I’ll do you one better.
Played through all of Portal 2 when it released, got all the way up to the penultimate level and no matter what I did I just could not finish the puzzle. Couldn’t figure it out, nearly gave up entirely.
Next morning I went to school and met up with one of my friends who was big into the series and asked her for help.
She kind of looked at me like I was a moron, fired a Portal across the chasm, fired another on the wall right next to her and just… walked through.
I’d spent half the game dealing with gels and momentum puzzles that I had totally forgotten you can just walk through a goddamned portal.
When I first played through Portal 1 I didn't know you could open doors because I clicked every button and it wouldn't open. Spent forever walking around trying to find where I need to go before I looked up a tutorial and it turns out you can open doors, I'm just stupid
I think I figure out where, I think a corridor collapses after the gel section and you have to use the portals to get through the hole. In the commented version of the game, the developers say that that little puzzle is there for just that, reminding players to think with portals since many of the testers had their brains wired to the gels at that point in the game
That is definitely an established phenomenon in the Portal games, where after a series of tricky puzzles you completely overcomplicate a moment like that!
There was another part where I stood for at least half an hour to figure out where I have to put portals to get over a gap, but there were no useful portal walls anywhere. The solution was to just ... jump over the gap.
My memory is hazy but there is a puzzle in the first portal where you need to send a missile through a portal to blow up a pipe with a cube in it (it was ten years ago so details maybe wrong). However, I did it another way where I arranged furniture below the pipe to stand on, got the missile to chase me then moved at the last minute. Later on with the internet learned, that's how alot of people solved the puzzle rather than the correct way.
As I type this I realise I may be remembering it incorrectly.
This reminds me of a puzzle in Half Life 2... the one where you're in the compound and need to find the car batteries to open the gate. Couldn't for the life of me find a third battery. So, I built a ramp out of scrap, and jumped the wall with the buggy. It was a lot of effort.
My friend thought that the boss battle was bugged as he'd get to a certain point in it and then couldn't do anything.
I just asked him 'Did you shoot at the moon?'
'No why would I?' He replied
Me 'Because the walls you can use the portals on are made out of moonrocks.'
I mean if you don't listen to the dialogue and/or have long pauses between different parts of the game, you can easily forget about the moon rock part.
That being said, the game literally MAKES you aim at the moon and has implicitly taught you to aim at any white surface, making the moon shot kinda obvious.
That’s just disappointing.
One of the best moments of that game is when that moon gets a little glimmer and you’re sitting there mouth agape knowing exactly what you need to do.
This comment just reminded me how phenomenal that fight was. I went into it blind, not really knowing what to expect- but knowing that I'd be fucking *wild* because it's portal. I never would have guessed that.
Spent over an hour in one area with a friend whilst playing. We could not work out how to get the box laser to the right place!
Turns out the laser goes through glass..
I started playing Portal after completing every Half Life knowing its the same universe (and Portal actually feels like another HL game). I was so used to HLs parkour that at almost every level I've forgotten you can teleport in that game
There's one part where you are blocked by a fence and the portal gun won't shoot through it. I had to look up the solution but there's like only two spots in your entire view that can hold a portal. One immediately next to you and one right above you but on the other side of the fence. I felt ashamed that that was the one "puzzle" that forced me to look online.
They probably assumed that everybody who played Skyrim when it first came out watched the interviews for it. Where Mr. Howard literally talked about the immersion of being able to view and rotate any item you can pick up, and that it might help you solve puzzles. I think they show a dragon claw while he was saying that.
Also, if you do the first couple main quests that the game REALLY wants you to do before you go off exploring, the guy you saved by cutting the spiderweb in bleak falls barrow has a journal that explains puzzle along with the dragon claw. You know, after you kill him.
But I agree, if you’re the type to go off the beaten path right from the get-go, or don’t read the in game flavor items (books, notes, computer terminals or audio logs in other games) you’d be lost.
Edit: I think a loading screen tip says it too. I know I’ve read them all. Especially when that’s when the game would freeze for me most often and I’d read the tip 50 times before I get the Skyrim.exe is not responding window. lol
Also, one of the questlines for the civil war has you open a door like that, and I'm like 83% sure that one of the characters mentions how the door looks like the same animals on the claw.
It's honestly such a shitty puzzle.
Not because the concept of inspecting the claw is in itself bad, but they do the same puzzle over and over and over. Once you figure out the first time it just becomes a chore to do the rest
Yea its like can you even really call those puzzles? Its the same concept as put the square in the square hole. If the key gives you the answer the real puzzle is getting the key which never really was a puzzle.
Sigh, i just brute forced all those puzzles back in 2011. Had no idea the solutions was in the key. Always thought the solution was in the door and markings in those hallways with the puzzles and then just kept turning until it clicked.
Sure, but the very first time you get the claw it comes with a note with "it's within the palm of your hand" or something like it. I really enjoyed that, but sadly they never did anything else with it.
That one took me a semi reasonable amount of time to figure out but I'll be damned if I don't forget about it nearly every single time I start a new file and get to it.
That puzzle would be absurdly obvious to a character living in Skyrim, who could just look at the object they're holding. So obvious that it's actually immersion-breaking. The in-world builders of the tomb would never go to that much trouble over such an idiotic "test".
However, it's not obvious to someone playing a game that inspecting and rotating objects in your inventory is even a thing you can do. A lot of people probably learned about that capability from promo videos rather than the game itself.
They're supposedly not to lock you out, if you have the key. They're to lock the draugr in, and keep anyone without the claw from releasing them. The "puzzle" exists to make sure the key wielder is sapient and not, say, a loose draugr.
Or so I've picked up, hanging around r/teslore.
The Skyrim one that always gets me is the 4 pillars that rotate each other in bleak falls barrow I think. I always look up the order you need to set them to the symbol behind them to get it right since it just doesn’t click in my brain the way you’re supposed to do it.
the only reason I know that one is Todd did a developer walkthrough (complete with "see that mountain? You can walk over there") and the solution was in the video
I’ve got a good one. The first time I played LoZ: wind waker, I got to the tower of the gods, there was a room where you had to get a statue across a small gap. It was a statue that you could take control of, but statues can’t jump. I spent over an hour trying to get to get this little statue to hop across the gap before I realized I could just…. Pick it up and jump over the gap myself. I’ve replayed the game several times and each time I reach that little hop I’m filled with shame.
I had a block a bit later, in the Earth Temple. You have to hold down both switches to make the stairs form, and there's purple chuchus that'll fight you.
I got stuck for *weeks* on that room, and ran around the entire game world trying to figure it out. I had to buy the guide in order to figure out to use fire arrows to shoot the curtains.
I had *exactly* the same issue a couple years prior with Majora's Mask, in Ikana Castle.
Yes. earlier today as I was playing The Talos Principle.
Absolutely stuck for two days on a puzzle called Hall of Pressure Plates and the solution which I had to look up online was stupid simple. Very annoying lol
I just got done with Road to Gehenna!
I played it after having not played the base game for over a year and that was a HUGE mistake. I was immediately getting stumped left and right. The DLC is clearly the like "hard levels" meant to be done after the main game. There were quite a few puzzles where I was just walking up and down, up and down just trying to figure out what the heck the puzzle even WAS so that I could then try to solve the puzzle. That super open level that the puzzles are set in psych me out more than the puzzle itself at times.
Did you happen to play the insane final levels in Gehenna? I think you have to find all the stars to unlock if memory serves, but it’s been 8 years for me. Couldn’t believe how crazy those last levels were, after beating the entire game without help I didn’t even know where to begin.
I just started the last night and oh man these puzzles are insane. The only good thing about them is that each room is too small so the options are technically limited
Loved Road to Gehenna
Really reminded me of Reddit 10+years ago. Reading through all the citizen messages was so nostalgic. There really used to be a bigger sense of community and decorum.
I just played that puzzle today! I tried it for a while, was stumped, and then decided to go finish the other puzzles in the level. I went back and got really close to looking up the solution, but I was able to figure it out. Felt pretty dumb for not noticing something simple earlier lol. This game is really fascinating, I'm loving it so far.
I tried the demo for the sequel and got stuck on the very first room, because I couldn't figure out how to turn off a barrier. The thing is, it was the kind of barrier you can just walk through. It's only there to stop you from taking puzzle tools with you to the next area.
Oh my gosh, same thing happened to me! I searched every corner, looked through every fence... Tried everything I could think of to figure out how to get past that wall, and thought to myself that the developers weren't playing around with the difficulty in the sequel... All to realize (by accident) that I could just... Walk through it haha.
In our defense, the colours of the walls are quite similar, and when there's just been an impenetrable wall previously... It's an easy (albeit silly) mistake to make.
I’m playing the new one atm and it’s quite a bit easier than the original imo. This has lead to me massively overthinking a puzzle a few times and having to look up the solution, feeling like a comlete idiot a few times.
I got stuck on the first puzzle of some Tomb Raider game because the solution was for Lara to push a giant boulder ontop of a wooden plank and then jump on the other side to launch the boulder into the air. Just the idea of her weight being able to do that was so cartoony and unrealistic that when I finally looked up the solution, i couldn't stop laughing at it. Such very simple video game logic that i just couldn't figure out because I took the game too seriously, lol.
Man if I could go back to watching my dad play Tomb Raider on PS1 and being too scared to take the controller because I didn't want to die... OG Tomb Raider holds a place in my heart.
I'm so glad I not the only one with core memories like this! However, I was a bossy kid, so I had the laptop open with Stella's Tomb Raider guide, telling him where to go. Even with the guide, I was still not confident taking the controller!
Oh I know, and I'm a fresh and spry 35yr old! My memory is looking in the latest copy of a game magazine while my dad failed at the game, and me not daring to point out the hole in the wall he hadn't seen because he was a fragile, self important arse that wouldn't like a 9yr old being better than him.
Not so much a puzzle but I got stuck on the final Sonic Fronteirs DLC 3 boss.
Turns out you had to press the right bumper at the start of the fight to be able to attack the guy. That's all it was. If you tried to attack him like every other boss he'd recover all his health whereas pressing right bumper changed where you hit him which was never established with any other boss
I had to look up a tutorial for Hardspace Shipbreakers on how to start level two. You just click on the ship you want. It was so stupidly easy and I could not figure it out. I thought there were levels and there isn't.
Good news, the question gets asked quiet often on the subreddit, so at least I'm not alone on feeling dumb on this one lol.
If you think that's bad, I had to look up how yo use the tethers...in the tether tutorial area
I don't know if I spaced out randomly or if I stopped paying attention, but when it was time to learn how to use em, I went "What the fuck? What am I doing?" Spent the better part of 5 or 6 minutes trying to figure out what to do
To be fair with Shipbreaker, depending when you got the game they explained NOTHING. A couple of other things that have really simple solutions if you know what you're doing, disassembling Class 2 engines, dealing with reactors, how to stop the wires from shocking you, how to depressurize ships that are only partially pressurized. Took a lot of explocding engines, space nukes and slicing live wires to figure those out. Though, I'll admit, I sometimes see how far I can get cockpit windows to go by cutting the external hardpoints with the cabin pressurized, bonus points if a seat flies out.
I couldn't figure out how to start the final mission on Nioh for years. I beat the Nobunaga dual boss fight before unlocking divine weapons. Because up until that mission, every quest was a scroll. The ship took you back to the region select screen. And there was a button that took you there directly, so I didn't click the ship icon for that, either.
I googled. Many times. Everything said that there should be this other mission, and I just couldn't find it. Apparently nobody else ever had trouble with this.
It happens when the puzzle is simple but you expect it to be some next level stuff.
Usually it's designed as such to throw the player off their game, first they give you complex puzzles, then some easy ones which you expect to be at the same level which just causes confusion.
I really like developers doing some outside the box stuff like this.
Of course some are just plain bad design.
This is me, I do this constantly. Any time I've been stuck is because I was imagining some 4D chess moves and just had to come back to it a day or two later with some obvious solutions that almost always work.
Lego Indiana Jones, there is a staircase that i just couldn't climb. Since there are parts you cant access until you complete tasks, I wandered around for a long time trying to find the thing i missed. Turns out, i kept falling off the stupid stairs because they are at a slight angle, and you have to. adjust where you are aimed half way, or you fall off.
The Last of Us. I was running around in a skyscraper when this boss clicker just kept messing me up. I died over and over and over again. I died so many times that the game kept prompting me to go to an easy setting, and I refused. Then I wasted another few hours just dying and dying to this thing, and finally, I broke down and accepted the easier game setting. But then I still COULD NOT BEAT IT! Even on the easiest freaking setting, and I was still wasting hours on it! Finally, I googled it, and all I had to do was run away and not fight it. Just had to run to an elevator shaft and leave. That one made me sit in some self reflection for a long time.
Is it the first game? Where you fall into that basement place and need to start the generator? That’s the only one I can think of but maybe I’m wrong lol
It was the first game, but I played it a decade ago so the memory is a little fuzzy, but the generator sounds familiar. I assumed I had to fight and kill the boss clicker because I had earlier been in the school gym boss clicker fight. But this time, I kept running out of ammo and couldn't hide well enough and get enough damage in before it would one shot me. I then remembered getting away from it and being futher into the skyscrapper and encountering another clicker, but this time, I picked a lock door and got away in time without wasting hours trying to fight it.
I hate when games do a switch up without being obvious in some way about it - either a game where you fight everything you suddenly need to run from this one enemy, or a game where you hide from everything and now you need to fight this time. You end up wasting time and ammo wondering why you can’t kill the thing.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There's a temple where you have to expose the boss monster to sunlight to get him to reveal his true form. I knew where a room with sunlight was, and I knew that the floor there looked bombable (which would send sunlight down to a lower floor), but I couldn't figure out how to actually bomb the floor.
BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW LINK COULD THROW HIS BOMBS. I kept placing them down outside of the wall, which was too far to break the floor.
\---
NieR Replicant. In the temple where you find the Prince of Facade, there's a room you instantly fail if you ever run or evade. But Nier's walking speed was too slow for me to sneak my way through the obstacles (because I didn't realize Nier could fit between the firing ranges), so I ended up relying on the forward momentum you get from weapon attacks.
Took me forever to get through, and if I may toot my own horn, it involved a lot of both luck and skill. Lent the game to a friend of mine who's less experienced with video games. Asked her how she solved that puzzle.
SO IT TURNS OUT NIER CAN WALK FORWARD WHILE BLOCKING
I had that same problem with Zelda. Did you realise every time you find bombs it TELLS you you can throw them?! I just clicked through that message and didn't read it.
Yep, and they conveniently leave a chest with bombs two rooms away so that message WILL proc right before encountering that room.
They knew people were having trouble with that puzzle and tried to leave as many hints as possible.
I failed that puzzle and a few others... I'm way too "modern gaming" (or dumb) to solve ALttP's many of puzzles. In fact, I'm stuck on the ice temple level RN and have been a few months. It's so freakin long and requires a lot of back tracking.
I had the exact same problem with Oracle of Ages back in the day. You needed to throw a bomb over a wall in one of the dungeons to trigger a switch to progress. I could not work it out for days. It was only when I went back and played the goron minigame with throwing the meat over walls that it clicked, maybe I can throw bombs over the same type of wall too!
Mine wasn't even a puzzle. Cyberpunk, the assignment said to stalk a car. The chase was quite long and uneventful, until the car stopped (an accident, I think?)
I get out of the car and walk towards them, a gunman comes out and I shoot at him, I don't remember why I thought it was a threat. I'm immediately killed and have to repeat the whole chase
I do the same thing three or four more times trying to engage the enemy before I'm in range, but each time he does massive damage and kills me
Until I realized he wasn't an enemy, that I just had to talk to him. Almost an hour wasted in the intro of the mission
It was the mission >!in which you meet for the first time the man who wants to be crucified live!<
You're killed? Maybe it was an earlier patch because you can actually easily kill everyone in that car, succeed in the mission, and be done with the whole thing without even going through the >!crucifixion!< questline.
Dude I 100% wasted them the first time I played that mission and the mission was over with the fixer calling to end it and everything. Then I read somewhere online to just get in and realized I missed a whole ass mission.
What’s worse is I still haven’t gotten to the end of it because my last play through I pissed off that corpo woman apparently too much and she basically said “you’re done” and I was told not to go further with them.
Oh I watched Mark's security breach vids after already making the same blunder. It's funny, I watched a lot of other POV's after and they all made the exact same mistake. Guess the exit's too dark to actually see the exit
If half of your playerbase has to lookup online how to simply get out of a room it's just bad game design, and while not having played the game but watched some of it Steel Wool seem to really suck at game design in general
I was playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider and I was totally stuck. Watched a video and saw that one of the walls was climbable. There's a texture that all climbable walls have, but it was so dark that I couldn't see it.
This is a frustration in the new Tomb Raiders. I love the idea of subtly having white markings where you can climb, but there’s plenty of places that look almost identical that you can’t. Similarly, those rigged/bumpy surfaces can be misleading too.
This is my favorite story to share:
So way back when, I was playing Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS. I got to this part in the game where I had to make an imprint on the map to chart a course to a new island. Nothing you can do on the system will work. No button press, nothing on the touchscreen, no mic, nothing did anything.
When I played DS games, I had a habit of closing the system to think more about a puzzle; I did this a lot with Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton games.
So here I am, closing the DS and then as soon as it shuts, it plays a chime! Then I realized that's exactly what I had to do! I opened it right back up and sure enough, the imprint had been transferred!
It was amazing. Nintendo is so creative.
You can still trigger the correct response from the game with 2DSes (and virtual consoles for that matter) by suspending the system, but yeah, the actual puzzle element of it doesn't translate.
The ghost ship level puzzle got me! Where you have to pull 5 levers in a specific order, you're given 5 numbers jumbled up on the screen.
So I pull the levers in the order, reading left to right and nothing happens. I did it about a dozen times and finally looked up the solution. Turns out each number represents the location of a lever and you had to pull the lever located where 1 appears in the sequence first and so on.
Very simple, but probably the hardest a Zelda puzzle has stumped me in my adult life.
Always sucks when you're looking for a walkthrough of a certain puzzle that's taken you an hour up to that point, and the video is like a minute and a half long.
When "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was released, I was so engrossed that I played incessantly, only to hit a snag in the notorious Water Temple. It took me several days to discover that the room where I found the Longshot actually had an exit. Mistakenly, I had backtracked using the same entrance, under the impression that obtaining the Longshot was the room's sole purpose.
Zelda Wind Waker. I had to light some torches on fire with my handheld torch and one of the torches was on a tall ledge across a gap. The ledge was just a few pixels too high for me to jump up, and the gap was just barely too big for me to jump across. I thought something was wrong with my game because I just couldn’t make it. I’m about to rage quit. My 5-year old comes in to the room to. watch me play, and says “why don’t you just throw the torch?” And it worked. First try. /facepalm
Doom 2016. Death from above achievement. Gotta get a bunch of glory kills from high in the air. Running off ledges trying to drop on zombies and shit. Spent ages, couldn't nail it.
Turns out I just forgot I had a double jump.
I got stuck on the very last level of Storyteller because I didn’t realize that putting the Devil in a certain scene affected the mechanics afterwards and wasn’t just a cutesy animation. Wanted to kick myself because I hadn’t had to look any solutions up until then.
Max Payne. Right at the end, I was supposed to shoot a chain or a line or something. Couldn't figure it out. Nothing in the game had apparently prepared me for environmental destruction as a game element.
I played the 2016 Doom game. Near the very start of the game (literally a few seconds in) you go through a passage and it teaches you how to do glory kills. There is a door at the end of the passage. The door does not open.
I wondered around for about fifteen minutes trying every nook and cranny, pressing every button trying to figure out where I was supposed to go.
Turns out you have to look down at a dead dude on the ground and take his shotgun before it will allow you to open the door. I had to find an online tutorial on how to make it through the first 30 seconds of Doom!
Happened to me with Resident Evil 1. Made it all the way until I needed to use the medallions. Bought the guide just to find out the medallions was inside the books and all i needed to do was inspect and open them. Never used the guide to finish the game but that one time
I spent 2 hours running around Blasphemous trying to find where to go. I literally had just missed a door in a room. Had to look it up and felt so dumb.
I remember being super excited for Professor Layton, being hot off the Ace Attorney games I was expecting a VN style game. Took me awhile to accept the fact I was going to be doing lots of puzzles completely unrelated to the plot. Yeah I ended up wasting a lot of hint coins.
I love both series so much, I remember being so hyped when the crossover originally announced back then. im super excited for the new Layton game it’s been like ten years since the last mainline one but not sure how well the touch screen puzzles will translate to the switch
I get so angry when I spent hint coins like I don’t want to even though I’m sitting on 200 of them *because what if I need them more later on??* and also I hate having to admit I’m too dumb for some of those stupidly obvious puzzles
[also this](https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/pythagorean-fear-em)
OMG SAME. hint coins activate my hoarding lizard brain so much lmao. im not sure what’s worse: having to spend hint coins or losing picarats on a super obvious 20 picarat puzzle bc I overthink
It was less me, and more my roommate. Was playing Zelda Skyward Sword. There was a puzzle where you had to do something with an eye above the door. He couldn't figure it out for the life of him, and I was doing the 'I'm far too amused by your frustration to help' thing.
Pretty much all Zelda games prior to this solved it by shooting the eye or something along those lines.
So of course that's the first thing he tries. And of course fails, then tries all sorts of other cockamamie schemes... only to get frustrated, curse out the eye, hold the sword really high up in the air, and twirl it around out of spite to screw around with it.
... eye gets dizzy and the door opens.
The swearing was *epic.*
What about puzzles where you look up the solution and you're like, "no sane person would even think about that," and it's deliberately made too complex, confusing to make no logical sense.
I tried playing Space Quest and there's a part early on where you have to get across this swamp filled with alligators or something, and even after reading a bunch of guides and faqs I literally couldn't figure out how to do it.
Or, many years ago, I borrowed Grim Fandango from a friend. I'm usually pretty good at those LucasArts games but I remember for a whole weekend I couldn't figure out how to even get past the first screen and I basically just gave up and stopped at that point.
Specific examples don't come to mind, but I've definitely done it
And yet simultaneously, nothing kills me more than watching a video of someone doing a playthrough (or Chris Ramsay doing a puzzle box) and seeing them struggle to figure out something you've known the solution to for five minutes. No matter who it is that's missing the obvious, it's nothing but abject pain and misery 😫
Watching people struggle at something which I find to be relatively-easy (or otherwise less-complicated), when I KNOW what to do, is just one reason why I can't watch gaming streams. No one likes a backseat gamer, and I'm 100% not trying to be that, but the frustration is real.
In the game Supraland there's a 'puzzle' that people overthink so frequently the devs added a npc afterward that tells you you probably did, too.
Iirc, the first part involves doing some back and forth to open a gate and keep it open, but the second one you can just spawn a block or something and get through in five seconds.
I was playing Myst, which is infamous for its difficult puzzles, but this one in particular stumped me. You had to enter a three digit number to enter a rocket ship, and I had that code. There are two levers. One advances the first and middle digit, the other advances the middle and last… and I could *not* get the number to set!
I was sitting there studying it… even drew out a decision tree… could not figure it out for the life of me. I was sitting there staring at it, trying to enter it again… and I discovered that you could *hold down* the lever and it did something else - rotated the middle one I think?
I was furious. I spent over an hour stuck on it.
I fired that game up not too long ago after a \~three decade hiatus and it ended like it did back then. Me frustrated and quitting. I simply don't have the patience or intellect or whatever it takes to get into Myst.
Ooh I have a good one!
When I was a child I was playing Jak 2 and having an absolute blast.
But then I got stuck in a level where you can't backtrack. It was this dungeon-like building full of bad guys inside of the city. I just could not figure out where the next door was. I tried for the longest time, then just gave up and loaded a much earlier save and completely stopped doing the main quest.
Then as an adult I picked up the remaster, got to this level again. I literally just had to press a button to jump on this overboard they give you, because the room was a half pipe and you're supposed to go over the edge where the door is.
I felt so stupid. But the good news is, I could finally finish the game and then play the third one. They stayed my favorite games for a very long time after that.
Oh man, I totally get that. I remember playing Portal 2 and getting stuck on this puzzle where I had to use a portal to move a light onto a pedestal. I was struggling with it for so long, trying all sorts of different things, but I couldn't figure it out. Finally, I decided to watch a walkthrough, and I was so embarrassed when I saw that the solution was incredibly simple. I was literally just overthinking it the whole time!
Pokemon Yellow
I got stuck on the first time you have to use cut.
You can't talk to the bush yet. You need to stand in front of it. Select cut from your pokemon in the menu and use it.
No idea where they told you to do that.
This one is embarrassing because it's not even a puzzle.
I got stuck in Link to the Past dark world dungeon 4 because i couldn't find a way through the walls... I even phoned the nintendo help line (but it didn't go through).
...
...
there are no walls, those are vertical ceilings. You just WALK under them
I missed a chest in Immortal Unchained and when I went to look up the chest locations I skipped the chest thats in the middle of a boss room assuming I wouldn't miss it. Went to 9 other chests to see they were open, and then went to the most obvious one and it was closed still
Not really a puzzle but when I was playing remnant 2, there was this door at the entrance to labyrinth with a glowing orb in the middle. I shot it, nothing happened. I spent like half a hour searching for keys, mechanisms, secret paths and even thought it's a bug.
Then I found a playthrough on YouTube and it did the exact same thing I did at the beginning. Turns out my aim is just shit and I missed the orb at point blank range.
I've been feeling like that playing Tunic. I've searched the answer on google for 2 puzzle of this game (page 9 anyone) and the answer was always so obvious. This game is a gem and the game design is incredible. Play it please !
Older point and click games.
'Ah, of course I have to take the headlice of the shoulder of a jacket hanging up in a theatre to then put on a barber's comb while he's not looking so he'll return to pirating and join my crew. Why didn't I think of that?'
James Bond night fire on the PS2, when you’re in the hotel thing sneaking past guards you get this code decoder tool to get into locked doors. I couldn’t figure out how it worked… turns out you have to hold the button down… I was just clicking it…
I gave up on Tomb Raider 3 as a kid because I couldn't figure out how to swim, and I kept drowning. I figured out that the square button made Lara move her limbs, but it only propelled her forward a tiny amount with each press. Years later, I retried it and realized you have to hold square to swim.
Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
First game I ever used the internet for help. Had to go to a friends house to do it cus my family didn’t have internet yet.
How to navigate the Tarm Ruins to get the the Ancient Ruins dungeon.
Looking back, it is actually super easy. Especially because I had the clue from the deku scrub and everything. But c’est la vie.
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.
In the very first dungeon, there's a switch, and a pot. My idiot brain tried to throw the pot onto the switch for AGES. I just couldn't do it, and I almost quit playing.
So I decide to search it up, and apparently you could just push the pot? It was so embarrasing.
I always forget basic mechanics after learning more advanced skills. Trying really complicated ways to complete a task rather than, say, jumping or finding a door. I’m a moron.
MGS. “Look on the back of the CD Case”, “snake. It’s on the back of the case!”
Practically telling you what to do. It was made more confusing because there’s an actual CD Case in the inventory. But I never made the connection that it would be on the actual game case. I ended up just scrolling through every channel.
It was some fourth wall shit my young brain couldn’t even fathom.
Not quite a puzzle, but in FreeSpace 2 there's this mission where you have to protect a large ship. Every time I played it, the ship would be destroyed, and as soon as it blew up I'd pause the game and restart the mission to save time. Took me forever, finally one time after the ship blew up I let the game go to the "losing" screen. Turns out the ship is supposed to be lost and that is actually how the mission completes.
Talos Principle 2 - S2 - Question Box
After watching a video on how to solve that, I realized the puzzle name is maybe referring to the question box in mario games. I felt so stupid after that
My buddy rented Rambo for the NES when we were kids. We beat a spider boss in a cave that was about 3 screens deep to the right, and then we tried to go deeper into the cave, but the screens seemed like the kept repeating. Buddy eventually called nintendo power hotline for help.
Turns out the screens repeat infinitely if you go right, you have to go left to get back out and go to the next level.
Portal has a tendency to do that, it introduces really complex concepts and puzzles in the hopes that when presented with a simple puzzle you won’t know how to solve it so by running out of ideas they artificially raise the difficulty
I had to look up where the door was at the end of the maze section for the presage mission in destiny 2. Did everything else fine, figured out all of the other parts of the maze puzzle. Just couldn't find an OPEN door that was pretty much right in front of me at the end of the maze. I face palmed pretty damn hard at the end of that.
Finding Kit Fisto in one of the bounty hunter missions of Lego Star Wars. Rather than go right, the direction the story mode of the level takes you, fly to the platform left of the starting point. The level last 5 seconds.
Resident Evil remake, spent I don't know how long stuck in the guardhouse because I didn't know where to use the bug spray. I had explored every room... but it turns out that one corridor was just a little bit longer than I thought it was
Okay.....so this is going to make you laugh and be a real personal embarrassment, but then again, I streamed it on Twitch to one viewer during my *fuck it I might as well stream* phase.
BotW had just come out and I was playing for the first time on stream. No hints, no backseat gaming, etc.
In the (IIRC) literal first shrine where you get the Magnetism power, I spent I think over an hour using the doors and some blocks to build a bridge from a wall to a platform with a chest, and I mean it was multi layered door/block balancing and it crumbled as I made the running jump and succeeded.
I then found out immediately after that you can just use the magnetism power on the chest itself.
God yes, way to many to count over the years. One recently that springs to mind, is Escape simulator I played with the GF. We couldnt figure a outside pyramide puzzle out, and all we had to do, was look straight up into the clouds, and there it was.
It wasn't a puzzle game but I was playing Digimon cyber sleuth. I'm telling you I probably ran around that mall for days before I gave up and looked up a guide. Walked past that coffee shop over and over and over again.
I spent like half an hour writing out equations and crap for the first Arithmancy door in Hogwarts Legacy thinking the icons represented 1 through 10. I was sitting there going "Wow either I got really bad at math or this math is hard." When I finally caved and looked up a guide, realizing the puzzle went from 0 to 9, I felt like I deserved a temporary clown license.
Lol I'll take this a step further.
Way back before YouTube or streaming video was wildly popular (like 97) I was playing Zelda on my Gameboy color and couldn't figure out this puzzle for the life of me. I ended up begging my parents to take me to the book store where I found the game guide and looked up the puzzle.
Solution: just push the case instead of picking it up. If you picked it up you can only throw and smash it instead of being able to use it as a weight on a button. I didn't know you could push in that game by just waking into it
I do this ALL.THE.TIME.
Sometimes I do the obvious thing, but don't do it quite correctly. So then I spend an hour trying other approaches. (Like maybe make a jump and fail, and I assume that the jump is a bit-too-far, when really I just didn't quite nail it.)
Two recent examples, both from Zelda:TotK (slight spoilers):
- You are told that you need to get an item from "the dragons eye", on a sky island named Dragon Head Isle. Sure enough, the map shows a place that looks like an eye; I go there and open a locked-area. But I don't see anything in the locked area. "Maybe I need something more", so I spend 2hrs fully exploring the archipeligo next to Dragon Head Island. Nothing. I go back to the original place, and just see there was a door that I had overlooked, in the dim light.
- In another part, I'm told I need to go to the island that looks like a fish. "Oh right, I've already been to that Island; I remember that it's roughly in such-and-such area." I look all over the map, but now I can't find it! I spend 20min searching wider and wider. I give up. The next day, I look at the map, and see it right away. (I'd been zoomed out a bit far on my earlier searches, and had been scanning for something that I thought would appear bigger than it did on the map.)
Not all my problems are visual (like the ones above), but often it's just overlooking something that was *intended* to be obvious.
I have a PhD. And also: I am an idiot.
In Arkham City, I forgot the slide move was thing, and eventually I got to a point where I had to use it. I looked it up and felt so stupid. Felt even stupider later when I came to a wall with Riddler’s question mark on it. I didn’t know what to do there, so I assumed I needed an ability I didn’t have. Well, I beat the game and I got no ability for it so I looked it up. All I had to do stand in front of it so a button prompt would appear. All I had to do was stand in front of it. So much for being the world’s greatest detective
I’ll do you one better. Played through all of Portal 2 when it released, got all the way up to the penultimate level and no matter what I did I just could not finish the puzzle. Couldn’t figure it out, nearly gave up entirely. Next morning I went to school and met up with one of my friends who was big into the series and asked her for help. She kind of looked at me like I was a moron, fired a Portal across the chasm, fired another on the wall right next to her and just… walked through. I’d spent half the game dealing with gels and momentum puzzles that I had totally forgotten you can just walk through a goddamned portal.
When I first played through Portal 1 I didn't know you could open doors because I clicked every button and it wouldn't open. Spent forever walking around trying to find where I need to go before I looked up a tutorial and it turns out you can open doors, I'm just stupid
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I think I figure out where, I think a corridor collapses after the gel section and you have to use the portals to get through the hole. In the commented version of the game, the developers say that that little puzzle is there for just that, reminding players to think with portals since many of the testers had their brains wired to the gels at that point in the game
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That is definitely an established phenomenon in the Portal games, where after a series of tricky puzzles you completely overcomplicate a moment like that!
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Keeping her answer a secret I see lol
There was another part where I stood for at least half an hour to figure out where I have to put portals to get over a gap, but there were no useful portal walls anywhere. The solution was to just ... jump over the gap.
My memory is hazy but there is a puzzle in the first portal where you need to send a missile through a portal to blow up a pipe with a cube in it (it was ten years ago so details maybe wrong). However, I did it another way where I arranged furniture below the pipe to stand on, got the missile to chase me then moved at the last minute. Later on with the internet learned, that's how alot of people solved the puzzle rather than the correct way. As I type this I realise I may be remembering it incorrectly.
This reminds me of a puzzle in Half Life 2... the one where you're in the compound and need to find the car batteries to open the gate. Couldn't for the life of me find a third battery. So, I built a ramp out of scrap, and jumped the wall with the buggy. It was a lot of effort.
That's how I solved it too.
My friend thought that the boss battle was bugged as he'd get to a certain point in it and then couldn't do anything. I just asked him 'Did you shoot at the moon?' 'No why would I?' He replied Me 'Because the walls you can use the portals on are made out of moonrocks.'
I mean if you don't listen to the dialogue and/or have long pauses between different parts of the game, you can easily forget about the moon rock part. That being said, the game literally MAKES you aim at the moon and has implicitly taught you to aim at any white surface, making the moon shot kinda obvious.
I mean I didn't even realise that at the time, it was just really obvious that's what the game wanted me to shoot lol And it's white.
And just cool as heck, I remember I giggled with excitement when I saw a moon through that crack. Portal 2 is in my top3 games ever easy.
I just think he wasn't listening as he played through the game pretty fast.
That’s just disappointing. One of the best moments of that game is when that moon gets a little glimmer and you’re sitting there mouth agape knowing exactly what you need to do.
Meanwhile I hadn't even thought about it, I just saw the moon and was like "I'm going to shoot the moon."
This comment just reminded me how phenomenal that fight was. I went into it blind, not really knowing what to expect- but knowing that I'd be fucking *wild* because it's portal. I never would have guessed that.
It's situations like these that make me wish GlaDos would give the player increasingly exasperated and mean responses to failing a puzzle
Spent over an hour in one area with a friend whilst playing. We could not work out how to get the box laser to the right place! Turns out the laser goes through glass..
I started playing Portal after completing every Half Life knowing its the same universe (and Portal actually feels like another HL game). I was so used to HLs parkour that at almost every level I've forgotten you can teleport in that game
Many puzzles make me feel cheated when I find the hidden solution. Portal makes me marvel that I didn't drown in the shower that morning.
There's one part where you are blocked by a fence and the portal gun won't shoot through it. I had to look up the solution but there's like only two spots in your entire view that can hold a portal. One immediately next to you and one right above you but on the other side of the fence. I felt ashamed that that was the one "puzzle" that forced me to look online.
Skyrim, it was on the claw I didn't need to spend 30 minutes looking around the entrance for an answer it was on the damn key.
Tbh Skyrim doesn't really introduce you to mechanic that you can inspect items in 3d and its not obvious enough that you do it by instincts
They probably assumed that everybody who played Skyrim when it first came out watched the interviews for it. Where Mr. Howard literally talked about the immersion of being able to view and rotate any item you can pick up, and that it might help you solve puzzles. I think they show a dragon claw while he was saying that. Also, if you do the first couple main quests that the game REALLY wants you to do before you go off exploring, the guy you saved by cutting the spiderweb in bleak falls barrow has a journal that explains puzzle along with the dragon claw. You know, after you kill him. But I agree, if you’re the type to go off the beaten path right from the get-go, or don’t read the in game flavor items (books, notes, computer terminals or audio logs in other games) you’d be lost. Edit: I think a loading screen tip says it too. I know I’ve read them all. Especially when that’s when the game would freeze for me most often and I’d read the tip 50 times before I get the Skyrim.exe is not responding window. lol
Also, one of the questlines for the civil war has you open a door like that, and I'm like 83% sure that one of the characters mentions how the door looks like the same animals on the claw.
It's honestly such a shitty puzzle. Not because the concept of inspecting the claw is in itself bad, but they do the same puzzle over and over and over. Once you figure out the first time it just becomes a chore to do the rest
Yea its like can you even really call those puzzles? Its the same concept as put the square in the square hole. If the key gives you the answer the real puzzle is getting the key which never really was a puzzle.
Sigh, i just brute forced all those puzzles back in 2011. Had no idea the solutions was in the key. Always thought the solution was in the door and markings in those hallways with the puzzles and then just kept turning until it clicked.
Sure, but the very first time you get the claw it comes with a note with "it's within the palm of your hand" or something like it. I really enjoyed that, but sadly they never did anything else with it.
I just brute forced those for so long before realizing. Still do sometimes
There's only 27 possibilities, they're not very good security devices EDIT: This post has 27 upvotes, haha
They’re not to keep you out. They’re to keep the dead in.
Ancient Nords probably weren't great at math.
That one took me a semi reasonable amount of time to figure out but I'll be damned if I don't forget about it nearly every single time I start a new file and get to it.
That puzzle would be absurdly obvious to a character living in Skyrim, who could just look at the object they're holding. So obvious that it's actually immersion-breaking. The in-world builders of the tomb would never go to that much trouble over such an idiotic "test". However, it's not obvious to someone playing a game that inspecting and rotating objects in your inventory is even a thing you can do. A lot of people probably learned about that capability from promo videos rather than the game itself.
They're supposedly not to lock you out, if you have the key. They're to lock the draugr in, and keep anyone without the claw from releasing them. The "puzzle" exists to make sure the key wielder is sapient and not, say, a loose draugr. Or so I've picked up, hanging around r/teslore.
Lol "I am not a Draugr"
I'm literally only learning of it now as I read these comments lol I played skyrim when it came out and remember just brute forcing solutions.
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Snake Snake Whale
The Skyrim one that always gets me is the 4 pillars that rotate each other in bleak falls barrow I think. I always look up the order you need to set them to the symbol behind them to get it right since it just doesn’t click in my brain the way you’re supposed to do it.
I hate those because once you've figured out one you know them all. It was really lazy to not come up with different puzzles
Yeah I was hyped af the first time it happened as well
That was the one that jumped to mind for me as well.
Omg or the claw that is sitting right in front of the door. I remember specifically looking that one up and feeling dumb
It’s alright, I spent 30 minutes in that same dungeon looking for a puzzle to open a door. Because I didn’t see the chain that was right next to it
the only reason I know that one is Todd did a developer walkthrough (complete with "see that mountain? You can walk over there") and the solution was in the video
I’ve got a good one. The first time I played LoZ: wind waker, I got to the tower of the gods, there was a room where you had to get a statue across a small gap. It was a statue that you could take control of, but statues can’t jump. I spent over an hour trying to get to get this little statue to hop across the gap before I realized I could just…. Pick it up and jump over the gap myself. I’ve replayed the game several times and each time I reach that little hop I’m filled with shame.
That exact thing happened on game grumps
That makes me feel so much better lol.
Oh god. Same game. I don't remember what point, but pretty far on, I think. You had to jump in a hole. That was the whole puzzle.
It’s amazing how you just…… forget about the simple options once you get your expanded tool kit.
I had a block a bit later, in the Earth Temple. You have to hold down both switches to make the stairs form, and there's purple chuchus that'll fight you. I got stuck for *weeks* on that room, and ran around the entire game world trying to figure it out. I had to buy the guide in order to figure out to use fire arrows to shoot the curtains. I had *exactly* the same issue a couple years prior with Majora's Mask, in Ikana Castle.
Yes. earlier today as I was playing The Talos Principle. Absolutely stuck for two days on a puzzle called Hall of Pressure Plates and the solution which I had to look up online was stupid simple. Very annoying lol
The Talos Principle tricked me like that a few times. I made it harder than it really was.
It’s fun when you figure it out. Just not fun trying to figure it out. It’s a hard balance to strike.
I just got done with Road to Gehenna! I played it after having not played the base game for over a year and that was a HUGE mistake. I was immediately getting stumped left and right. The DLC is clearly the like "hard levels" meant to be done after the main game. There were quite a few puzzles where I was just walking up and down, up and down just trying to figure out what the heck the puzzle even WAS so that I could then try to solve the puzzle. That super open level that the puzzles are set in psych me out more than the puzzle itself at times.
Did you happen to play the insane final levels in Gehenna? I think you have to find all the stars to unlock if memory serves, but it’s been 8 years for me. Couldn’t believe how crazy those last levels were, after beating the entire game without help I didn’t even know where to begin.
I just started the last night and oh man these puzzles are insane. The only good thing about them is that each room is too small so the options are technically limited
Loved Road to Gehenna Really reminded me of Reddit 10+years ago. Reading through all the citizen messages was so nostalgic. There really used to be a bigger sense of community and decorum.
I just played that puzzle today! I tried it for a while, was stumped, and then decided to go finish the other puzzles in the level. I went back and got really close to looking up the solution, but I was able to figure it out. Felt pretty dumb for not noticing something simple earlier lol. This game is really fascinating, I'm loving it so far.
I tried the demo for the sequel and got stuck on the very first room, because I couldn't figure out how to turn off a barrier. The thing is, it was the kind of barrier you can just walk through. It's only there to stop you from taking puzzle tools with you to the next area.
Oh my gosh, same thing happened to me! I searched every corner, looked through every fence... Tried everything I could think of to figure out how to get past that wall, and thought to myself that the developers weren't playing around with the difficulty in the sequel... All to realize (by accident) that I could just... Walk through it haha. In our defense, the colours of the walls are quite similar, and when there's just been an impenetrable wall previously... It's an easy (albeit silly) mistake to make.
I’m playing the new one atm and it’s quite a bit easier than the original imo. This has lead to me massively overthinking a puzzle a few times and having to look up the solution, feeling like a comlete idiot a few times.
I got stuck on the first puzzle of some Tomb Raider game because the solution was for Lara to push a giant boulder ontop of a wooden plank and then jump on the other side to launch the boulder into the air. Just the idea of her weight being able to do that was so cartoony and unrealistic that when I finally looked up the solution, i couldn't stop laughing at it. Such very simple video game logic that i just couldn't figure out because I took the game too seriously, lol.
Tomb raider got me too
Man if I could go back to watching my dad play Tomb Raider on PS1 and being too scared to take the controller because I didn't want to die... OG Tomb Raider holds a place in my heart.
I'm so glad I not the only one with core memories like this! However, I was a bossy kid, so I had the laptop open with Stella's Tomb Raider guide, telling him where to go. Even with the guide, I was still not confident taking the controller!
I find it wild you had a laptop and Internet when playing OG tomb raider
Ps1s did exist past their launch date. Not to make you feel old, but some of us were young at different times!
Oh I know, and I'm a fresh and spry 35yr old! My memory is looking in the latest copy of a game magazine while my dad failed at the game, and me not daring to point out the hole in the wall he hadn't seen because he was a fragile, self important arse that wouldn't like a 9yr old being better than him.
Ahh tomb raider legend
Same lol, it was so obvious it would never work I never thought to try it but game physics do whatever they want lol
Ugh, the automaton! I shot the mirror robot thing for like four minutes trying to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do.
This is the one I was gonna mention lol! I spent at least an hour trying to figure it out.
Not so much a puzzle but I got stuck on the final Sonic Fronteirs DLC 3 boss. Turns out you had to press the right bumper at the start of the fight to be able to attack the guy. That's all it was. If you tried to attack him like every other boss he'd recover all his health whereas pressing right bumper changed where you hit him which was never established with any other boss
Watched a video mentioning that and how it's kinda crappy that it's the only boss to do that.
Same, I was just kicking his ass for 2 hours before I gave up and beat it next day after looking up what to do.
I had to look up a tutorial for Hardspace Shipbreakers on how to start level two. You just click on the ship you want. It was so stupidly easy and I could not figure it out. I thought there were levels and there isn't. Good news, the question gets asked quiet often on the subreddit, so at least I'm not alone on feeling dumb on this one lol.
If you think that's bad, I had to look up how yo use the tethers...in the tether tutorial area I don't know if I spaced out randomly or if I stopped paying attention, but when it was time to learn how to use em, I went "What the fuck? What am I doing?" Spent the better part of 5 or 6 minutes trying to figure out what to do
To be fair with Shipbreaker, depending when you got the game they explained NOTHING. A couple of other things that have really simple solutions if you know what you're doing, disassembling Class 2 engines, dealing with reactors, how to stop the wires from shocking you, how to depressurize ships that are only partially pressurized. Took a lot of explocding engines, space nukes and slicing live wires to figure those out. Though, I'll admit, I sometimes see how far I can get cockpit windows to go by cutting the external hardpoints with the cabin pressurized, bonus points if a seat flies out.
I couldn't figure out how to start the final mission on Nioh for years. I beat the Nobunaga dual boss fight before unlocking divine weapons. Because up until that mission, every quest was a scroll. The ship took you back to the region select screen. And there was a button that took you there directly, so I didn't click the ship icon for that, either. I googled. Many times. Everything said that there should be this other mission, and I just couldn't find it. Apparently nobody else ever had trouble with this.
It happens when the puzzle is simple but you expect it to be some next level stuff. Usually it's designed as such to throw the player off their game, first they give you complex puzzles, then some easy ones which you expect to be at the same level which just causes confusion. I really like developers doing some outside the box stuff like this. Of course some are just plain bad design.
This is me, I do this constantly. Any time I've been stuck is because I was imagining some 4D chess moves and just had to come back to it a day or two later with some obvious solutions that almost always work.
Lego Indiana Jones, there is a staircase that i just couldn't climb. Since there are parts you cant access until you complete tasks, I wandered around for a long time trying to find the thing i missed. Turns out, i kept falling off the stupid stairs because they are at a slight angle, and you have to. adjust where you are aimed half way, or you fall off.
The Last of Us. I was running around in a skyscraper when this boss clicker just kept messing me up. I died over and over and over again. I died so many times that the game kept prompting me to go to an easy setting, and I refused. Then I wasted another few hours just dying and dying to this thing, and finally, I broke down and accepted the easier game setting. But then I still COULD NOT BEAT IT! Even on the easiest freaking setting, and I was still wasting hours on it! Finally, I googled it, and all I had to do was run away and not fight it. Just had to run to an elevator shaft and leave. That one made me sit in some self reflection for a long time.
> That one made me sit in some self reflection for a long time. [This you?](https://imgur.com/t/narcos/We8SW)
I was going to be very disappointed if that wasn't the image I was thinking of, lol Edit: spelling is hard
Is it the first game? Where you fall into that basement place and need to start the generator? That’s the only one I can think of but maybe I’m wrong lol
It was the first game, but I played it a decade ago so the memory is a little fuzzy, but the generator sounds familiar. I assumed I had to fight and kill the boss clicker because I had earlier been in the school gym boss clicker fight. But this time, I kept running out of ammo and couldn't hide well enough and get enough damage in before it would one shot me. I then remembered getting away from it and being futher into the skyscrapper and encountering another clicker, but this time, I picked a lock door and got away in time without wasting hours trying to fight it.
I hate when games do a switch up without being obvious in some way about it - either a game where you fight everything you suddenly need to run from this one enemy, or a game where you hide from everything and now you need to fight this time. You end up wasting time and ammo wondering why you can’t kill the thing.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There's a temple where you have to expose the boss monster to sunlight to get him to reveal his true form. I knew where a room with sunlight was, and I knew that the floor there looked bombable (which would send sunlight down to a lower floor), but I couldn't figure out how to actually bomb the floor. BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW LINK COULD THROW HIS BOMBS. I kept placing them down outside of the wall, which was too far to break the floor. \--- NieR Replicant. In the temple where you find the Prince of Facade, there's a room you instantly fail if you ever run or evade. But Nier's walking speed was too slow for me to sneak my way through the obstacles (because I didn't realize Nier could fit between the firing ranges), so I ended up relying on the forward momentum you get from weapon attacks. Took me forever to get through, and if I may toot my own horn, it involved a lot of both luck and skill. Lent the game to a friend of mine who's less experienced with video games. Asked her how she solved that puzzle. SO IT TURNS OUT NIER CAN WALK FORWARD WHILE BLOCKING
I had that same problem with Zelda. Did you realise every time you find bombs it TELLS you you can throw them?! I just clicked through that message and didn't read it.
Yep, and they conveniently leave a chest with bombs two rooms away so that message WILL proc right before encountering that room. They knew people were having trouble with that puzzle and tried to leave as many hints as possible.
I failed that puzzle and a few others... I'm way too "modern gaming" (or dumb) to solve ALttP's many of puzzles. In fact, I'm stuck on the ice temple level RN and have been a few months. It's so freakin long and requires a lot of back tracking.
The way I always did it as a kid is to clear the next dungeon first, as you get an item you can use to "cheat" past the sadistic backtracking.
I had the exact same problem with Oracle of Ages back in the day. You needed to throw a bomb over a wall in one of the dungeons to trigger a switch to progress. I could not work it out for days. It was only when I went back and played the goron minigame with throwing the meat over walls that it clicked, maybe I can throw bombs over the same type of wall too!
Mine wasn't even a puzzle. Cyberpunk, the assignment said to stalk a car. The chase was quite long and uneventful, until the car stopped (an accident, I think?) I get out of the car and walk towards them, a gunman comes out and I shoot at him, I don't remember why I thought it was a threat. I'm immediately killed and have to repeat the whole chase I do the same thing three or four more times trying to engage the enemy before I'm in range, but each time he does massive damage and kills me Until I realized he wasn't an enemy, that I just had to talk to him. Almost an hour wasted in the intro of the mission It was the mission >!in which you meet for the first time the man who wants to be crucified live!<
I kept shooting 006 in goldeneye by accident when meeting him
Well, after a while I shot him out of pure sadism. He had to die anyway...
You're killed? Maybe it was an earlier patch because you can actually easily kill everyone in that car, succeed in the mission, and be done with the whole thing without even going through the >!crucifixion!< questline.
This was a few months after the game's release, before the balance changes
Dude I 100% wasted them the first time I played that mission and the mission was over with the fixer calling to end it and everything. Then I read somewhere online to just get in and realized I missed a whole ass mission. What’s worse is I still haven’t gotten to the end of it because my last play through I pissed off that corpo woman apparently too much and she basically said “you’re done” and I was told not to go further with them.
Are you markiplier? He did that exact same thing…
Oh I watched Mark's security breach vids after already making the same blunder. It's funny, I watched a lot of other POV's after and they all made the exact same mistake. Guess the exit's too dark to actually see the exit
I remember many comments on that video saying that they also got stuck on that part as well.
If half of your playerbase has to lookup online how to simply get out of a room it's just bad game design, and while not having played the game but watched some of it Steel Wool seem to really suck at game design in general
I was playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider and I was totally stuck. Watched a video and saw that one of the walls was climbable. There's a texture that all climbable walls have, but it was so dark that I couldn't see it.
I seem to do this constantly. Had similar issues in horizon zero dawn 2. Also. Sometimes there’s like, a ladder and I just keep not seeing it.
This is a frustration in the new Tomb Raiders. I love the idea of subtly having white markings where you can climb, but there’s plenty of places that look almost identical that you can’t. Similarly, those rigged/bumpy surfaces can be misleading too.
This is my favorite story to share: So way back when, I was playing Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS. I got to this part in the game where I had to make an imprint on the map to chart a course to a new island. Nothing you can do on the system will work. No button press, nothing on the touchscreen, no mic, nothing did anything. When I played DS games, I had a habit of closing the system to think more about a puzzle; I did this a lot with Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton games. So here I am, closing the DS and then as soon as it shuts, it plays a chime! Then I realized that's exactly what I had to do! I opened it right back up and sure enough, the imprint had been transferred! It was amazing. Nintendo is so creative.
There's an identical situation in Hotel Dusk. I love them. F for those who play on an uncloseable 2DS.
You can still trigger the correct response from the game with 2DSes (and virtual consoles for that matter) by suspending the system, but yeah, the actual puzzle element of it doesn't translate.
the puzzle where you have to blow out the candles blew my mind I was like "Surely this isn't gonna work..... right?"
The ghost ship level puzzle got me! Where you have to pull 5 levers in a specific order, you're given 5 numbers jumbled up on the screen. So I pull the levers in the order, reading left to right and nothing happens. I did it about a dozen times and finally looked up the solution. Turns out each number represents the location of a lever and you had to pull the lever located where 1 appears in the sequence first and so on. Very simple, but probably the hardest a Zelda puzzle has stumped me in my adult life.
Ah, phantom hourglass. That exact puzzle is the only thing I really remember about that game, but it was ingenious!
The amount of times I've spent a ton of time staring at a puzzle only to look at a video and immediately say "oh for fucks sakes..."
Love it when the light bulb comes on
Always sucks when you're looking for a walkthrough of a certain puzzle that's taken you an hour up to that point, and the video is like a minute and a half long.
When "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was released, I was so engrossed that I played incessantly, only to hit a snag in the notorious Water Temple. It took me several days to discover that the room where I found the Longshot actually had an exit. Mistakenly, I had backtracked using the same entrance, under the impression that obtaining the Longshot was the room's sole purpose.
Zelda Wind Waker. I had to light some torches on fire with my handheld torch and one of the torches was on a tall ledge across a gap. The ledge was just a few pixels too high for me to jump up, and the gap was just barely too big for me to jump across. I thought something was wrong with my game because I just couldn’t make it. I’m about to rage quit. My 5-year old comes in to the room to. watch me play, and says “why don’t you just throw the torch?” And it worked. First try. /facepalm
Doom 2016. Death from above achievement. Gotta get a bunch of glory kills from high in the air. Running off ledges trying to drop on zombies and shit. Spent ages, couldn't nail it. Turns out I just forgot I had a double jump.
I got stuck on the very last level of Storyteller because I didn’t realize that putting the Devil in a certain scene affected the mechanics afterwards and wasn’t just a cutesy animation. Wanted to kick myself because I hadn’t had to look any solutions up until then.
Max Payne. Right at the end, I was supposed to shoot a chain or a line or something. Couldn't figure it out. Nothing in the game had apparently prepared me for environmental destruction as a game element.
Boss fight of Max Payne 2, I think the camera did zoom in on those wooden beams you're supposed to shoot before the fight but it wasn't very obvious.
You mean the entire game The Witness? Yes.
I played the 2016 Doom game. Near the very start of the game (literally a few seconds in) you go through a passage and it teaches you how to do glory kills. There is a door at the end of the passage. The door does not open. I wondered around for about fifteen minutes trying every nook and cranny, pressing every button trying to figure out where I was supposed to go. Turns out you have to look down at a dead dude on the ground and take his shotgun before it will allow you to open the door. I had to find an online tutorial on how to make it through the first 30 seconds of Doom!
Yes, I tend to assume puzzles are much more complex than they are a lot of times.
I can’t believe you’d miss something you can only see in your inventory, the inventory is so well optimized and fun to spend time in…
I assume your comment was meant to be in reply to the skyrim comment.
Bizarre. Yes it was, I must have clicked the wrong comment. Or the Reddit app is trash…
Happened to me with Resident Evil 1. Made it all the way until I needed to use the medallions. Bought the guide just to find out the medallions was inside the books and all i needed to do was inspect and open them. Never used the guide to finish the game but that one time
I spent 2 hours running around Blasphemous trying to find where to go. I literally had just missed a door in a room. Had to look it up and felt so dumb.
me when I’m playing Professor Layton and I wasted a hint coin on a super obvious answer
I remember being super excited for Professor Layton, being hot off the Ace Attorney games I was expecting a VN style game. Took me awhile to accept the fact I was going to be doing lots of puzzles completely unrelated to the plot. Yeah I ended up wasting a lot of hint coins.
I love both series so much, I remember being so hyped when the crossover originally announced back then. im super excited for the new Layton game it’s been like ten years since the last mainline one but not sure how well the touch screen puzzles will translate to the switch
I get so angry when I spent hint coins like I don’t want to even though I’m sitting on 200 of them *because what if I need them more later on??* and also I hate having to admit I’m too dumb for some of those stupidly obvious puzzles [also this](https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/pythagorean-fear-em)
OMG SAME. hint coins activate my hoarding lizard brain so much lmao. im not sure what’s worse: having to spend hint coins or losing picarats on a super obvious 20 picarat puzzle bc I overthink
It was less me, and more my roommate. Was playing Zelda Skyward Sword. There was a puzzle where you had to do something with an eye above the door. He couldn't figure it out for the life of him, and I was doing the 'I'm far too amused by your frustration to help' thing. Pretty much all Zelda games prior to this solved it by shooting the eye or something along those lines. So of course that's the first thing he tries. And of course fails, then tries all sorts of other cockamamie schemes... only to get frustrated, curse out the eye, hold the sword really high up in the air, and twirl it around out of spite to screw around with it. ... eye gets dizzy and the door opens. The swearing was *epic.*
What about puzzles where you look up the solution and you're like, "no sane person would even think about that," and it's deliberately made too complex, confusing to make no logical sense.
There is the infamous moon logic in older adventures games, very prevalent in the adventure games made by Sierra back in the days.
I tried playing Space Quest and there's a part early on where you have to get across this swamp filled with alligators or something, and even after reading a bunch of guides and faqs I literally couldn't figure out how to do it. Or, many years ago, I borrowed Grim Fandango from a friend. I'm usually pretty good at those LucasArts games but I remember for a whole weekend I couldn't figure out how to even get past the first screen and I basically just gave up and stopped at that point.
Specific examples don't come to mind, but I've definitely done it And yet simultaneously, nothing kills me more than watching a video of someone doing a playthrough (or Chris Ramsay doing a puzzle box) and seeing them struggle to figure out something you've known the solution to for five minutes. No matter who it is that's missing the obvious, it's nothing but abject pain and misery 😫
Watching people struggle at something which I find to be relatively-easy (or otherwise less-complicated), when I KNOW what to do, is just one reason why I can't watch gaming streams. No one likes a backseat gamer, and I'm 100% not trying to be that, but the frustration is real.
That's the reason I buy games. Because a streamer is doing it SO WRONG. Best advertisement.
So many Tears of the Kingdom ones. Like my brain just wouldn't remember ASCEND
In the game Supraland there's a 'puzzle' that people overthink so frequently the devs added a npc afterward that tells you you probably did, too. Iirc, the first part involves doing some back and forth to open a gate and keep it open, but the second one you can just spawn a block or something and get through in five seconds.
I was playing Myst, which is infamous for its difficult puzzles, but this one in particular stumped me. You had to enter a three digit number to enter a rocket ship, and I had that code. There are two levers. One advances the first and middle digit, the other advances the middle and last… and I could *not* get the number to set! I was sitting there studying it… even drew out a decision tree… could not figure it out for the life of me. I was sitting there staring at it, trying to enter it again… and I discovered that you could *hold down* the lever and it did something else - rotated the middle one I think? I was furious. I spent over an hour stuck on it.
For the record, that puzzle lets you gain access to the big gear instead of the rocket.
I fired that game up not too long ago after a \~three decade hiatus and it ended like it did back then. Me frustrated and quitting. I simply don't have the patience or intellect or whatever it takes to get into Myst.
Ooh I have a good one! When I was a child I was playing Jak 2 and having an absolute blast. But then I got stuck in a level where you can't backtrack. It was this dungeon-like building full of bad guys inside of the city. I just could not figure out where the next door was. I tried for the longest time, then just gave up and loaded a much earlier save and completely stopped doing the main quest. Then as an adult I picked up the remaster, got to this level again. I literally just had to press a button to jump on this overboard they give you, because the room was a half pipe and you're supposed to go over the edge where the door is. I felt so stupid. But the good news is, I could finally finish the game and then play the third one. They stayed my favorite games for a very long time after that.
Oh man, I totally get that. I remember playing Portal 2 and getting stuck on this puzzle where I had to use a portal to move a light onto a pedestal. I was struggling with it for so long, trying all sorts of different things, but I couldn't figure it out. Finally, I decided to watch a walkthrough, and I was so embarrassed when I saw that the solution was incredibly simple. I was literally just overthinking it the whole time!
The very first sliding door in Half Life: Alyx. Also my very first VR game
Recently played Talos Principle and just, yes....
Pokemon Yellow I got stuck on the first time you have to use cut. You can't talk to the bush yet. You need to stand in front of it. Select cut from your pokemon in the menu and use it. No idea where they told you to do that.
This one is embarrassing because it's not even a puzzle. I got stuck in Link to the Past dark world dungeon 4 because i couldn't find a way through the walls... I even phoned the nintendo help line (but it didn't go through). ... ... there are no walls, those are vertical ceilings. You just WALK under them
I missed a chest in Immortal Unchained and when I went to look up the chest locations I skipped the chest thats in the middle of a boss room assuming I wouldn't miss it. Went to 9 other chests to see they were open, and then went to the most obvious one and it was closed still
Not really a puzzle but when I was playing remnant 2, there was this door at the entrance to labyrinth with a glowing orb in the middle. I shot it, nothing happened. I spent like half a hour searching for keys, mechanisms, secret paths and even thought it's a bug. Then I found a playthrough on YouTube and it did the exact same thing I did at the beginning. Turns out my aim is just shit and I missed the orb at point blank range.
Yes, every game that had puzzles because I'm fucking dumb.
I've been feeling like that playing Tunic. I've searched the answer on google for 2 puzzle of this game (page 9 anyone) and the answer was always so obvious. This game is a gem and the game design is incredible. Play it please !
La Mulana is full of these, because it's also full of very difficult ones as well so you get the brain farts.
Older point and click games. 'Ah, of course I have to take the headlice of the shoulder of a jacket hanging up in a theatre to then put on a barber's comb while he's not looking so he'll return to pirating and join my crew. Why didn't I think of that?'
“You’re, you’re …making it harder then it is “- Peter Griffin
James Bond night fire on the PS2, when you’re in the hotel thing sneaking past guards you get this code decoder tool to get into locked doors. I couldn’t figure out how it worked… turns out you have to hold the button down… I was just clicking it…
I gave up on Tomb Raider 3 as a kid because I couldn't figure out how to swim, and I kept drowning. I figured out that the square button made Lara move her limbs, but it only propelled her forward a tiny amount with each press. Years later, I retried it and realized you have to hold square to swim.
Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons First game I ever used the internet for help. Had to go to a friends house to do it cus my family didn’t have internet yet. How to navigate the Tarm Ruins to get the the Ancient Ruins dungeon. Looking back, it is actually super easy. Especially because I had the clue from the deku scrub and everything. But c’est la vie.
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. In the very first dungeon, there's a switch, and a pot. My idiot brain tried to throw the pot onto the switch for AGES. I just couldn't do it, and I almost quit playing. So I decide to search it up, and apparently you could just push the pot? It was so embarrasing.
I always forget basic mechanics after learning more advanced skills. Trying really complicated ways to complete a task rather than, say, jumping or finding a door. I’m a moron.
MGS. “Look on the back of the CD Case”, “snake. It’s on the back of the case!” Practically telling you what to do. It was made more confusing because there’s an actual CD Case in the inventory. But I never made the connection that it would be on the actual game case. I ended up just scrolling through every channel. It was some fourth wall shit my young brain couldn’t even fathom.
Basically every single level of Baba Is You is like this lol
Not quite a puzzle, but in FreeSpace 2 there's this mission where you have to protect a large ship. Every time I played it, the ship would be destroyed, and as soon as it blew up I'd pause the game and restart the mission to save time. Took me forever, finally one time after the ship blew up I let the game go to the "losing" screen. Turns out the ship is supposed to be lost and that is actually how the mission completes.
Basically every single player game I play, and I only play single player games.
Skyrim, the patterns on the claws….
Talos Principle 2 - S2 - Question Box After watching a video on how to solve that, I realized the puzzle name is maybe referring to the question box in mario games. I felt so stupid after that
There's a Talos Principle 2???
Yeah, this has happened to me enough times that I decided I will no longer resort to watching a video, unless I'm actually stuck for like hours.
Pretty sure I remember Markiplier got stuck at that same section for a long time lol. It's easy to miss!
I have played Portal, yes
My buddy rented Rambo for the NES when we were kids. We beat a spider boss in a cave that was about 3 screens deep to the right, and then we tried to go deeper into the cave, but the screens seemed like the kept repeating. Buddy eventually called nintendo power hotline for help. Turns out the screens repeat infinitely if you go right, you have to go left to get back out and go to the next level.
Portal has a tendency to do that, it introduces really complex concepts and puzzles in the hopes that when presented with a simple puzzle you won’t know how to solve it so by running out of ideas they artificially raise the difficulty
I had to look up where the door was at the end of the maze section for the presage mission in destiny 2. Did everything else fine, figured out all of the other parts of the maze puzzle. Just couldn't find an OPEN door that was pretty much right in front of me at the end of the maze. I face palmed pretty damn hard at the end of that.
Finding Kit Fisto in one of the bounty hunter missions of Lego Star Wars. Rather than go right, the direction the story mode of the level takes you, fly to the platform left of the starting point. The level last 5 seconds.
Resident Evil remake, spent I don't know how long stuck in the guardhouse because I didn't know where to use the bug spray. I had explored every room... but it turns out that one corridor was just a little bit longer than I thought it was
Okay.....so this is going to make you laugh and be a real personal embarrassment, but then again, I streamed it on Twitch to one viewer during my *fuck it I might as well stream* phase. BotW had just come out and I was playing for the first time on stream. No hints, no backseat gaming, etc. In the (IIRC) literal first shrine where you get the Magnetism power, I spent I think over an hour using the doors and some blocks to build a bridge from a wall to a platform with a chest, and I mean it was multi layered door/block balancing and it crumbled as I made the running jump and succeeded. I then found out immediately after that you can just use the magnetism power on the chest itself.
God yes, way to many to count over the years. One recently that springs to mind, is Escape simulator I played with the GF. We couldnt figure a outside pyramide puzzle out, and all we had to do, was look straight up into the clouds, and there it was.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Had to look up the part where you close the DS to copy the thing to the bottom half of the paper.
It wasn't a puzzle game but I was playing Digimon cyber sleuth. I'm telling you I probably ran around that mall for days before I gave up and looked up a guide. Walked past that coffee shop over and over and over again.
I spent like half an hour writing out equations and crap for the first Arithmancy door in Hogwarts Legacy thinking the icons represented 1 through 10. I was sitting there going "Wow either I got really bad at math or this math is hard." When I finally caved and looked up a guide, realizing the puzzle went from 0 to 9, I felt like I deserved a temporary clown license.
It happens but I never regret looking it up. I have zero patience for being stuck on a video game puzzle
Lol I'll take this a step further. Way back before YouTube or streaming video was wildly popular (like 97) I was playing Zelda on my Gameboy color and couldn't figure out this puzzle for the life of me. I ended up begging my parents to take me to the book store where I found the game guide and looked up the puzzle. Solution: just push the case instead of picking it up. If you picked it up you can only throw and smash it instead of being able to use it as a weight on a button. I didn't know you could push in that game by just waking into it
I do this ALL.THE.TIME. Sometimes I do the obvious thing, but don't do it quite correctly. So then I spend an hour trying other approaches. (Like maybe make a jump and fail, and I assume that the jump is a bit-too-far, when really I just didn't quite nail it.) Two recent examples, both from Zelda:TotK (slight spoilers): - You are told that you need to get an item from "the dragons eye", on a sky island named Dragon Head Isle. Sure enough, the map shows a place that looks like an eye; I go there and open a locked-area. But I don't see anything in the locked area. "Maybe I need something more", so I spend 2hrs fully exploring the archipeligo next to Dragon Head Island. Nothing. I go back to the original place, and just see there was a door that I had overlooked, in the dim light. - In another part, I'm told I need to go to the island that looks like a fish. "Oh right, I've already been to that Island; I remember that it's roughly in such-and-such area." I look all over the map, but now I can't find it! I spend 20min searching wider and wider. I give up. The next day, I look at the map, and see it right away. (I'd been zoomed out a bit far on my earlier searches, and had been scanning for something that I thought would appear bigger than it did on the map.) Not all my problems are visual (like the ones above), but often it's just overlooking something that was *intended* to be obvious. I have a PhD. And also: I am an idiot.
Darksiders 2 in the city of the dead where you need to use soul splitter on top of this moving platform to get past a gate
In Arkham City, I forgot the slide move was thing, and eventually I got to a point where I had to use it. I looked it up and felt so stupid. Felt even stupider later when I came to a wall with Riddler’s question mark on it. I didn’t know what to do there, so I assumed I needed an ability I didn’t have. Well, I beat the game and I got no ability for it so I looked it up. All I had to do stand in front of it so a button prompt would appear. All I had to do was stand in front of it. So much for being the world’s greatest detective