Your Favorite Puzzle Ever (Absolute Spoiler!)
 

Some Puzzle can not be forgotten ,one exactly had spined/rolled my head many times even when i replayed the game, Nothing Changes :D

in The Secret of Monkey Island you ask that man at the shop (i guess it is at the early start of the game) about

Spoiler:

how to reach the sword master, he tells you wait and i will go check with him/her and you start collecting things at the shop he comes and catch doing so ,ring the desk bell, or play with that big safe and that sound it makes (nothing helps) when you do so....and all you gotta do is get right out of the shop after he leaves and follow him to the Sword Master....Damn!!

I'm glad you mentioned that. I often fondly remember that puzzle in Monkey Island and it's one of my favorites as well.

Another one of my favorite puzzles is Le Serpent Rouge in Gabriel Knight 3. I have to admit it's really hard and I've never been able to solve it without a walkthrough but I just love the concept of it and the way you go about solving it. Just sitting alone on your laptop in your cozy hotel room in a sleepy village. Poring over mysterious documents and the map. Classic.

thanks man, you know you just reminded me, there is also one puzzle in PQ3 where you had to use the map and point all the four previous murders to draw something like pentagram which leads you to the killer next Victim location,...this one also is a Classic , i can tell you i repeated that game many times only for this one puzzle ... makes me feel quite rewarded after solving it ;)

Two of my favorites already mentioned (Le Serpent Rouge and PQ3 pentagram).

Others:

Gray Matter - The Game of Life - it's many puzzles wrapped in one but a stunning sequence nonetheless
Riven - Colored marble map puzzle - extremely difficult game but in a great way

The one in GK2 where you sent the spliced message over the walkie talkie thing to get the guard out was pretty clever.

The Babelfish puzzle from hitchhiker's guide.

i guess this one can be considered as more like 60-70% of all the Game-playing of Riven if not even more ;)

I prefer the ones that make you think outside the box.

The DS lends itself well to this:
- In Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney, you had to blow in the mic to

Spoiler:

blow dust off a fingerprint

- In Last Window: The Secret of Cape West you had to partially close the DS to

Spoiler:

grab hold of a key that was stuck in the closing mechanism of a music box

- Also in Last Window (where you hold the DS sideways, like a book), you have to close the DS to

Spoiler:

hug the person in the right screen while your character is in the left screen

- etc.

I love these kinds of puzzles because they often have you trying every conventional thing first, but they come with a huge Aha-Erlebnis when you finally figure out what you had to do...

The same applies to the "red fez"-puzzle in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (where you

Spoiler:

first had to get the red fez from the random guy walking around in Algiers, in order to give it to the shopkeeper so that you could follow him through the crowds

).

Or the final puzzle of Grim Fandango where shooting at your target doesn't work - you have to shoot something else to get to him... :D

There's countless others like this, but I can't think of any specific ones at the moment...

the most clever ones (not hardest) that comes to mind now are

Discworld Noir -

Spoiler:

The upside down Azile... i remember how much I wandered before even getting the idea that you can use your clues as items....

DOTT -

Spoiler:

haven't played it for a long time but I do remember that there were at least several very clever puzzles involving the time shifting... like the transformation of the USA flag which turns into a tentacle costume, or the hamster and the huge amount of coins....

Curse of Monkey Island -

Spoiler:

when you had to inhale from a helium balloon and then make a helium bubble with the gold tooth. love when the mouth/hand/eye is not just talk to/use/look

Sam n Max Hit The Road -

Spoiler:

the inside out cat. it's not actually a puzzle but... :D

Yeah these are all well and good but nothing beats the Gabriel Knight 3 cat moustache puzzle.

My favorite is the escape puzzle in Spider and Web. It's solved with a single command, but figuring out that command requires the player to figure out the underlying 'trick' to the entire mystery of the plot. It's widely considered one of the greatest text adventure puzzles of all time, and I agree.

Absolutely brilliant:

(MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BEST PUZZLE.)

Spoiler:

The secret lies in unreliable narration. The game tricks you into fooling yourself.

The protagonist, a spy, has been restrained in a chair all game, undergoing interrogation. For the first half of the game, the player is forced to act out a burglary conducted by this spy and show the questioner what happened in virtual reality. In doing so, the player learns how to use the spy's gadgets, including a voice-activation switch (activated with the word 'TANGO'), a timer, a bomb, and a metal-dissolving acid pack.

In this story, the player recounts finding a mysterious package and hiding it in the air vents, then being captured. But when the story is done and the interrogator searches for this package, he only finds the spy's inventory, with a few pieces missing. Angrily, he demands that the spy explain what's going on.

In order to solve this puzzle, the player has to realize:

1) The package never existed. The spy invented it as a ruse to explain what he was doing in a location.

2) Clues earlier in the story suggest that the spy visited the interrogation room for some reason.

3) When the guards bring in your inventory, the voice activation switch is present, but a number of other items are absent - including the acid pack.

4) The chair you are strapped into is made of metal.

If they player fails to work out the spy's brilliant scheme, the interrogator figures it out first and kills the spy, dropping a clue in the process. Before he flips the switch, the interrogator mutters something along the lines of...

5) "You expected..."

In other words, the player-character expected to be captured and plotted the escape in advance. With that clue, the command needed to escape becomes clear:

"> SAY TANGO"

The voice-activation switch trips and the acid pack, planted under the chair by the spy, explodes and wrecks the restraints. The spy then knocks out the interrogator, and the player is left to untangle the rest of the deception for the remainder of the game.

I've never seen the gap between a player's knowledge and their character's knowledge exploited so brilliantly. This is the closest thing to a Death Note game we will ever get.

The one i spent the most of the game playing was Still Life, something with the key, at the end of the game. I don't say i liked it, but i think that this was the hardest one i have ever tried to solve! And i have played a lots of adventure games in my life.