Most Frustrating Puzzle in an Adventure Game?
As any Adventure Gamer knows, some games are just full of puzzles that are either illogical, frustrating, or both! What are some of the most frustrating puzzles you have encountered in an adventure game?
I am going to toss in one of the more common ones: the part in GK 3 where you must make a disguise to make Gabriel Knight look like Mosely. Cat hair, syrup, and hats do not a disguise make! :) |
The puzzle in Monkey Island 4 where you have the clock on the boat and you go through the time warp and have to talk to yourself in the future drove me absolutely crazy. That was the only puzzle I have ever cheated.
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Since I'm a Tex Murphy fan, here are 2 puzzles that made me crazy. :crazy:
Elijah Witt's Puzzle Box in Pandora Directive. It's a timed puzzle that'll drive you crazy. The Alcatraz Bricks puzzle in Overseer. That one is like a blind person trying to put together a 100,000 piece jigsaw puzzle together. Another strategy in Overseer that took me almost a month to complete is in the Gideon's Gallery. It's not really a puzzle....it's more strategy where you have to time yourself to get out of the Gallery before being zapped. |
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I think I've mentioned it before, but using the clamp and rubber duck with a bandaid from a pair of gloves to get a key in a subway always seemed silly. That's from The Longest Journey, by the way.
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Runaway. Maybe not quite illogical but I have got to say TO many pixel hunts :( It kept pissing me off that I had to resort to hints all because I didn't notice a 5 pixel item that looked like part of the background :crazy: :pan:
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Black dahlia with that crystal thing.
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re-assembling the broken coffee mug in Ripper ....that one was annoying to manipulate onscreen.
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I said it already, but... the puzzles involving dogs in MI2 and Simon the Sorcerer 2.
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From recent memory it was Uru where you had to push those buckets around to step over the water. Made me so frustrated, I was shouting at the damn computer "JUST PICK THE DAMN THING UP!!" Seriously, who kicks stuff around attempting to place it in just the right spot? Drove me nuts...
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I still don't see what people find illogical about the disguise puzzle in GK3. To me, the objective and resources were very clear in that part of the game.
Now, that cuckoo clock puzzle in GK2... I still don't know what that one's all about. :eek: |
One of the many annoying puzzles in Black Mirror:
You're in this room, the only way out is the wire frame door. You try to use wire cutters on it, but it isn't interactive. So, you do some other stuff until you notice a key on the other side of the door. You think, 'Well, they can't be expecting me to use the wire cutters because I already tried that.' Wrong! |
Two that come to mind are the 3D maze in Space Quest 5, because none of the standard maze-solving rules applied. And the tile puzzle at the end of Rhea. I recall the solution required over 160 moves, and would have been impossible without a WT.
Tim |
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The rotating peg door puzzle on the Lyra ship in Mysterious Journey 2. The objectives where so simple and at first glance it looked like it would take 5 minutes. 4 hours later I was seething in fury. Finally looked at a damn walkthrough. And after all that, the room that it opened triggered short cutscene. That's it. No other reason for the room what-so-ever. And the cutscene had nothing to do with the room either. After that I went right back out the door to continue the story elsewhere. My headache is coming back just thinking about it. Am loving the rest of the game though. ...bysmitty
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Lately Runaway peaked the most ridiculous puzzles in my opinion. The wrench (or was it a screw driver?) that you desperately need falls in a trough full of mud. So can you go down to the trough and just pick it up? OH HELL NO. Your hands would get dirty. So instead you go to the top of the balcony, throw a pot into the trough and then the splash throws the wrench out of the trough. All that while you are running out of time trying to save the day. Now that is ridiculous. Just pick up the goddamn wrench and wash your hands.
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Yes, I hate it when puzzles expect you to do something you would not usually do in real life. Of course everyone would just go grab the wrench if they were in a real hurry. It's not like you can't just wipe off the mud on something else later, like your shirt? But the designers didn't realize that and instead thought up some silly method of getting the wrench while still managing to 'lengthen' the game.
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Working out the day, race and track no. in Grim Fandango to make the bet to get the picture :crazy:
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The diving contest is where the game ended for me (I don't do walkthroughs). I never could figure out how to impress one of those three judges. The game is still on my hard drive, but I'm about to uninstall it since I'm all out of ideas. It's been over two weeks since I've touched it. It'll be the first adventure game I've left unfinished. |
i think everyone here is going to change there mind on what the hardest one is once i post it...
MONKEY COMBAT!!!!!!! i hated that damn puzzle, it was utterly point less. eek eek oop oop eek ook SHUT UP YOU DAMN MONKEY AND JUST LET ME THREW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
I liked monkey combat.
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Monkey wrench puzzle from 2 MI. I had no idea how was thatr thing called.
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I can't belive no one's said it.
Microscope puzzle; 7th Guest |
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I guess the most frustrating thing in recent memory was playing the Sherlock Holmes demo. The entire experiment and quiz section, ugh. I am NEVER buying that game. |
It's funny. Many of the puzzles listed here I found quite cute, and one of them (Grim Fandango's "Kitty Hat Day" puzzle) I think is brilliant. However, I have to concur with all criticism on Runaway's puzzles - they're some of the worst the genre has ever seen. When you want to reach through the screen and choke the lead character to death, something's wrong with the game.
One I really hated wasn't really a puzzle, but rather a misdesign IMO -- the Fax thingie on Gabriel Knight 2. When you enter the house, it shows the same video clip of you hanging your coat or whatever, but they appended a "btw you have a fax go pick it up yo" part, which you, having skipped the boring video you've seen 20 times already, miss. Then you get to wander around aimlessly until you get so bored you talk to everyone and voila, fax. |
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i found the kitty hat puzzle to be very fun and well thought out.
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I wasn't more specific in my earlier post because I didn't want any spoilers. |
Let me know if you need a hint.
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Almost instantly a word popped up in my mind: Floyd! This damn arcade games (which you had to win in order to gain a token!!) gave and still giving me the creeps.
This turned me off so much that I never considered to play this (all in all) excellent game again. |
Well, of the QFG series, I only played QFG4 and it took me three walkthrougs to realise that I had to click with the "mouth" icon on yourself if you want to say something. Without knowing this, I did manage to play halfway through. Now I'm finishing it.
In Nightlong, the combine mouse with skate was really strange, but rewarding. In Syberia, I just couldn't make the damn cocktail, not even with the walkthrough. Eventually, it worked, but it took me an hour. |
The pinball puzzle in Shivers was by far the most frustrating puzzle I've ever played, even though the game itself is one of my favorites. A close second is the monastery maze in Riddle of Master Lu, especially if you wanted to take those long detours to get to the oddities hidden in the maze. I resorted to a guide on both of these puzzles.
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You can count the number of puzzles and dialogues that AREN'T frustrating in The Mystery of the Druids on the fingers of one hand. So many puzzles that you have to solve before you knew that there was a puzzle there...
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I know exactly what you mean about the cocktail puzzle in Syberia -- I figured it out, but the drink was always wrong anyways. So I finally went to a walkthrough only to read that the solution was what I'd already figured out and had been trying to do. And finally it worked............I don't know if it was a bug in the game or what.
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For me the worst was the timed underwater maze in Cameron Files-Loch Ness. I did that so many times that I actually found a way to bypass it:
Spoiler: FGM |
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