Worst puzzles ever?

What is the worst puzzle you've ever come across a game? Not genre specific but some early Adventure games very really notoriously bad about this.

I think this is absolutely the worst one I've ever seen. (If you click play, it should auto find the part but if it won't, it's at 19:13)

[embedded media]

What the actual hell is that game?

I feel like I just rolled a critical failure on a sanity check and this is the result.

As for your question - one of the recent Deponia games requires you to actually go into your game settings and lower your sound to zero to get past a puzzle related to sound. The 4th wall break was refreshing but I have to confess it took a hint from a developer for me to figure it out.

I'm gonna go with the Secret Challenges in DDR Extreme 2 for home consoles - challenges in a dancing game where the game doesn't tell you what you have to do, and while sometimes it's something you could aspire to anyway ("Get an A or higher"), sometimes it's the exact opposite of that ("Pass with no more than 6.5 million points"), or something completely off the wall ("Finish with a max combo of EXACTLY 200").

These might not be so bad if the game outright told you what to do to complete the Challenge, but it doesn't - you just have to stumble into it or look it up in an FAQ. Oh, you can buy hints for some of them (with the credits you'd normally use to buy new songs)... but then you can't buy hints for others, for some reason.

If you complete these Secret Missions, you earn the "pleasure" of doing Hidden Missions, which task you with doing even more insane things. And a lot of these Missions are required in order to unlock specific songs, that you as a player might just want to dance to. You know, like, actually do the thing that's fun in DDR.

A runner up is the Secret Arrows in the same game - arrows which never appear on the step charts, but grant large amounts of shop credits if you "find" them during a song (by stepping on the arrow at the right time). You're never told where they are (except, again, for hints that can be bought for some of the songs). There's no reason to ever step there if you're dancing the song correctly. And yet, the designers thought it would be a good idea to throw in this "feature" to distract you even more from the core gameplay you know and love.

A great songlist, good technical performance... and yet DDR Extreme 2 was an absolute nightmare to play because of terrible game designers that insisted on Gilding the Lily.

Water Temple.

The water temple is great, its just taking the boots on and off from the menu that makes it feel awful. The 3DS remake shows just how intelligently designed the temple itself is, and having the boots asigned to a button makes it a breeze.

Block puzzles are the worst, they arent hard, they are boring. Solving the puzzles is easy but then you have to wait until you have actually finished pushing the blocks around to reap the benefits of solving it... Actually any puzzle that takes longer to actually play out then it does to solve in your mind is an annoying waste of time imo.

Yeah I kinda wish we could leave the complaining about the OOT water temple (which has more or less become a meme) behind and focus on he real badly designed and hard dungeon.

The Majora's mask water temple!

Jokes aside since I am a point-and-click fan i have soooo many dumb puzzles to choose from but I guess my "favorite" is from Limbo of the Lost, a very bad game in general. You have a empty vial and need to present a character with a green potion. So what do you do? You fill the vial with water and add saffron because blue+yellow equals green! This is stupid in so many ways:

Water is not blue in a "child-drawing-with-crayons" kind of way.
Saffron does not automatically make something yellow.
Mixing the two is not like mixing colors.

I also have to give an "honoroble" mention to the lego games where there are waaaay to many instances of flailing around in an area before finding that last destroyable object needed to build something new.

Overall I tend to forgive harder puzzles once the solution becomes clear. I have a much harder time handling action games were the puzzle is simple but the execution is almost impossible due to bad game design and/or controls. The ball-pushing puzzles of Sonic 06 and Yooka-Layle are prime examples!

When I was a young boy (way back when lol) I had a game on my sega megadrive (the name lost to time) that had a puzzle involving 5 different colored statues and 5 different plaques that you needed to put into their appropriate place.
You could get a hint if you needed. The hint : put them into the correct order.
Never finished that game!

The final dungeon of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has a puzzle, if you can call it that, with a sign that reads "Beyond Beyond Beyond Before Before". The solution? You have to hit the switch the the far side of the room 3 times, and the near side 2 times.

I've always stood by that this puzzle is one of the worst I've ever seen. Not because it's too hard. But because it's so... nothing. It's not thought provoking, it's not hard, it doesn't add to the atmosphere, it doesn't do anything. The designers just needed another puzzle, so they threw this room in. It's basically a running joke in my house for a bad puzzle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Quest_(game)
The whole game was a huge puzzle, of extreme difficulty.
I am not talking about tricky puzzles. It was EXTREMELY difficult.
I was a teenager when I attempted to solve it.
Eventually failed.

The Onimusha 3 sliding puzzle trasure boxes, required to unlock health/magic power up gems, sure the first 5 or 6 optional dungeons where you had to kill every enemy in the arena to THEN spawn the chest you had to solve to get your reward were ok but when they ramped up the number of lines/nodes on the final ones it became annoying, i solved them by randomly moving pieces until it worked...

Yeah same here :biggrin:.

Last dungeon of Legand of zelda, while I am young i did not get access to the internet outside of school until i was 17. I spent the summer and winter when I was 13 or 14 trying to figure out how to defeat Gannon. (Silver arrow by the way.) Until I went into a local used game store, got a guide for it off the shelf and flipped through it to find it... I was also jealous that the guide had a full map and I had spent time drawing my own xp

Off the top of my head, some memorable ones;
King's Quest 5(?) requires you to save a mouse from a cat. This happens about 1 hour into the game and about 3 hours later the mouse will save you from prison. If you didn't save the mouse... there's no way of knowing you can't escape
Metal Gear Solid has a (admittedly great) terrible puzzle that requires you to "look at the box" to figure out the right radio signal. What box? Oh, just the box that the game came in, that's all.
Some rpg maker game I played has a moment where the villain forces you to choose between two girls, then kills you. I just stared at the game over screen confused for at least a full moment. I did the scene again and apparently it's a QTE where you have to press left or right to shove a girl out of the way without zero explanation. Sure, it's near a save point, and yeah once you know about it it's not hard, but wow it's terrible.
One game required trivia questions to beat one dungeon and continue past. Most were simple (what's the color of the main character's cape? What's the name of the major city you continue to visit?) but one question was asking about a quote from Sun Tsu's The Art of War and questions were not multiple choice. At least the game was nice enough to ignore capitalization, but...

I guess I am stretching the definition of puzzle, but then the worst puzzles aren't really puzzles. The actual worst puzzle I remember is in an otherwise amazing rpg maker game that has a puzzle that's literally impossible. You have to convince a grand wizard in the game that giving his artifact (I think it was something that created infinite clean water) to a village was a good idea. The game had some impressively complicated conversation scenarios and I tried for hours to do this... and again for hours later when post-game journal told me it was the only thing left to hit 100% completion. After eventually giving up and assuming it was impossible, I found out later the creator just hates the idea of completionism and intentionally put in a puzzle that couldn't be solved and even purposely make it seem like you were so close to solving it.

Even on the n64 I never found it to be that difficult, but it is probably the easiest one to get lost in. The Shadow Temple is insidious and quite confusing, even when you know exactly what to do and have played it multiple time. Also, for how "linear" the Forest Temple is, replaying it on the 3ds made me remember how odd the puzzles in general are.
But wow boots on C was amazing (and that's ignoring glitches!).

I've known a few over the years.

One I can remember, I think, was from Dino Crisis. I just remember there being a puzzle involving connecting some pipes, where it employed some kind of torturous logic to work it out - if you did it the right way. However, it was pretty obvious that the puzzle was a logic sequence which only had about 36 permutations, so I completely ignored the instructions and just tried each of them in order. It was maybe the 10th one. That was badly designed because the developer had obviously put a great deal of thought into it, but it was too easy to circumvent.

I find, though, that the worst puzzles in games are ones where you, the player, could know the answer, but the game won't let you solve them until your "character" learns the answer. Those are pretty annoying on a repeat play.

the Main Temple in "Phantom Hourglass" is a pain, coming back over & over makes it worse u_u.

The worst puzzles probably belong to an obscure and awful adventure game called Mirage, which made no sense at all, where you can die for going out the wrong door with no warning, just because. Just be glad you never heard of or played it,
The worst puzzle in something you have a chance of hearing of... hmm... probably the cookie puzzle in a 2004 adventure game called Still Life, which ground the game to a halt. You had a cookie recipe written by your grandma which was in code and had to figure out what she meant with no hints. I didn't even bother, i just used a walk-through. It was just there to add game-time and nothing else.

That reminds me of Wild Arms. There's a part right at the beginning where you have to input the name of a certain person. If you already know the person from previous playthroughs, the scene plays out differently (you come back later once you know who the person is, you're supposed to fail the puzzle).

I cannot even remember how many games I've ditched when the solution to a puzzle is Trial and Error or involved some kind of speedy reflex. I was born an actual grandma and do not have time for these shenanigans. It makes me lose interest immediately.

FNAF 3. The number of steps to get the good ending, to have it negated in the Pizza Simulator.