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Fair or… Not ! (Puzzles) ...“SPOILERS!”

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some Puzzles can be described Very Hard but some puzzles strike us as totally unfair.

these puzzles (The Unfair) I am confident that they left all players Puzzled and frustrated !! , unless they were encountered by a Genius player with an unmatched IQ. Grin

one of the puzzles the strikes me as Unfair is the interpretation for the Governor’S secured office door access CODE at the end of NightLong ...and another example the Parabolic dishes Puzzle also at the end of Moment of Silence... etc !

on the other hand you can not describe Riven’s as Unfair , Very hard ...yeah, but very Logical still (indeed).

help me to put my/our hands on those unfair puzzles we all encountered in our history of Adventure gaming and lets see if we can all agree,! .....(or not) and why?

     

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The access code puzzle gives you everything needed to complete it. Sure it’s not an easy puzzle, but I wouldn’t say it’s unfair.

Not anymore than the Fire Marble puzzle in Riven for example.

For me an unfair puzzle would be one that did not give any clues to it’s solution or just lacks logical sense.

Some of the puzzles for example in the Hitchikers text adventure were unfair. You had to keep a couple of items from the start of the game right until the end otherwise the game was unbeatable.

     

An adventure game is nothing more than a good story set with engaging puzzles that fit seamlessly in with the story and the characters, and looks and sounds beautiful.
Roberta Williams

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Lucien21 - 27 May 2012 11:56 AM

The access code puzzle gives you everything needed to complete it. Sure it’s not an easy puzzle, but I wouldn’t say it’s unfair.

and that why attached those images… but is it fair that i must (to solve an adventure fun puzzle) to take out a pencil and a paper and also the calculator! .

     
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Why not?

I always play adventure games with a pad and pen/pencil next to it to write down clues etc. It’s a habit that started during text adventure days when map drawing and clue noting was essential.

     

An adventure game is nothing more than a good story set with engaging puzzles that fit seamlessly in with the story and the characters, and looks and sounds beautiful.
Roberta Williams

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You can’t say that that puzzle in Nightlong is unfair. You can definitely say it’s not fun (that’s a matter of taste), but you can’t say it’s not fair: the rules are clear, all the necessary clues are provided, it’s just pure logic.

The final puzzle in MoS, on the other hand, does border on unfair. At least, I thought, even though the objective was clear (it was in some journal somewhere, I think), the rules were not (I think it wasn’t completely obvious when you were allowed to move the dishes or not). Also, there was far too much running around in that puzzle.

As Lucien21 said, to me an unfair puzzle is one in which the objective and rules are not clear at all, or in which clues are missing. There are far too many of those in adventures, but I wouldn’t say the maths puzzle in Nightlong is one — which doesn’t mean it was a fun final puzzle, or that such a puzzle even belongs in an adventure game. (I personally liked it, but that’s just me.)

     
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i didn’t want to approach some certain puzzles (i mentioned) by this thread, but..

Riven i used not just a Paper all through the game i remember that finished a small notebook and was still into the game playing and enjoying… but with that Nightlong puzzle i did quit the game after taking/writing down all the data that i need and stayed off the game solving it!

     
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I always start playing a game with pen/pencil & paper handy! A lot of games have references to puzzles sometimes recorded in a journal but you often can’t bring the page of the journal up at the same time you need to solve the puzzle - so you still have to make a note!

The most unfair puzzles I have come across in Ags are those with action elements which need dexterity and/or speed & even worse are random when you have to start again so there is no learning curve!!    Smile

     
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That crate puzzle near the end of The Sleeping Dragon. Eww. It was the last nail in the coffin of an already badly designed game for me.

     
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The most unfair puzzle i can recall, was (i belive) in Black Mirror 2 where you have to navigate through some sewers.

As we all know, these kind of mazes are best solved by drawing a map, but for some unknow reason thay had decided to make it more interesting by constantly chaning the viewpoint, so you exit the screen at the right and enter the next screen from the left - right? Wrong you enter from the right, or the bottom or pretty much any random direction.

This pretty much made map drawing impossibel, or at least made you map look like one of thoose false perspective drawings.
Fair? I think not!

(The “maze” was actually quite small, and you could easily get to the end by choosing random directions, so you didn’t actually need a map - but still very unfair)

     

You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ

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I was half way through RHEM before I completely forgot how to get back to where I had been and had to make a sketch from memory.  That taught me to start noting from the start on those games even though that’s not my usual way to play.  I’d like to know if anyone has played it through using memory alone.

     
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Dara100 - 28 May 2012 01:10 PM

I was half way through RHEM before I completely forgot how to get back to where I had been and had to make a sketch from memory.  That taught me to start noting from the start on those games even though that’s not my usual way to play.  I’d like to know if anyone has played it through using memory alone.

Impossible , games like Riven , Rhem are just like a train of consequences .

     
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In Laura Bow 2: Dagger of Amon Ra at one point in the game a boot will appear in a location where it wasn’t before. If you don’t visit that location to pick up that boot then you will be unable to progress a few hours later in the game. They fixed that ion the CD version but I played the floppy disk version and had to replay through almost the entire game.

Also this kind of thing is a bit annoying to deal with.

     
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Having played Runaway recently I think some of the puzzles in that could be seen as unfair.

Searching a mayan pot to be told there was nothing there and then having to go back later to say that there was now coffee there is unfair.

The first encounter gave no indication that you need to revisit it.

     

An adventure game is nothing more than a good story set with engaging puzzles that fit seamlessly in with the story and the characters, and looks and sounds beautiful.
Roberta Williams

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Adventure - 28 May 2012 01:37 PM

Also this kind of thing is a bit annoying to deal with.

Hehe i remember that one, alway puzzled me.

     

You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ

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As I have mentioned many times, I always considered many safe puzzles unfair. Even if you DO know the code, you have to guess the way you put it (clockwise/counterclockwise)since no clue is provided. To make matters worse, if you are not 100% sure that you have the right code, you would keep wondering if you have the correct code as well. Black Dahlia had one of these, cursed riddles I think… To be honest, I don’t remember many safes opening with the clockwise/counterclockwise method that I would not consider unfair (Riddle of the Sphinx perhaps…).

     
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The Long walk at Neverhood to get that desk at the end of the corridor!!... that was totally unfair , .......
to need to cross about 40 screens to get to the end of that hall not to mention Kalyman’s slow movement , plus walking them back  ..that was tooooo much ! and unreasonable

     

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