place.

And after you eventually got it, you weren't able to use the same solution again if you replayed the game. Uurgh...

And the nightstick in Police Quest 1 (the original, EGA version). How was I supposed to know it was in the car the whole time?

[Babar]

If I remember correctly, the directions were given in the Plato book. You just had to subtract 10 or something...

[F1ak3r]

=X Never mind...

[Eggie]

There are a lot of puzzles in Grim Fandango like the vault door and the tree pump which I don't understand. I got the solutions from friends and walkthroughs but I don't know WHY the solutions worked.

Personally though, my least favourite puzzle is how you get past the domino-rigged bomb to get to the bone wagon. It requires doing the completely unrelated action of giving a bottle of stuff to Glottis which then makes him run off and drink a whole barrel before running back to the same position he was before and then vomiting in the exact direction you needed creating handy walkable vomit.

How did Manny know this sequence of events would occur? Is he magic?

[Trihan]

I remember being quite infuriated by the Human Show puzzle in Day of the Tentacle. Every time I thought I'd finally beaten it I found another thing I had to do to the goddamn mummy.

[Trent R]

I rather liked the Human Show (and that entire game). The Show was judged by 3 categories (I believe), plus you had to get rid of the tutu-wearing douche.

~Trent

[DeviantGent]

Opening puzzle in Phantasmagoria 2 - A Puzzle of Flesh.

Problem - Wallet is stuck behind the sofa.

Obvious solution - you move the sofa, get the wallet, celebrate with hookers and blow.

Right?

WRONG BITCH.

You see, the character speaks to his pet rat, and through dialogue implies the rat somehow got out of his cage, stole his wallet, and hid it beneath the sofa for lulz. So, you pick up the rat and send him beneath the sofa.

And if THAT isn't a leap of logic too far, the little sod stays UNDER the sofa. So now what? Well, you tempt him out of course. With a handy food bar. And somehow he's able to dash out, having smelt this bar, and presumably DRAGGED your wallet with him, which you can now retrieve.

If this was a LucasArts game, then I would be more forgiving. After all, in their worlds, monkeys make acceptable wrenches and dogs can be bundled into ones jacket. But no. This is an INTERACTIVE FMV ADVENTURE from Sierra, and as such the typical laws of rational logic should apply.

The puzzle serves no purpose, is in no way satisfying to solve, and doesn't even make a lick of sense. It's an arbitrary time lengthener, nothing more.

And it makes me RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

[Radiant]

Another worst puzzle. The friggin' desert maze in KQ5.... argh!

[Dataflashsabot]

broken sword 3. oh lord. ok first really boring pressure pads and symbols stuff, really crappy but got through it. but now, right after that, theres this incredibly complicated pile of levers and orbs and mirrors and i just couldent stand it any more. closed it down and havent played it again to this day. shame as it was pretty good up till then.

[Trihan]

Trent: Oh, don't get me wrong, I absolutely adored the puzzle (I can't think of a single puzzle in DotT I didn't like), but it infuriated me no end when I kept realising there was still -one more thing- to do before I beat category X, though.

[Stupot]

Right at the and of Broken Sword 4, George is walking along, and the floor randomly gives way underneath him.  You then have to tell Anna-Maria to pull some levers in a certain order to bring the floor back up as if nothing had happened.  It's all completely pointless as well as being the easiest puzzle in the entire game.  Why chuck it there randomly right at the end?  It would have been better as a kind of training puzzle at the beginning.  Or better still, they shouldn't have bothered with it at all.