Worst. Puzzle. Ever.

[Colxfile]

That wall bit in Neverhood actually made me turn of the game. I haven't been back since.

Mmm. But then I remember the cutscene with the music box and I'm inclined to forgive. 

[EagerMind]

I guess these aren't very original examples, but:

The mazes in Zak McKraken. A great game otherwise, but come on ... what was it, 3 of them?

Also, in The Last Crusade, you had to find like two or three books in the library. Basically a pixel hunt on acid x3.

[Buckethead]

I dunno if this counts but in Tomb Raider 1 some where in the middle of the game there is a button puzzle. It has 6 different combination that you have to get right and you can't know if you did it right. And now clues what so ever.

[Janik]

The mazes in Zak McKraken. A great game otherwise, but come on ... what was it, 3 of them?

Come to think of it, the Neverhood had a couple of mazes too - they weren't very complex, but they were needlessly long.

Sometimes it seems that game designers want increase the length of the game without increasing the content - not a good thing! Even Half-Life 2, amazing though it is, had that really long bit with the fanboat.

[Phemar]

What, for just that instance? Make a whole new inventory that'd get in the way of the player for a single instance?

This is what we did in 'The Netherworld":



To use an item you just select it and use it on the head symbol.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

It's better than an inventory item, sure.

[Akatosh]

It's not true, that you have walk over pixel-perfectly.

Not? I was pretty sure you had to because I remember failing it once or twice... but then again, that was even before my CounterStrike-phase, so you can probably imagine I wasn't too old back then...

But nice to see I wasn't the only one who fell for this f ing bad adventure!

[EagerMind]

Anyone besides me ever play a game called Dream Zone? I remember a really, really annoying puzzle where you walk around in an office building full of pigs, collecting one form after another in order to get some final form that you know you need. Well, the last pig randomly decides he won't give you the last form, so after all that work, you end up just plugging him and grabbing the form anyway. Yuck.

As an aside, I played this game on an Amiga, and it's just amazing to compare the Amiga screenshot of your room (which you can see at Underdogs) with the DOS screenshot (which you can see at Moby).

[FamousAdventurer77]

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

3) That whole "Avvooozzlll" bug in Quest For Glory IV! Argh! Oh yeah, it's also really fun having to run it in both VDMS and DosBox and quitting out and starting up in them respectively to run certain puzzles because the processor speed warps it so badly that certain puzzles didn't work (I never played the whole game through because of this), or like when fighting the Wraiths, it'd drain my health in VDMS to 0 in half a second but ran fine in DosBox. But the processor speeds definitely screw up the whole "Avoozl" thing when you have to enter it in the pillar.
I wish I could just play it ALL through continuosly and get all the different endings!!

4) The Sequel Police in Space Quest IV, in the mall after you fry the Astro Chicken machine. I preciously covet that saved game of when I finally them beat them to the punch, because otherwise I only beat them maybe 3 times of the 240982490 times that I played SQ4.

I know this is slightly off-topic but just the perfect place to vent: Reading over this made me realize how much I really truly miss the games of yesteryear. And so glad that I found the AGS community who pretty much feels the same way. I mean, do modern gaming executives even THINK of things like storylines and memorable characters, or in this case, excruciating puzzles?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

1) I agree that the first puzzle could have used some sort of, maybe, visual hints that'd alow you to understand what kind of approach would work with any given soldier, but it wasn't that bad, and the second one - though indeed a pain to navigate - was entirely optional.

3) You do know there are patches out there that'll fix it? No fair talking that way about the puzzle itself when the problem is that technology has moved on. I mean, the gym puzzle in LSL3 is nice. Having to exercise 1000+ times on each machine is not, but that's a new-tech problem that patches can fix anyway.

[Radiant]

3) That whole "Avvooozzlll" bug in Quest For Glory IV! Argh! Oh yeah, it's also really fun

That's not a bad puzzle, that's just sloppy QA.

[FamousAdventurer77]

Last Few Posters: I tried looking for a few patches, the only working one I found was the Katrina note patch (which I never had trouble with)...mine always crashed with the Chernozy (sp?)wizards when running VDMS (75% success rate using DosBox), the infamous Avoozl bug, the fairies, and quite a few other points. I tried tweaking the living crap out of both VDMS and DosBox but to no avail.

But I agree, its more or less just poor QA rather than an impassable puzzle. Otherwise, the puzzles (at least from the point I was able to play up to) were of typical QFG caliber...some serious, some funny, the only other technical thing was that it took me a while before I realized you had to use the Talk icon on yourself, not the other characters, to get certain dialogue options.

But as for non-technical difficulties that make players' brains tear up:

Still though, the Last Crusade Nazi mazes always tore my brain up.

Come to think of it, that part in Gobliins 2 where you had to make Fingus and Winkle work together in Vivalzart's hut to get the Vulture's meat was really tough-- you had to get the timing *just right* and if you missed by 0.5 a second you had to keep doing it over again. That one was really frustrating!

And...I haven't met/talked to a single a soul who's heard of this game: Curse of Dragor, an adventure-based old-school RPG type of game I had in the Mac days of my childhood (I don't think it was ever made for DOS. But I could be wrong. I quit using Macs upon the advent of OS X.)
I found my old copy and played it on my dad's OS X machine finding that it ran perfect so I wanted to see if I could solve what I couldn't figure out 12 years ago. Turns out...I could only get to a certain point simply because there was impassable puzzles of unlocking the doors and then finding one key that didn't unlock ANYTHING. The nice puzzles in CoD were mapping the area and then piecing the diary entries together, but just when you thought that finding the one secret area would help...nope!

I will be impressed if anyone's ever heard of/played CoD, and triply impressed if they know how to get past any of the doors or tell me if I did indeed miss something. Otherwise the game probably still ends on the first floor.

[blueskirt]

I kinda agree for TLC's second maze. The maze wasn't really complicated, nor the fights insanely difficult, but it had too much fights, making it difficult to concentrate on the maze when you were constantly interupted by countless fights. Plus, not being able to save at any point during the maze didn't really help. But the Castle Brunwald is in my opinion one of the coolest thing ever implemented in an adventure game but I recognize it had flaws. For one, you were not told anywhere that guards would become more suspicious and alerted as the body count increased, leaving you to wonder how they could smell you in a mile radius.

For two, fooling the guards was fun and interesting but tedious, you had absolutly no hints for the conversations that could have removed 1 or 2 dialogue trees. It's roughly 27 possibilities for a single disguise for a single guard if you exclude bribing a guard. And if that wasn't enough, 2 guards couldn't be fooled unless if you collected informations from 3 previous guards, informations which would no longer be available if you fooled the guards in a different way or if they were gone to neverland. So, that's 2 guards which would most likely make you waste your time and alert everyone if you had already knocked 2 guards. And it was impossible to immediatly restore in case of failure, everytime you'd have to knock the guard and go to the nearest room, or voluntary die to access the save/load menu.

The first time I passed thru that part, I remember feeling as baddass as someone who finished an old adventure game back when there had no internet for hints or walkthru and when walking deads were waiting for you at every street corners. It was cool, fun, new and interesting but tedious and badly executed. If it could be well executed, I'd love to see this in more adventure games.

As for the Sequel Police in SQ4, that was a timer issue that only happen when your computer is too fast, it wasn't a badly designed puzzle, just a badly coded one.

If I had to add puzzles to that list, I'd say the ending puzzles of Mystery of the Druids, basically you had 8 stone slabs that needed to be placed in a precise order, but you were only given 2 vague hints and it wasn't your average padlock puzzle where it's easily possible try every possibility. Instead they decided it would be ways better off if every stone slabs needed to be placed in differents rooms. Bad. And if there's one thing that's more annoying than this it's having to look in a walkthru to solve the final puzzle of a game. The best way to spoil the experience and make you feel cheap. Really bad.

Next I'd add dealing with Herman Toothrot in Escape from Monkey Island.

And the cookie recipe puzzle of Still Life. It was an original way to integrate a padlock puzzle (If I can call it like that) and would have been fun if it wasn't for the fact there had no hints anywhere and the only way to solve the puzzle was to ask grandma for her cookie recipe and hope the recipe is similar (good luck) or check a walkthru, which is usually the best way to determine if a puzzle sucks.

[LimpingFish]

Yeah, the cookie thing in Still Life is pretty bad, but the cocktail mixing one from Syberia is even worse.

And they're both basically the same puzzle!>

[rodekill]

I'd say any puzzle involving math of some sort.

[Gilbert]

But math. puzzles are at least better than "DON'T PRESS THE RED BUTTON!1!" ones.

[MashPotato]

And the cookie recipe puzzle of Still Life. It was an original way to integrate a padlock puzzle (If I can call it like that) and would have been fun if it wasn't for the fact there had no hints anywhere and the only way to solve the puzzle was to ask grandma for her cookie recipe and hope the recipe is similar (good luck)

I wonder if I found that puzzle (as silly as it was) straightforward because I'm a girl .  I bake a mean chocolate-chip cookie...

Anyway, in King's Quest 7 there is a time when you have to sneak into a witch's house, and if you didn't do it at the right time, her dog would catch you.  Now, the theory was that you wait for the dog to stop barking before you try to enter (indicating that the dog wasn't around), but this wasn't the case... it seemed entirely random whether the dog was there or not.  Each time I wanted to go into the house, it took me at least 10 deaths before getting in.  I'm not sure if that's considered a bad puzzle, or just bad design.

[Dmitri]

Kings Quest 1: Guessing that stupid dwarf guy's name, when I read the solution I thought, "Who the hell thought that one up?" (It's Rumplestiltskin spelled in a reverse alphabet or something)

[Janik]

Kings Quest 1: Guessing that stupid dwarf guy's name, when I read the solution I thought, "Who the hell thought that one up?" (It's Rumplestiltskin spelled in a reverse alphabet or something)

Yeah that was insane! I think they saw that it was too hard, since in the remake Rumplestiltskin backwards would also work.

[FamousAdventurer77]

On the note King's Quest puzzles...I was a wee lass when I played KQ5. I felt real proud of myself when I made it Mordack's Castle and inside without getting caught and dying too much. But the one I just really didn't get was what to do with the wand machine: like, there were no clues about getting the cheese then putting the cheese in the machine. Or any leads...it wasn't as if you overhead the bandits saying things like "I hear Mordack's lab equipment is lactose intolerant" or something. Oh yeah, and it was a few times before I noticed then remembered to even get the fish hook from Harpy Island to get the aforementioned cheese.

Still, it's one of my favorite childhood games nevertheless. The cheese thing just kinda throws you off though, a fairly off color puzzle. 15 years later I still think so.