Adventure games with ingenius puzzles...

[Shampoopsii]

Preferable criteria:
- Highly original or abstract
- Not too easy, not too hard (subtly presses you on to solve it yourself without consulting gamefaqs)
- Gives you that great "Ah-HAH!" feeling after having solved it.


  You can mention a single puzzle, or a whole game that met this criteria consistently throughout.

p.s. try not to give away the solution to the respective puzzle

[Akril15]

I thought the central puzzle in the first act of Toonstruck was both inventive and challenging without being overly frustrating. You have to find eleven unnamed items that are the "opposites" of eleven other items. You are given a hint at the beginning of the game when you're told that the opposite of sugar is spice, although they aren't really opposites; they are a reference to the phrase "sugar and spice and everything nice".

You slowly realize that similarly, each one of the unnamed items is half of a relatively common English phrase that incorporates two nouns in a "[noun 1] and [noun 2]" fashion, which helps you figure out roughly what you should be looking for.

Spoiler

For instance, the opposite of needles turns out to be pins (as in "pins and needles") and the opposite of ball is chain (as in "ball and chain"). There's even a bit of lateral thinking involved, since there are no actual pins in the game, but there is a trophy with three bowling pins on it.

[close]

[Eggie]

That was a good one, except I'd never heard the phrase 'cloak and dagger' before when I played it.

This question's trickier than the terrible puzzles discussion, part of a puzzles quality is when it seamlessly integrates into a well-balanced design and you don't really notice it's there. I really enjoyed getting the photograph of Domino in Grim Fandango but thinking back it doesn't really make much sense... I guess I'll go for any of the stuff involving Time Travel in DOTT. I'm a sucker for time travel nonsense.

And, I have to say, Telltale's Sam & Max games have some brilliantly inventive puzzles. Like the stuff with the clove cigarettes in Night of the Raving Dead: hilarious, ingenius and it just feels so RIGHT.

[ThreeOhFour]

I liked the bit in The Secret of Monkey Island where you are under the water and tied to the idol of many hands.

Also, Day of the Tentacle's puzzles where you flush items down the toilet to other characters in the past and future was pretty darn neato.

[Stupot]

Also, Day of the Tentacle's puzzles where you flush items down the toilet to other characters in the past and future was pretty darn neato.

Yeh, you wonder why they couldn't just flush themselves, though and they'd be home again in no time... but then we'd have no game I suppose 

[Trihan]

Because you could only flush inanimate objects, as clarified by Dr. Fred. Which is the reason you had to get the hamster to the future some other way...another ingenius puzzle.

[Andail]

I like the police quest one, where you have to adjust the sight of your gun, or you'll get helplessly stuck two hours later.
Oh wait, wrong thread.

A good puzzle I really liked - although I've only read it in the design document, and am uncertain whether it was actually implemented, is the Grim Fandango puzzle where you convince a retired taxi driver to drive you by directing a fan to his head, so he'll remember how nice it is to have the wind flapping his ears...

There is a really fun episode in Space Quests 6, where you escape a jail cell by building a replica of yourself using various fruits.

In Simon the Sorcerer 2, there's an loan office that catapults rocks at houses whose residents haven't paid due mortgage. You need to enter a certain house, so you take a letter with their address on and put in the tray of late mortgage payers.

[Radiant]

What I found really ingenious was the Sense Gnomes puzzle in KQVI.

[Dualnames]

What was a really ingenious puzzle mostly because you wouldn't think of it, was when you're dropped with the idol in monkey island on the sea. Took me some time to figure out. My favorite puzzles are those of DOTT. Every single one of them is smart. Easy yes, but nevertheless smart.

[Miez]

Shampoopsii

As a totally unrelated reply: best nick EVER!

[blueskirt]

I'll go with Dualnames with this one, DOTT is quite possibly one the best game when it come to great puzzles all around. I've been toying with the idea of replaying that game for the puzzles rather than the jokes or the story. Take everything that's not nailed down without solving a puzzle, and then ask myself what I got to do next, what is the problem, how to overcome it, etc.

In the last year, the sole puzzle that gave me that "Ah-HAH!" feeling was the scale puzzle in La-Mulana (an indie metroidvania focusing on puzzle solving rather than action). To solve that puzzle one has to piece together 4 simple looking clues, do a gigantic "A 6yo kid would have seen it coming!" mistake and understand a couple of things about the game world before attempting to solve the puzzle again, but in the end, that "Ah-HAH!" feeling is totally worth it.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I enjoyed most of the puzzles in Rex Nebular, particularly the ones where you have to use the gender bender device a few times.  It was something they hadn't tried before (a character that changed sex as a game element) and while the game didn't do as much with it as it could have it was still amusing.

Rex doesn't get much press so I thought it was worth a mention.  In fact, I hadn't even played it until about a year ago and I enjoyed it more than any of the Space Quests.  The same was true with Eco Quest I and II, which seemed too 'kiddie' to me when they came out, but with a growing lack of adventure games to play I gave them a try and found them to have decent entertainment value and nice, if simplistic, puzzles.

I think the best puzzles are the ones that fit the situation and aren't clearly there to pad out the game.  It also helps when they are logical and challenging without being frustrating.

[lo_res_man]

In Myst, figuring out how to raise the sunken ship was very satisfying, as was aligning the tower with the parabolic collectors.

[magintz]

Snail Quest...

Need I say more.

[Trihan]

Snail Quest...

Need I say more.

Yes.

[ginanubismon]

My favorite is Ned's graveyard nightmare....

Spoiler

Where you had to defeat the zombie girlscouts, eat the cookies than walk into the arms of a zombie grandpa to be squeezed into the air. Afterwards you had to help a ghost girl get something, which involves closing the jack in the box, jumping on it then the bed and hit the pianta enough to swing into the bat. What the girl says, in the most sweetest voice, is one of my favorite moments...

Next to the singing rats.

[close]

[Jack Hare]

I think highly of Myst in this category -- I've always liked the way the puzzles in that game didn't feel like they were set up just for the sake of puzzling, but rather, made sense as an intruder trying to get around the home of a paranoid wizard.

[blueskirt]

I've finally got around to replay Day of the Tentacle and yes, "perfect" is the only word that can describe the puzzles in DOTT. The puzzles' overall originality is amazing, each puzzles are zany, yet are all perfectly logical and fit seamlessly in the game's Chuch Jones-esque atmosphere. The game also hardly feature those cliché puzzles that have become so prevalent in today's adventure games, like clues collection, locked doors, fetch quests, conversation trees/triggers or puzzles solved with tools or improvized tools.

The puzzle difficulty also walk the fine line between challenge and fairness, the puzzles are not that hard, yet the solutions are not given away, and there are sufficient hints slipped all over the place for the harder or more obscure puzzles, yet I must recognize the hint for the game's hardest puzzle is unfortunately only told once, and is so easily unnoticed if one doesn't pay very close attention to what the characters say.

I must say I recommand everyone who want to witness the greatest example of brilliantly designed puzzles to play or replay DOTT. If you played the game before, try to pay more attention to the puzzles rather than mindlessly solve them by memory, get yourself artificially stuck, look at everything, talk with everyone... so you can better re-experience the puzzles, and if you are lucky enough to have forgotten one or several solutions, it will be even better!

[Trihan]

Now we need to make a "What was your favourite puzzle in DotT and why?" thread.

[Helme]

Yeah! DOTT or the Monkey Island series is full of incredible puzzles.

One puzzle in an AGS-Game I enjoyed very much, was the birdbot-puzzle in Annie Android. The solution is so obivous but strange at the same time and I was really surprised, when I solved the puzzle.