Oh, I have my fair share of them. Sometimes it's almost enough to make me wonder why I even bother with the genre at all.
There are the arcade and times sequences. Alll of them, particularly the ones that end in death. Hate them all. Even when they aren't difficult, they utterly ruin my control of the pacing of the gameplay.
Then there are the sliding puzzles and the mazes. Detestable. There's nothing to learn or discover here, just waste time moving around over and over again wishing it would end and the game would continue.
And, of course, let's not forget the ones that involve translating abstract symbols into words, letters, or numbers. Pure, pointless tedium. This isn't playing, it's bookkeeping.
However, the one puzzle I choose to single out today is the lava maze from Torin's Passage. Vile little thing that is, and utterly killed the game for me. The fact that it follows right after a timed puzzle diesn't help.
The maze isn't difficult. It's all right there on one screen. It's the movement. Tiny, tiny little steps, clicking through small spaces two or three pixels at a time, over and over again through tight little loops. Unbelievable mental frustration and physical discomfort, and knowing full well that absolutely nothing even remotely interesting will happen until it's over does not help.
And then, finally, after inching through it, it turned out that I'd missed something and had to backtracl the entire way, then off in another direction, back again, then retrace my original steps.
This was about the time I was ready to shove the disc up Al Lowe's passage.
Of course he wasn't there, so all I could do was quit the game and file it away for some other time. Maybe after finding a savegame right after that point to switch to oce I reached it.
- Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea, IMO. An archive of saves right after all of the really unpopular parts of games gathered in one convenient place could make adventuring far more pleasant.
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