What are your favorite/most hated Adventure Game Puzzles

[Play_Pretend]

Most Hated:  I just played Neverhood again, and don't know if anyone else already said this one.  But I HATE that freaking 38-screen-long walk back and forth down the Hall of Records.  How pointless is that?  And that puzzle where you have to enter 12 symbols and replace the "wonky" sounding one, but you can't just change them, you have to wait for them to cycle through.  Urrrrrgh!

[Jared]

Even though the game is unpopular as hell, I loved a lot of the puzzles in Simon the Sorcerer 3D. The pizza puzzle, in particular, has a fond place in my memory.

My least favourite are in Discworld (good to see Cunny brought it up) and specifically... something (can't remember what) has fallen of the Disc and is juuust out of reach. How do you get it? Well, obviously you'll need a broom (?) and apparently the ONLY broom on the entire PLANET (because you travel across the whole world map in this game..) is one you swapped for a wizard's staff three acts ago. So you need a snake (??) which you get from inside an egg (), to feed compost (which makes it grow long) and starch (which makes it go stiff) to swap for the broom.

This is the only game in which I have felt no guilt at all in using a walkthrough.

[Alarconte]

Neverhood oh, one of the freakist adventures game I totaly in love!

Yes, the hundred-thousand hall of history hallway is really Kicking, as well the story wrote on the walls are very good to make in the story, very interesting yeah. (but obiously, i din't read whole xD)


I HATE the cretians laberynths in Indiana Jones and the Fate of atlantis (I fell i never do the action way-laberynth withouth a walktrougth.

The cretian laberynth in adventure way made me left the game a lot of months xD

And was claustrophovic xD

I LOVE Kiz Urazgubi puzzle to kill the assasinatrix, in Space Quest V. This game was epic for me ^^

[Iliya]

Favorite:
Tunguska: the puzzle with the cat, pizza, salt and cellphone
Tunguska: slowing down the music tempo puzzle
SQ1: Spiderdroid killing: when you enter the Orat cave and then go and climb on the rocks. Then Orat and spider droid are killing each-other
SQ1: Sector HH
SQ1: use glass on barrier
Syberia: Mammoth drawing for the kid
Larry 1: When you get the pills from the window
SQ2: When you push the tree to make a bridge
Dark Earth: Playing Yonk game/othello with the old man

[Anteater]

Favorite Puzzles:
Killing the evil android in BASS.
Destroying Morkus Rex in Lost Eden. I know it was a very simple puzzle, but it was just so funny seeing him turn into a mouse.
Least Favorites:
Anything from Schizm. Seriously, almost none of the puzzles made sense, even after reading a walkthrough. Every time you finish some stupid puzzle or break some stupid code (especially the prayer grinder one), you get rewarded by being forced to solve another one! Why? Who knows? The story makes no freaking sense!

[Lady_Seph]

Favourite/best puzzle ever- the serpent rouge- Gabriel Knight 3.

The worst and (or) most dazzlingly stupid puzzle in any adventure game ever has to be Still Life "baking cookies" puzzle. Ask yourself...what would you do if you were tasked with tracking down serial killer? That's right...you'd stop investigating, run to the kitchen and bake some gingerbread.


I can't even begin to explain how pointless and stupid that game is. :

S
x

[ambientcoffeecup]

I honestly think the first two Broken Sword games tick all the boxes for what makes awesome puzzles. From start to finish. Also the worst "puzzle ever" was the general Library/Sewers area at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I never even made it past that area, even with a walkthrough.

[olafmoriarty]

Maze puzzles can be good as long as there is a hint to how one solves it and the hint is somewhat intelligent done. I remember a maze I found in a MUD a few years back, where every room was identical and there was no way of figuring out where in the maze you were, and you couldn't even map it, as it was inside a cave and dropping a coin to recognize the room later (a common mapping technique in MUDs) made the coin roll away and get lost. Oh, and it was three-dimensional, so you didn't have FOUR directions to choose from at any time, but SIX. Trial and error made no reason whatsoever.

I finally found the correct hint in the room outside the maze: A postcard written by the maze creator, signed "SEND NEWS". I think I read the card five times before the message struck me... South, East, North, Down, North, East, West, South. Brilliant. Probably my favorite maze.

Not sure if I remember any clear favorite puzzles or most hated puzzles right now, but one example of a puzzle genre I really hate from the bottom of my liver is puzzles that requires knowledge of outside information (pop culture), and especially if they at the same time are somewhat hard to recognize and require you to think in the exact same way as the game creator. I can't remember any good examples from adventure games, so I'll use an example from a MUD here as well... I tried to get somewhere, and a strong black knight was blocking the way and of course wouldn't let me pass. And he's very violent, so it seems the only way to get past him is to kill him, but he's extremely tough, and I have no idea how to beat him. In the normal way it seems near-impossible, and there's not really any clues around here telling me if this guy has some special weakness either. If I had paid close attention I may have noticed that his lines had a some kind of montypythonesque ring to them, but for some reason I didn't. However, turned out the only way to beat this guy was to go back to the village and buy an axe (there couldn't be an axe available nearby, that would have been way to easy, of course), come back and chop all the knight's arms and legs off until he stopped fighting. And the only way to know this was to recognize the character from Monty Python's Holy Grail, there was no clues whatsoever that this was the way to kill him.

Ooh, and I also get annoyed when there's a code or riddle you have to solve, and you manage to solve it off-screen but can't move on in the game because you can't inform the game you have found the solution. There's an example of this near the end of "Hotel Dusk: Room 215":

Spoiler

You are trapped in an airtight room and must find a way out. Or, not really, as there IS no way out, you have to wait for a friend to open the door from the outside, but he won't do that before you have cracked a completely unrelated code hidden somewhere in the room (don't you just love it when what you have to do to move on is the exact opposite of what your life actually depends on? I don't). Anyhow, I found the code, figured it had to be a code, and assumed I had to solve it. I recognized it as a possible Caesar sipher, and through a lucky guess (guessing that a two letter word was "is") I solved the code. But, of course, the game didn't know I had, and there was no way to tell it, so my character hadn't solved the code yet. So in order to proceed with the game I had to repair a defect code solving machine, figure out how to use it, and let the machine solve the code for me!

[close]

I love the game, but that puzzle almost made me tear my hair out. It's great that the machine is there, but why not make a way around it for those of us who don't NEED it?

[nihilyst]

I love the game, but that puzzle almost made me tear my hair out. It's great that the machine is there, but why not make a way around it for those of us who don't NEED it?

Reminds me of Inherit The Earth, where your furry character has to repair the lens of a telescope (which in this after-human-world is just called light-catcher). You have to seek advice of an old human relic called Unit, but you have to tell him the precise name of the object you want to repair. So what do you do? You walk through a tedious maze (the THIRD time!1!) to visit the leader of the clan of Rats to ask him about it. Is this necessary? Couldn't that be shortened? It's not even a puzzle, because you are told: Go to Sist, the leader of the clan of Rats! Geeze!

Speaking of which, ITE really got on my nerves with it's silly mazes and top-view-locations. Unfortunately, though, because the graphics are good, the voices (at least the German ones, as I don't know the others) were brilliant and the story was quite interesting.

[Laukku]

Unlike some people, I liked the last puzzle of Trilby's Notes.

Spoiler

The very first thing I tried was kick idol, as I thought that that was an obvious way to mess up the ritual. (The game counted it as trying to move, so the timer that makes Trilby weaker started ticking.) I tried doing other stuff and at one point tried talking to Lenkmann. I noticed that Trilby was too weak to talk for some reason. Then I had something else to do, and finally, when playing it again, I instead started by asking Lenkmann about everything I could think of.

This time Trilby was able to speak for a much longer time. I pondered what could have caused this, and next time tried kicking the idol till Trilby woud be dead from exhaustion. Sadly, during the latest try my sister, who had already played the game, started giving hints without asking for permission. part of the fun of solving the puzzle was lost.

[close]

On the other hand, I always got hopelessly stuck when I had to

Spoiler

touch something

[close]

But my favourite computer game puzzle EVER (not necessarily from adventure games) is how to beat your mirror image in Prince of Persia. After figuring it out, it feels so obvious!

Spoiler

Killing him in any way(swordfight, pushing off a cliff) results instantly in your death, because you and the mirror image are the same person. You have to figure out that killing him is not the key.

[close]

I absolutely hate puzzles that require you to be a native english speaker. From Monkey Island 1&2,

Spoiler

red herring: to me, that was just a normal fish. It was a complete mystery to me why would the troll want THAT, until recently.

monkey wrench: no comment

[close]

EDIT: I have a new most hated puzzle, from Ben Jordan 7:

Spoiler

The wooden box. Yes, I knew that you had to press buttons related to lost items, but I never thought about the galleon because (1)It's not a lost item in everyday sense (2)BJ had FOUND it, after all, so it was not lost anymore (3)There was no reason to try symmetric patterns.

[close]

[mrsix]

I hated some of the Puzzles in Black Dhalia. Especially the diamond one, with all the runes. And that safe lock!!!!!!!

[Glorfindel]

  I always liked the maze in Mordack's fortress in King's Quest V, although probably only because I always had fun doing it, and the fact that I had no trouble beating it while other people seemed to have so much trouble.

 I loved killing the "arnoid" droid in Space Quest III, and I didn't discover for a long time that there was two ways to kill him!

 I enjoy the timing puzzles in Space Quest IV at the end and in the mall, again probably because they are hard (even after you know exactly what to do) and yet I do well with them.

[die_to_xxx]

I think ANY puzzle that you can't complete because you didn't pick up some object earlier in the game from a location that you can no longer go back to drives me COMPLETELY INSANE!!!!!!!!!!!
The first time I think I ever really encountered this, and the one that sticks with me the most is Leisure Suit Larry II when you're on the airplane going "WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!  I'VE USED EVERYTHING WITH EVERYTHING AND NOTHING WORKS?!".. Then you realized you missed an item in the previous location and are completely screwed - the first time I played it I think I was only working with one save game and saved when I GOT ON THE PLANE..so I had to start the game from the very beginning!  WOW I WAS MAD!

And wow this was all such a long time ago xDD

[perfectpixel]

Favorite Puzzle: The chase sequence from Phantasmagoria. I know this game wasn't that good, but the chase scene was the most fun I've had in a pc game in a long time.

Worst Puzzle: Connections: It's a Mind Game is an excellent game except for this one puzzle. Those genius developers didn't just decide to put both a slider puzzle and a maze in the game, they put the slider puzzle INSIDE the maze! Genius! (It remains unknown why they bothered since they offered a 'magic button' that lets you skip them both. Strange...)

[Cuiki]

My favourite type of puzzles are those that make you think and in which you got to have a pencil and a piece of paper somewhere near you to write down all the clues and then thought them out on the paper.
I really enjoyed playing Myst (Exile for instance) where you have all those clever puzzles which you are able to solve only if you examine the island thoroughly and find the way the machines operate and are related to one another without lucky guesses.
I also loved Gabriel Knight 3, when Grace is trying to locate the entrance of I forgot what with a computer program and that part when she has to enter Jacques's mansion by clmbing walls and ivy only because that was my first adventure game puzzle I ever solved (it was a demo) and got me into playing some more.
I cannot recall the puzzles I really hated, it's just that I used to play a bit more when I was younger and also more foolish So I just combined every item with another instead of reconsidering the situation. I'd have to play such games once more to see whether the puzzles were really stupid or it was just me.

[Patternjake]

The Water Temple in Zelda Ocarina of Time. It was just so freakinly long !!!

Also the mayan puzzle in Broken Sword II- the spinning disc thing, it took so long to work that out (Nicole)

[gracenakimurafan]

I hated the hourglasses puzzle in Nancy Drew Ransom of Seven Ships. There were several of them, each with a different amount of sand, and you had to click on all of them in a particular sequence so that when all of the sand ran to the other halves of the hourglasses, they all emptied themselves at the same time. It was so frustrating and how this related to opening the cave door made no sense!

[mr crowley]

Probably a puzzle I encountered in Sam and Max season one episode 1 (culture shock)

Although its not my favorite adventure games it probably has my favorite solution to a puzzle ever. Im talking about curing whathisfaces hypnosis.... by dropping a bowling ball from your window... onto his head.

[Patternjake]

I love the recent Sam and Max games, I've got them all

[Monsieur OUXX]

My favourite type of puzzles are those that make you think and in which you got to have a pencil and a piece of paper somewhere near you to write down all the clues and then thought them out on the paper. I really enjoyed playing Myst (...)

Oh yes, those Myst puzzles, where you NEVER guess, ALWAYS (kind of) suffer to find the solution, and ALWAYS realize how much sense it actually made.

I played Myst I, II, III, IV, and the only puzzle I guessed was in Myst II or III: the giant rotative silo where you have to line up the upper, middle and lower cylinder in order to make the circuits drawn on the wall connect or something. I followed my intuition and eventually solved it, but never really understood what I was doing.

Also, I thought that the puzzle in Myst III where you have to rotate individually all 9 parts of the giant looping ramps to create a consistent circuit for the ball was incredibly cruel. From the beginning I thought: "OK, I feel like I should make something out of it", but at the same time I couldn't believe the programers would have inflicted that to the player, since you can't really have a clear view of the circuit below you. Well, it turns out they did!

Finally, my personal feeling was that the puzzle in Myst III where you must find-the-proper-balance-for-the-lever-ramps-positionning-the-ball-on-the-catapult was flawed. Did anyone else feel like the balance was incorrect, and was contradicting the small example model that you could find in Atrus' lab?