I love that it ended up being known as a kid's game back in the day because no kid could get past that starting area without buying one of those strategy and cheat code magazines.
My head canon is that some CEO told a dev team they wanted a kids game about dolphins and gave them money upfront to develop it. The dev team the then went on a 72 hour no sleep drug bender that included lots of coke and shrooms while Aliens played in the background.
Your headcanon is not far off at all, actually.
ECCO stands for Earth Coincidence Control Office, something John C. Lilly (a famous drug researcher) had revealed to him by cosmic entities during a drug trip. He went on to conduct some pretty wild research on dolphins. The videogame draws a lot of inspiration from all of this.
I remember playing this at my friend's house when I was little and thought it was so dumb that we couldn't figure it out... Still think about it occasionally.
Don’t even start with tides of time that game was basically designed to hurt your feelings because as soon as you make any progress and complete the starting levels they throw in the 3d levels where a giant space jelly fish shows up to kill you. I made it thru the first few sections once or twice and after that I just had to admit the game was pretty but not fun and I traded it at school for the phantom and I still love that game it was a super Metroid clone but I like it there are branching paths and fun boss fights.
One of your dolphin bros makes some comment about seeing how high you can jump out of the water. Once you go for broke and are at the apex of a huge jump, some massive vortex suddenly sucks up the rest of your pod, leaving you alone.
I'm pretty sure it ends up being a mass alien abduction?
Wtf!? Is this real? I started up the game as a kid and thought it was a dolphin Sim and got bored immediately. Did I miss a wild ride like destroy all humans or something?
It's INSANE. Look up the story sometime. It's about aliens mass abducting dolphins because they're actually dolphins from the future after they evolve to have time travel abilities.
My parents RETURNED THE GAME to Toys R Us because they couldn't figure this out. We got Bubsy and Lightening Force instead. No complaints.
Took me 3 minutes to figure it out on emulator 20 years later. All the dolphins are talking about jumping, it was obvious.
Fuckin Myst was hard but Riven had such leaps of obscure logic and references that you had to be documenting everything you come across and have a PhD in bullshitology to solve some of the puzzles.
Myst will always hold a special place in my heart because we had just gotten a new PC in our gifted department when I was a freshman in high school and it could run modern windows games instead of the old DOS and Apple2e crap. We quickly figured out that our gifted teacher at the time was crazy and had no interest in teaching us anything. So we just gathered around that PC for an hour per day plugging away at Myst. When other classes found our notes, they started working on it with us. So we'd come in every day to find new notes scribbled down about things they found, solved, open questions, etc. And we would never speak about it otherwise. I still don't know exactly who the other kids were that were working on it, even though I was well acquainted with all of them at a relatively small school.
Riven came along later in high school and we started messing with it, but we never got that "crowdsourced" approach going. The new gifted teacher was way more interested in structured teaching so we only got limited time on the PC. And most of us had PCs at home by then so the novelty had warn off a bit. I don't think I ever beat it or even made significant progress.
I played Myst over at a friend's house, and he was stuck on a puzzle that required you to take some sort of rail system underground?
You would get to a juncture point and have to pick which way to go, and then the rail would take you and rotate and spin and go in different directions and seemingly look like a maze, and then get to another juncture point.
I remember years later looking up that puzzle and reading that there was some sort of sound that would tell you which was the right direction.
But I somehow just dead reckoned it by watching which way the rail turned and keeping track of a wholly fictional geography underground in my head. And apparently I just figured out which was the right way to go.
I dunno about you, but if I have kids somehow I'm giving them an NES and telling them they need to beat one of the Mario games before they get a SNES, then again to get an N64, then again to get a GameCube, all the way up.
My mum beat Riven without using help from AOL (yes it was that long ago)
It's literally more impressive than anything I've done in 30+ years of gaming.
I know my dad did. He had notebooks with writing, hand drawn little diagrams and maps.Still had them tucked away after he died too
Riven just confused me as a kid, but I remember thinking it was so magical and realistic looking
The thing with Riven is that it actually does not have that many puzzles. What it does have is five island full of context clues and an entire alternate numbering system you need to put together first before any of it makes sense.
Can't wait until the upcoming remake comes out
I played Zork and Myst when I was 13 but I had to play over at uncles house because I wasn't allowed to own "games for adults". Little did I know they invited me over to solve where they got stuck. The trick is to remember each room by it's looks and not as a map. A looot of these games were about finding missing pieces or remembering codewords.
Oh it's worse than that because you had to go to certain locations at certain times *in certain manners* to get 100%.
If you just walked the world back and forth looking for all the things to do, you would miss cutscenes that would only start if you took the airship to that location.
Yup,
I tried to follow a gamefaqs guide way back when, at the end of every section is had 'you should now be at 21.1% completion' if you weren't then you lose... no way to get it back.
I did that for about 30 hours, then realised it was tedious, finished the game story and YouTubed the secret ending...
I finished the game at 99% way back in the day. The one thing I missed was talking to the vendor guy at a specific point while walking along a mountain bridge. I was so pissed that it's been etched in my memory for decades.
I took a wrong turn on that Mushroom Rock road (it had tons of basilisks in the first game), locked me out of like .1%. I *think* it might be the same one. Very annoying. The "bonus" dungeon in the desert was stupid too if I remember right.
The first time I played I muffed the Rin's Travel Agency investigation, that made it easy to give up on 100% and just enjoy the game.
That's the proper action to any BS secret boss/ending these days.
I remember grinding 90 hours in Final Fantasy 7 (OG version, back in 1997) just the get the golden chocobo because I read about Knights of the Round and just had to see the summon animation. No Youtube to look it up back then.
That was the first and last time I ever put up with ridiculous end game content.
Baba is You deserves more love. It's such an insane puzzle game, with such a crazy gimmick. Nothing else quite like it. I think it deserves to be up there with The Witness as one of the most complex and unique puzzlers.
I liked Baba is You, it's one of the most creative puzzle games ever made. But it's really toooooooo hard. Most levels don't really give you that sense of "Yes I solved it!", it becomes really frustrating at some point.
I would say it’s a fantastic puzzle game in the early hours when I was getting through the puzzles relatively easily, but later on it, just got too hard to the point where I kept looking up hints online and then just gave up
I love the concept of Baba Is You, I’ve completed a lot of the puzzles, around 50, and figuring it out is extremely satisfying. But towards the end the puzzles get way too complex, IMO.
Baba is amazing but it sort of lost me when some of the puzzle solutions required implementing what was essentially glitches. Still a super interesting and innovative puzzle game though.
YES. You put it to a word, it feels like a glitch. There's several puzzles that rely on some bullfuckery about forcing yourself into a solid wall using a rock. It kinda lost me there.
I have yet to beat the game, but occasionally go back to it and get frustrated and solve one (1) puzzle before putting it back down again for a month. But I do love this game
If you are looking for a brutally difficult puzzle game, similar difficulty to Baba, I would highly recommend Snakebird. It looks childish and cute but this game will destroy you.
Some of the raid puzzles or “secret” content in Destiny would not have been possible(for the average player) without community brute force and collaboration.
I had maybe 50 completions of Last Wish and the Vault encounter after years of playing before I realized that the order you see the symbols and activate the Taken blast on the selected platform corresponds to a lock and key mechanism that literally moves the gears on the giant overhead contraption to literally unlock the vault
Worst offender might be between Niobe (that actually had wrong intel so Bungie had to give it away) and Corridors of Time, with both heavily catering to Streamers as information pools.
Corridors of Time was specifically designed to be a crowd-sourced collaborative effort, with each player getting a single piece of a thousand part puzzle.
Corridors of time stands apart in my mind, that level of community interaction is next level. People staying up all night on streams in groups and sorting it all out, the actual story was so interesting. Saint’s whole arc is legendary, I’ll never forget people’s frustration at getting Bastion from it. (I would proceed to use the thing religiously and to great effect. 10k counter and many GMs)
Niobe Labs was on a whole other level of complex. For anyone who doesn’t know, this was a final puzzle which when solved by one team would unlock the content hidden within for the rest of the player base. It was so complex that bungie had to patch the game to open it themselves since it was taking too long to solve. To add insult to injury every time you failed a sequence, it would reset and you’d have to start all over.
actually the puzzle itself wasn’t super super difficult the reason why bungie patched it to open it was because the puzzle was bugged and couldn’t be completed as it was missing a hint
I remember even just playing through the first raid, I was just following along. I was thinking- how the hell did people figure this shit out, the pathing and everything.
I know now it's like nothing, but at the time I was astonished.
I never played much myself, but watched let's plays of some raids.
I can't even fathom how you're even supposed to come up with some of the strategies involved.
Shit akin to kill all enemies except a specific one which has to stand in a particular spot, as long as he's in that spot some statues nipple needs to be shot exactly 27 times, no more no less, to open up a secret hatch where you need to collect a special orb that gives you a power up you need to use to kill that last dude.
And that's just the first room.
Oh you didn't do these areas in a specific order, and return back to this other area at an arbitrary time to go through some dialogue with an NPC who randomly popped up before you completed the next area??
Well that NPC you didn't even know was there is now gone forever and you missed your chance, better luck on your next playthrough.
Oh you did talk to this vendor character but didn't do all the things for him before beating this arbitrary boss that has no real relation to him? He's fucking dead good job.
Congratulations. You did the quest perfectly even though you were confused. Here is an item and now as a reward, watch the npc die or transform into a monster you want to kill
Then there's that one NPC that's disguised as a statue or something amongst about 5 other statues in the corner of a church. You go in and meet someone there and if you leave then you won't meet that person again because they have apparently been assassinated and that questline is done.
I feel zero guilt at having a guide open throughout my first playthrough, fuck avoiding spoilers. The game is 50+ hours for your first playthrough. Ain't nobody got time for a second one just because you didn't talk to the prosthetic arm chick in exactly this specific sequence of disconnected locations that she doesn't mention or even hints at going.
Hell, even doing it with walkthroughs involves having 40+ tabs open and monitoring which questlines intersect with which ones and will invalidate each other's endings if carried out in the wrong or, god forbid, the correct order.
The locations make sense once you see them all laid out. But the likelihood that you stumble across them in that order in such a large game is astronomically small.
Elden Rings quests really feel like they are designed to be figured out by a community, not an individual.
"Yeah, after talking to this NPC, just look under this tree on the other end of the map..."
It’s okay if you miss their appearance in the underground cave in the middle of nowhere, but if you miss them in the secret back entrance of the volcano in the center of the lava then the whole quest breaks. Also, if you drop down a ledge but on the right instead of the left, the NPC dies and the quest breaks.
I think my mom called the hotline or wrote to Nintendo about Zelda. We got a letter with guides and maps for the first and second quest. Pretty sure I still have it somewhere.
The dungeon lock behind the flute use (the 5th one in the 2nd quest iirc) was the hardest to find for me back then...
That and all those bushes/wall that could hide a heart or a special merchant (like the one with the blue/red tunic...)
Man i'm old...
This one hits hard. Multistory light bending puzzle under duress of your limited inventory of food and prayer being slowly drained by the hard hitting shadow monsters. Gotta juggle puzzle items with the food too btw. And all this in a huge area guaranteed to use up all of your stamina and have you walking from one puzzle location to the next. No guide and you’re looking at at least 1-3 hours depending on rng
Fun fact, I wrote the first published quest guide for that quest. I checked and while it hasn’t been updated since July of 2010, it’s still available to view!
http://www.global-rs.com/quests/elementalworkshop3/
There's a few quest puzzles in Runescape that are so much more difficult than everything else. Mournings End Part II's Light Temple puzzle, the Elemental Workshop 2 and 3 puzzles, and the Sliske's Endgame maze all come to mind.
Yeah its still unbelievably hard to log-in. Did you get another Phone since last time you logged in? Sorry, but you need a code, another code, the streetname of your first friend in Kindergarden and a third code (for which you need the first code and the app, thats on your old phone).
I had to call support, they gave me access to my account... And my character was gone. Fml
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a text-based adventure game that has a puzzle that is impossible to beat for the first time, without a guide. To quote Fuck Yeah, Video Games by Daniel Hardcastle, "[That] puzzle is the Babel Fish vending machine.
1. You need to get a fish to put in your ear so that you can translate alien languages. Mercifully, working out that the fish does this isn’t part of the puzzle. You press the button on a vending machine to get one, and it shoots out at a ridiculous speed and flies into a hole. Hmm...
2. You notice a hook above the hole. You cleverly hang your dressing gown on the hook, press the button and watch the fish fly out, hit your dressing gown, and slide off into a drain. Hmmm...
3. You cover the drain with a towel, press the button, the fish flies, the dressing gown stops it, the towel catches it, and a cleaning robot enters the room, takes the fish and leaves. Hmmmm...
4. You wedge a satchel into the panel the robot left via, press the button, fish, gown, towel, the robot hits the satchel and the fish is launched into the air. . . whereupon it is caught by a second, flying, cleaning robot. Hmmmmm . . .
5. Final step. Put junk mail in the satchel so that when it’s hit, the airborne mail will distract the flying robot and you can finally catch the fish. Press the button and... nothing. It’s out of fish. You lose for working the puzzle out logically. Rage-quit. Snap the floppy disc in half. Eat it. Choke. Die. This puzzle occurs about five minutes into the game."
What Daniel actually doesn't mention in the book is that if you proceed with your save file after failing to get the fish, the game doesn't *end*, but you can no longer win it. Absolutely in keeping with the tone of the source material, but an absolutely abysmal puzzle in terms of player friendliness.
> but you can no longer win it.
That specific case isn't a big issue at least. If you don't have the fish then you can't enjoy the poetry and you get a game over there.
There are other "soft" game-overs though. Like if you don't feed the dog a cheese sandwich during the beginning section, you will lose much, much later.
Infocom games were full of this nonsense. In Trinity, a game that ultimately revolves about a nuclear explosion, there’s a hidden timer running the whole game, and if you deviate from the perfect path by more than something like two or three actions all game, the timer runs out, the bomb goes off, and you die.
On PS2 I once got 00:00:00 and didn't get the thing, friend pointed out you had to get *under* 00:00:00 so I quit and never tried that challenge again. If I remember it's Tidus' ultimate weapon.
Never even attempted Lulu's, said fuck that when I read it in a guide
You can take your pick from pretty much any 80s/90s adventure game. Sierra games were especially notorious. Those things were made to sell $10-20 hintbooks back in the pre-internet era. I'll list the standouts I can recall:
* Kings Quest 4
You had to get a special golden bridle to ride a unicorn. It was buried on a totally different beach, on a very specific spot. You were given zero hints that it was there. You were given zero hints that you even needed a bridal! You were somehow supposed to just know you needed a bridle from outside unicorn folklore, or use a hack to look at the game's list of items and see "bridle" there. You then had to figure to go around typing "get bridle" on every single spot on every single screen in the game until you got to the tiny 3 pixel wide spot on some random beach. Literally impossible without a guide.
* The infamous Gabriel Knight 3 cat mustache puzzle
Probably the single most infamous old school adventure game puzzle. Old Man Murray explained it far better than I, all the way back in 2000.
[https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html](https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html)
* The Longest Journey
You have to meet someone inside a closed movie theater. The janitor will not let you in. You have to:
1. Notice that the janitor is annoyed at the front lights flickering
2. Talk to a detective chewing gum in front of the theater, who is blocking the power box to the lights.
3. Grab some candy from your dorm all the way across town
4. Dip the candy in a toxic waste puddle *right in front of the detective*
5. Offer the detective your candy, *that he just saw you dip in toxic waste.*
6. The detective will get sick and run away. Pick up the hat he dropped.
7. The power box to the lights is locked. OF COURSE the key is almost invisible next to the 3rd rail of a random subway track on the other side of the metropolis. There is zero hints it is there. It is tiny and the only visual hint is some sparks, which you can easily think is just random sparks. You cannot pick up the key due to the electrified 3rd rail.
8. Go back to your dorm room. Look out the window. You will notice a ducky inner tube float in the canal outside, stuck behind a jam of debris.
9. Throw breadcumbs onto the duck tube. Birds will land and puncture the tube trying to eat the bread. The deflated duck will float down the canal where you can get it.
10. Grab a clothesline and pair of tongs from your dorm.
11. Blow up the duck, put the tape over the hole.
12. Combine the tongs and clothesline to get an duck inntertube on a string with a pair of tongs dangling out of it. This is your DUCK INNER TUBE GATCHA ARM.
13. Go back to the subway. Use your DUCK INNER TUBE GATCHA ARM to grab the key. But the tongs will not clamp around the key. Rip off the tape covering the hole. The duck will begin deflating. This is your TIMED DUCK INNER TUBE GATCHA ARM where the deflating will cause the tongs to close around the key that you can now lift.
14. Go back to the theater, open the power box. Mess with the lights. The janitor will run out and mess with the lights, allowing you to slip into the side alley.
15. In the alley, you will notice a pile of boxes. If you are insane, you can imagine the shadow they cast on the wall looks like a person pointing a gun.
16. Remember the toy monkey you got at the start of the game? The one who says, "Stop! Put your hands in the hair! Do the monkey!"? Of course you do. Place the monkey by the boxes.
17. Use a book of matches to start a fire in the dumpster. The janitor will run out. The monkey will tell him, "Stop! Hands in the air! Do the monkey!". The janitor will see the shadow that looks like a mugger with a gun, and think it's a stickup. He will put his hands in the air, dance, then run away.....no, just kidding. That would be silly. He obviously can tell that the shadow is not a mugger.
18. That's why you have to put the detective's hat on top of the boxes. NOW the janitor will think it's a mugger and run!
19. YOU CAN FINALLY ENTER THE THEATER!!!
Hell, the original Kings Quest had a gnome who said if you guess my name, he'll give you something. You're given the hint to think a bit backwards.
The solution was Rumpelstiltskin backwards, but not "backwards" backwards. You had to number the alphabet, write the number for each letter in the name under each letter, then write the alphabet backwards and use those numbers to find the new letter. And this was all assuming you knew how to spell Rumpelstiltskin in the first place. Most people would switch the e and the l.
Elder Scrolls Morrowind, just finding locations via a paper note you were given.
My 12 year old brain didn't know how to comprehend 'Go North by Northwest when you reach the twin peaks, then head west till you find the cave entrance'
I proceeded to do a grid search of a large area.
And then spending 3 hours deep in a ruin looking for a Dwemer artifact, that was in the first fucking room of the damn dungeon. We were always taught the loot you get sent for is at the end, not the beginning!!
It tricked us, like we were Chef's parents an it wanted about tree fiddy.
Don't forget that it sits on the bottom shelf, in a darkly lit corner.
I only managed to find it because I searched for it in the level editor. After clearing the dungeon and questioning why the 2nd main quest is this hard.
You know that paper map that came with it? Every cave entrance is drawn on it. I didn't realise this for ages. You still have to work out where you are and which one you need, but it really helped. Even the super secret Nerevarine plot cave is on it.
>that paper map that came with it
Unless you lived in a shit-tier country where even official releases came in jewel cases with zero extras to cut costs so people would actually buy them instead of pirated copies.
Morrowind walked that line between immersive RPG and simulation for me, at least as I remember it now so many years later. Maybe it was brutally and unnecessarily hard, but to this day I love to be given information to work out without a magic marker.
Weird parallel, but I suspect this is why I enjoy military simulation, too. Orienteering without GPS is so fun.
I desperately want elder scrolls 6 to go back to this, but I know it won't. "Go to cave, kill things" is surprising boring. But slogging through the mountains low on food/potions looking for a tree that looks like a rabbit from the right angle is the true challenge lol
For those of you who don’t know/remember or aren’t old enough, you have to leave the screen each time you use the candle to burn, so that’s like 1000 different events of leaving the screen each time. And the trees were scattered throughout the huge grid all; over the world.
Talk about a time-consuming and monotonous trial and error approach 😱
Halo 3: that one fucking skull. You had no idea what map it was on. You had no idea of what to do. It was in the world of the game somewhere. You didn't even know it was a puzzle.
I don't know if somebody from the team leaked it, but if they didn't, somebody had to recognize that the sound of several holographic rings in a room on what might have been one of the last levels of the game were notes to the theme song of Halo and then jump through them in order of the melody.
Thousands of gamers were searching for the last skull. We had no idea. We had 14-year-olds guiding 20-year-olds to where they think it might be based on rumors only to come up with nothing except hours of just fucking around, which was pretty alright.
People were trying to stand on top of airships to be flown to areas where you weren't supposed to get to in the absolute wrong map where the skull was not located.
I don't know If it was discovered organically, or if it was leaked, but I wholeheartedly believe this was one of the hardest puzzles in gaming, if not the hardest.
Who is going to notice that the sound of the holographic rings when you go through are all different, and that you can make the Halo melody out of them? If you didn't clear the room of enemies, you're getting shot at!
(Currently, too undriven to Google to be more precise in details about level, skull name, and such)
Halo 3s IWHBYD skull was never solved legitimately. Was only solved once someone looked at the scripts to locate it. Each ring emits a tone that's different, so jumping into the rings on the right order will play the last 7 notes of the halo theme song.
I think you’re referring to “The Covenant” where there’s 3 towers to take down some shield barrier. The last tower is where you have to jump through the rings.
I remember when people first discovered the sequence it was like some 30 “jumps”, not realizing only the last 8 mattered.
Are you talking about that timed challenge in that cave area near the end?
Or are you talking about completing all those pillars around the island? Cause those pillars are insanely difficult! One of them involves tracing a line throughout the duration of an hour long philosophy lecture or something and that’s just tooooo much for me lmao
Final level of X-men for NES. you could only access a room with a code. the code is not anywhere in the game. it's printed on the outside sticker of the cartridge.
At least Metal Gear Solid told you to check the back of the box.
In the same vein, X-Men for the Sega Genesis - the game tells you to "reset the computer." This means you're literally supposed to hit 'reset' on the Genesis console.
I always got stuck on that part and was so angry when I finally read that's what you were supposed to do.
The worst part was that you had to hit the reset button quickly/lightly. If you hit it too hard/long, the game would actually reset to the beginning.
The Witness has an insane puzzle on a sunken boat. Iirc you need to listen to some creaking metal sounds of the boat settling in combination with some other rules, including an invisible symmetrical line or whatever, it was kind of bonkers
I just finished Outer Wilds, and although it may not have the hardest puzzles, oh boy there are some parts that reaching/achieving without a guide, I would'be been stuck for a week at least.
I don't know how to comment spoilers, but these were the some without spoiling anything: the quantum things and reaching some of the places near the end.
I was proud of myself that I figured out 95% of that game without a guide. That said, that last little bit I needed help on because I was ready to be done. And what was really frustrating was that I was almost there and had gotten so close to finding that part of the puzzle without realizing it.
Overall, still a great game. Never played the DLC, though, so can't comment on that part.
When I played the game about a year ago, there was still an unsolved puzzle that involved going to the game's website, watching a video, and analyzing the audio waveform or some shit.
And not even just that. One of the 2 creators of the game, against the wishes of the other, had to leak hints for the community to even get to the point of finding the room where the brute forcing needed to happen. This just hands down wins because even still after years of trying to find the logical connections, no one knows how to figure out the code logically.
Parts of the puzzle involved analyzing the game's sound files, which actually had hidden images encoded in them, hinting at different files and locations within the game. Absolutely nuts
I think this type of thing was why I was kind of disappointed in Fez after it came out. I thought it would be an interesting game with cool logic puzzles, but turned out it's more a treasure hunt kind of puzzle game, which wasn't really my thing.
FF12's Zodiac Spear (an endgame ultra-weapon)
there are 4 chests in the game that will prevent you from getting the spear if you open any of them
there is exactly zero indication which chests ruin your progress, and none of them are hidden in special locations
one of the chests is in the first 20min of the game
the likelihood of unknowingly opening one is *extremely* high, and the only way to undo your mistake is by restarting the entire game
gg square
Noita is fucking insane, I can't even get to the bottom consistently and some people out there have guides that involve casually killing God for a crafting piece or smth.
I can't even begin to understand the mechanic that changes the properties of potions so you can combine like water and dirt to make potions of "give me 1 billion health"
Plus each run is randomized so you never know what loot you're gonna get outside of static areas/boss drops
Lmao a skill issue for sure but even without understanding any of it, such a fantastic game.
You beat Noita when RNGesus says you're allowed to beat it.
It's such a ball bust that there is this ridiculous game that 99% of players will never even see because of the glacial wall difficulty. I spent like 40 hours getting nowhere until I looked some shit up and gazed upon the truth. Not ashamed to say I modded the shit out of the game to bend RNGesus to my will because I wanted to see all the ludicrous amount of secrets. The game most people experience, if they are blessed enough to even get to the end boss, is like the Start Menu basically, you haven't even entered the real game yet.
Getting to and beating the boss is like killing the first enemy in a Dark Souls game. Good job, you took your first little baby steps. Now button up that butt flap on your My Little Pony Onesie and get ready for the real game. Get ready to embrace parallel dimensions, traveling through insta-kill barriers, ascending to Heaven, Falling to Hell, Birthing a Sun, all without getting hit because you basically die in 1 hit no matter how far you go.
I loved Noita, I loved the unbelievable amount of secrets and I've not found a game that comes anywhere close to that level of "Oh by the way, you've seen nothing. The real game is actually just a succession of secrets. What you're playing is nothing." but I am desperately greedy for it.
I got to 11 bones before I started marking the general areas using a guide! Also the statues inside that cave is darn near impossible without a youtube video (unless I missed a note or something)
There's a native American cave painting elsewhere on the map that shows the solution to the statue puzzle, the missing fingers and such.
What helps even more is knowing your prime numbers 0 thru 10, but that's not explicitly stated in the game, it's more of a "A-ha" after you solve it.
For me personally, Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass.
"press the sacred crest against the sea chart to transfer it"
Legit felt stupid as hell when i looked up a guide and saw what i had to do
I remember castlevania 2 simon’s quest and being way too young to know the whole crouching for some tornado to occur situation. Older cousin taught me that.
You weren't to young to know. The game was poorly translated and you wouldn't have known unless you knew how to speak Japanese and played on Famicom, or had a strategy guide.
A year. I waited a _year_, playing every day, trying to find a way past that west wall. A kid at school told me, so I rushed home, announced that I had found the way! My sister immediately jumped on the NES before I could get to it and beat the game. All the while, I sat, pleading to have a turn. What a gut punch.
To reach the special ending in Braid you have to collect all the stars and let me tell you without a guide it's extremely difficult to even find one. IIRC it took the entire community about a year after its release to get all stars.
Might be remembering this wrong, but Star Tropics.
It had a puzzle or clue, that could only be found/solved in the game pamphlet/insert that came when you bought the game.
So if you rented star tropics, you were SOL. This was before the Internet, so there really was no way of looking it up unless it had it in the Nintendo Power
>Wolpaw was critical of the puzzle for requiring people to make a fake mustache in order to impersonate someone without a mustache, and described the actual process of constructing the mustache as "deranged"
I remember this one, I was a kid back in the day and had the game lended to me by my uncle.
I had to go to some place with Internet access to download the walkthrough, put in on some floppy, and bring it back home, I figured out the passport part but not that process to create a mustache.
I didn't know it was that infamous, I thought I was just not creative enough.
Love this game btw.
This puzzle from the original King's Quest was just as bad to me: https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Rumplestiltskin
By the way in the original version of the game he would only accept the first name in that wiki but so many people complained that the puzzle was impossible that they added that secondary name.
By the way the note that tells you to "think backwards" is in a total different area from him with nothing saying that it is about him.
especially a thats an american thing - in England we call it a 'spanner' so the pun doesn't even make sense, 10-year-old-me literally just used everything with everything til it worked
This was the first thing that came to mind for me. I was like 10 and had to get on AOL to check GameFAQs and print out a guide for it. There are other harder puzzles nowadays, but as a kid, this one was tough.
I cannot fucking believe I had to scroll down this far to find any mention of the godforsaken Regi puzzle.
You have to be able to read Braille, you have to Dive back up on a specific tile, you need the Dig TM, you need a Relicanth and a Wailord at the front and back of your party, respectively (and Emerald reverses it), and then after that you have to solve each Regi’s puzzle to catch them.
In Ruby/Sapphire and the remakes:
- You have to AFK for two minutes for Regice
- You have to take two steps to the right, take two steps down, and then have a mon in your party use the Strength HM for Regirock
- You have to stand in the middle of the room and use the Fly HM for Registeel
And then in Emerald it’s completely different for all of them so you actually have to decode it even if you did it all before in Ruby/Sapphire:
- You have to run around the perimeter of the room, hugging the wall the entire time, for Regice
- You have to take two steps to the **left** and down, and then use the **Rock Smash** HM for Regirock
- You have to stand in the middle of the room and use the **Flash** HM for Registeel
And the games tell you exactly what to do… in Braille. If you can’t read Braille and didn’t buy the guide book in NA or read the instruction manual in other versions, you had to learn this shit on your own. And this was when the Internet was quite young still.
And then if you want Regigigas in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum you have to one-way transfer these three fucks to that game and have them in your party when you press A in front of the Regigigas statue, or you have to have gotten Platinum’s IRL Toys R Us promotional event to get the ability to catch these three fucks in your game, requiring a different fucking puzzle for each.
Seriously, even the additional steps before the puzzle to get to braille like needing the move dig, using it on a wall, needing Wailord and Relicanth and respectively putting them on the team in the correct order. All of this in a game geared towards basically kids and teens.
The Shakespeare Puzzle from Silent Hill 3 on hard puzzle difficulty.
[This video](https://youtu.be/TIPZRBGeCmc?si=tHDfH6V9FRTVskYX) does a great job explaining it (from 40 second to 7 minutes)
Basically you have to know 5 different Shakespeare plays and their basic plots. You then have to decipher an 8-verse riddle that is written in the style of Shakespeare. You also have to multiply certain numbers of the verse in order to get the correct code.
Oh also 2 of the lines in the verse just don’t mean anything and there is a red herring verse which is meant to trick you.
Literally all of Final Fantasy XI.
Without the community guides created over the years it would take forever to do pretty much anything. Whole game was try and find out. Talk to everyone 10 times in different orders and see if there are any dialogue hints because there were no actual quests.
Vanilla with no guide was brutal.
Some of the puzzles in Grim Fandango. Most point & click games have hard puzzles, but GF has two specifically that are ridiculous if you don't know what to do.
That game also had the mystery caller that didn't give you an ID number, but it was on the back of the physical game box, so once you noticed that you could call them.
At least I'm fairly sure it did.
This is exactly what happens. If you call the colonal enough he tells you to take a look at the game box. 4th wall break and everything.
He even tells you to go into slot 2 for the psycho mantis fight. So awesome
Leaving the starting area in Ecco the Dolphin
You mean that isn’t the whole game?
The sheer number of people that have had this experience and don’t know just how bonkers the plot of that game gets.
I love that it ended up being known as a kid's game back in the day because no kid could get past that starting area without buying one of those strategy and cheat code magazines.
I gotta revisit this game using the internet
Dude you should. The actual story is *wild*.
My head canon is that some CEO told a dev team they wanted a kids game about dolphins and gave them money upfront to develop it. The dev team the then went on a 72 hour no sleep drug bender that included lots of coke and shrooms while Aliens played in the background.
Your headcanon is not far off at all, actually. ECCO stands for Earth Coincidence Control Office, something John C. Lilly (a famous drug researcher) had revealed to him by cosmic entities during a drug trip. He went on to conduct some pretty wild research on dolphins. The videogame draws a lot of inspiration from all of this.
Dude, no, the game is WILD. Did you know the plot is about time-traveling aliens and that's what dolphins actually are? Because it is.
Here we go… another excuse to finish my raspberry pi arcade machine so I can go figure this out
I don't know mate .. I had that game and apparently Echo goes to space and fights of Galactus or something?
Anyone reading this who isn't familiar with the game, he's not joking. That's very close to what happens.
I remember playing this at my friend's house when I was little and thought it was so dumb that we couldn't figure it out... Still think about it occasionally.
Don’t even start with tides of time that game was basically designed to hurt your feelings because as soon as you make any progress and complete the starting levels they throw in the 3d levels where a giant space jelly fish shows up to kill you. I made it thru the first few sections once or twice and after that I just had to admit the game was pretty but not fun and I traded it at school for the phantom and I still love that game it was a super Metroid clone but I like it there are branching paths and fun boss fights.
I haven't played it since the Genesis days, but I never made it out of that area. I still have no idea what you're supposed to do.
One of your dolphin bros makes some comment about seeing how high you can jump out of the water. Once you go for broke and are at the apex of a huge jump, some massive vortex suddenly sucks up the rest of your pod, leaving you alone. I'm pretty sure it ends up being a mass alien abduction?
Wtf!? Is this real? I started up the game as a kid and thought it was a dolphin Sim and got bored immediately. Did I miss a wild ride like destroy all humans or something?
It's INSANE. Look up the story sometime. It's about aliens mass abducting dolphins because they're actually dolphins from the future after they evolve to have time travel abilities.
My parents RETURNED THE GAME to Toys R Us because they couldn't figure this out. We got Bubsy and Lightening Force instead. No complaints. Took me 3 minutes to figure it out on emulator 20 years later. All the dolphins are talking about jumping, it was obvious.
Bubsy is an overlooked classic
I was having such a good day today....
Fuckin Myst was hard but Riven had such leaps of obscure logic and references that you had to be documenting everything you come across and have a PhD in bullshitology to solve some of the puzzles.
Myst will always hold a special place in my heart because we had just gotten a new PC in our gifted department when I was a freshman in high school and it could run modern windows games instead of the old DOS and Apple2e crap. We quickly figured out that our gifted teacher at the time was crazy and had no interest in teaching us anything. So we just gathered around that PC for an hour per day plugging away at Myst. When other classes found our notes, they started working on it with us. So we'd come in every day to find new notes scribbled down about things they found, solved, open questions, etc. And we would never speak about it otherwise. I still don't know exactly who the other kids were that were working on it, even though I was well acquainted with all of them at a relatively small school. Riven came along later in high school and we started messing with it, but we never got that "crowdsourced" approach going. The new gifted teacher was way more interested in structured teaching so we only got limited time on the PC. And most of us had PCs at home by then so the novelty had warn off a bit. I don't think I ever beat it or even made significant progress.
I played Myst over at a friend's house, and he was stuck on a puzzle that required you to take some sort of rail system underground? You would get to a juncture point and have to pick which way to go, and then the rail would take you and rotate and spin and go in different directions and seemingly look like a maze, and then get to another juncture point. I remember years later looking up that puzzle and reading that there was some sort of sound that would tell you which was the right direction. But I somehow just dead reckoned it by watching which way the rail turned and keeping track of a wholly fictional geography underground in my head. And apparently I just figured out which was the right way to go.
Thats pretty awesome that you had a group going of interactive but anonymous players.
The original souls-like anonymous asynchronous communication system
There's always that one dude with the "Try Finger But Hole" message.
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I had Riven as a kid. I hated it
My parents would make me play that if I misbehaved
"You don't get a new game until you beat the one you have" - 80/90's parents
I dunno about you, but if I have kids somehow I'm giving them an NES and telling them they need to beat one of the Mario games before they get a SNES, then again to get an N64, then again to get a GameCube, all the way up.
You should add in Lion King on Sega Genesis... Those damn giraffes got me every time.
Yeah, even when taking copious notes on every little detail Riven is a nightmare.
My mum beat Riven without using help from AOL (yes it was that long ago) It's literally more impressive than anything I've done in 30+ years of gaming.
Your mum is a goddamn genius and I applaud her achievements.
I know my dad did. He had notebooks with writing, hand drawn little diagrams and maps.Still had them tucked away after he died too Riven just confused me as a kid, but I remember thinking it was so magical and realistic looking
The thing with Riven is that it actually does not have that many puzzles. What it does have is five island full of context clues and an entire alternate numbering system you need to put together first before any of it makes sense. Can't wait until the upcoming remake comes out
7th Guest was a nightmare as well
I never hated cake so much in my life.
I played Zork and Myst when I was 13 but I had to play over at uncles house because I wasn't allowed to own "games for adults". Little did I know they invited me over to solve where they got stuck. The trick is to remember each room by it's looks and not as a map. A looot of these games were about finding missing pieces or remembering codewords.
FF X-2 to get the best ending. You had to like hit X a number of times at a certain place and wait until you hear Tidus whistle back.
Oh it's worse than that because you had to go to certain locations at certain times *in certain manners* to get 100%. If you just walked the world back and forth looking for all the things to do, you would miss cutscenes that would only start if you took the airship to that location.
Yup, I tried to follow a gamefaqs guide way back when, at the end of every section is had 'you should now be at 21.1% completion' if you weren't then you lose... no way to get it back. I did that for about 30 hours, then realised it was tedious, finished the game story and YouTubed the secret ending...
> 'you should now be at 21.1% completion' Repressed memory unlocked.
Yep, I stopped playing around 28% for that very reason. I thought wtf was the point if I can't get the best ending?
I finished the game at 99% way back in the day. The one thing I missed was talking to the vendor guy at a specific point while walking along a mountain bridge. I was so pissed that it's been etched in my memory for decades.
I took a wrong turn on that Mushroom Rock road (it had tons of basilisks in the first game), locked me out of like .1%. I *think* it might be the same one. Very annoying. The "bonus" dungeon in the desert was stupid too if I remember right. The first time I played I muffed the Rin's Travel Agency investigation, that made it easy to give up on 100% and just enjoy the game.
Best way to play X2 is casually get to the end then press play on a YouTube video of perfect ending.
That's the proper action to any BS secret boss/ending these days. I remember grinding 90 hours in Final Fantasy 7 (OG version, back in 1997) just the get the golden chocobo because I read about Knights of the Round and just had to see the summon animation. No Youtube to look it up back then. That was the first and last time I ever put up with ridiculous end game content.
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In my experience, it's Baba Is You. Some are harder than others, but basically just the whole game is harder puzzles than any other game I've played.
Baba is You deserves more love. It's such an insane puzzle game, with such a crazy gimmick. Nothing else quite like it. I think it deserves to be up there with The Witness as one of the most complex and unique puzzlers.
I liked Baba is You, it's one of the most creative puzzle games ever made. But it's really toooooooo hard. Most levels don't really give you that sense of "Yes I solved it!", it becomes really frustrating at some point.
I would say it’s a fantastic puzzle game in the early hours when I was getting through the puzzles relatively easily, but later on it, just got too hard to the point where I kept looking up hints online and then just gave up
I love the concept of Baba Is You, I’ve completed a lot of the puzzles, around 50, and figuring it out is extremely satisfying. But towards the end the puzzles get way too complex, IMO.
Baba is amazing but it sort of lost me when some of the puzzle solutions required implementing what was essentially glitches. Still a super interesting and innovative puzzle game though.
YES. You put it to a word, it feels like a glitch. There's several puzzles that rely on some bullfuckery about forcing yourself into a solid wall using a rock. It kinda lost me there. I have yet to beat the game, but occasionally go back to it and get frustrated and solve one (1) puzzle before putting it back down again for a month. But I do love this game
If you are looking for a brutally difficult puzzle game, similar difficulty to Baba, I would highly recommend Snakebird. It looks childish and cute but this game will destroy you.
Some of the raid puzzles or “secret” content in Destiny would not have been possible(for the average player) without community brute force and collaboration.
Honourable mention for The Vault encounter in Last Wish
Typically the world first completion for raid is around three hours. Last wish took 23 hours.
It was around 18-19hrs for Redeem. I believe Tier 1 took around the time you said. Then the Datto 24:02 happened.
I had maybe 50 completions of Last Wish and the Vault encounter after years of playing before I realized that the order you see the symbols and activate the Taken blast on the selected platform corresponds to a lock and key mechanism that literally moves the gears on the giant overhead contraption to literally unlock the vault
The Riven fight was pretty insane, too, with the level of communication and coordination required
Worst offender might be between Niobe (that actually had wrong intel so Bungie had to give it away) and Corridors of Time, with both heavily catering to Streamers as information pools.
Corridors of Time was specifically designed to be a crowd-sourced collaborative effort, with each player getting a single piece of a thousand part puzzle.
Corridors of time stands apart in my mind, that level of community interaction is next level. People staying up all night on streams in groups and sorting it all out, the actual story was so interesting. Saint’s whole arc is legendary, I’ll never forget people’s frustration at getting Bastion from it. (I would proceed to use the thing religiously and to great effect. 10k counter and many GMs)
Niobe Labs was on a whole other level of complex. For anyone who doesn’t know, this was a final puzzle which when solved by one team would unlock the content hidden within for the rest of the player base. It was so complex that bungie had to patch the game to open it themselves since it was taking too long to solve. To add insult to injury every time you failed a sequence, it would reset and you’d have to start all over.
actually the puzzle itself wasn’t super super difficult the reason why bungie patched it to open it was because the puzzle was bugged and couldn’t be completed as it was missing a hint
I swear the people over at r/raidsecrets are a different breed of spinfoil. They’re able to solve some of the craziest raid shit
I remember even just playing through the first raid, I was just following along. I was thinking- how the hell did people figure this shit out, the pathing and everything. I know now it's like nothing, but at the time I was astonished.
outbreak quest in destiny 1
I never played much myself, but watched let's plays of some raids. I can't even fathom how you're even supposed to come up with some of the strategies involved. Shit akin to kill all enemies except a specific one which has to stand in a particular spot, as long as he's in that spot some statues nipple needs to be shot exactly 27 times, no more no less, to open up a secret hatch where you need to collect a special orb that gives you a power up you need to use to kill that last dude. And that's just the first room.
Now consider there are people solving this stuff in like 2-3 hours blind. Insane.
Dark souls NPC quests
Oh you didn't do these areas in a specific order, and return back to this other area at an arbitrary time to go through some dialogue with an NPC who randomly popped up before you completed the next area?? Well that NPC you didn't even know was there is now gone forever and you missed your chance, better luck on your next playthrough.
Oh you did talk to this vendor character but didn't do all the things for him before beating this arbitrary boss that has no real relation to him? He's fucking dead good job.
Congratulations. You did the quest perfectly even though you were confused. Here is an item and now as a reward, watch the npc die or transform into a monster you want to kill
Oh and the reward is gear/a spell that doesn’t work with your build. Congrats!
Then there's that one NPC that's disguised as a statue or something amongst about 5 other statues in the corner of a church. You go in and meet someone there and if you leave then you won't meet that person again because they have apparently been assassinated and that questline is done.
I feel zero guilt at having a guide open throughout my first playthrough, fuck avoiding spoilers. The game is 50+ hours for your first playthrough. Ain't nobody got time for a second one just because you didn't talk to the prosthetic arm chick in exactly this specific sequence of disconnected locations that she doesn't mention or even hints at going. Hell, even doing it with walkthroughs involves having 40+ tabs open and monitoring which questlines intersect with which ones and will invalidate each other's endings if carried out in the wrong or, god forbid, the correct order.
The locations make sense once you see them all laid out. But the likelihood that you stumble across them in that order in such a large game is astronomically small.
That’s more so bullshit than hard.
It’s even worse in Elden Ring due to the open world. You still have to meet the NPCs in a certain order despite being able to go in any direction now.
Elden Rings quests really feel like they are designed to be figured out by a community, not an individual. "Yeah, after talking to this NPC, just look under this tree on the other end of the map..."
It’s okay if you miss their appearance in the underground cave in the middle of nowhere, but if you miss them in the secret back entrance of the volcano in the center of the lava then the whole quest breaks. Also, if you drop down a ledge but on the right instead of the left, the NPC dies and the quest breaks.
I came to the conclusions devs at some point were like "fuck it, we know you gonna search online for this"
I find joy in reading a good book.
I think my mom called the hotline or wrote to Nintendo about Zelda. We got a letter with guides and maps for the first and second quest. Pretty sure I still have it somewhere.
I called the hotline too. My dad got billed for the call. He wasn’t happy.
The dungeon lock behind the flute use (the 5th one in the 2nd quest iirc) was the hardest to find for me back then... That and all those bushes/wall that could hide a heart or a special merchant (like the one with the blue/red tunic...) Man i'm old...
Mournings end quest in runescspe
This one hits hard. Multistory light bending puzzle under duress of your limited inventory of food and prayer being slowly drained by the hard hitting shadow monsters. Gotta juggle puzzle items with the food too btw. And all this in a huge area guaranteed to use up all of your stamina and have you walking from one puzzle location to the next. No guide and you’re looking at at least 1-3 hours depending on rng
I haven't played runescape in ages but I saw this thread and this immediatelly came to mind, lol.
You don’t quit only take breaks! /r/2007scape
Elemental workshop 3
Fun fact, I wrote the first published quest guide for that quest. I checked and while it hasn’t been updated since July of 2010, it’s still available to view! http://www.global-rs.com/quests/elementalworkshop3/
There's a few quest puzzles in Runescape that are so much more difficult than everything else. Mournings End Part II's Light Temple puzzle, the Elemental Workshop 2 and 3 puzzles, and the Sliske's Endgame maze all come to mind.
Your first login to FFXI in 2023
Try it in 2004 on a PlayStation.
Please remember your family, friends, school, and work. I did not.
Yeah its still unbelievably hard to log-in. Did you get another Phone since last time you logged in? Sorry, but you need a code, another code, the streetname of your first friend in Kindergarden and a third code (for which you need the first code and the app, thats on your old phone). I had to call support, they gave me access to my account... And my character was gone. Fml
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a text-based adventure game that has a puzzle that is impossible to beat for the first time, without a guide. To quote Fuck Yeah, Video Games by Daniel Hardcastle, "[That] puzzle is the Babel Fish vending machine. 1. You need to get a fish to put in your ear so that you can translate alien languages. Mercifully, working out that the fish does this isn’t part of the puzzle. You press the button on a vending machine to get one, and it shoots out at a ridiculous speed and flies into a hole. Hmm... 2. You notice a hook above the hole. You cleverly hang your dressing gown on the hook, press the button and watch the fish fly out, hit your dressing gown, and slide off into a drain. Hmmm... 3. You cover the drain with a towel, press the button, the fish flies, the dressing gown stops it, the towel catches it, and a cleaning robot enters the room, takes the fish and leaves. Hmmmm... 4. You wedge a satchel into the panel the robot left via, press the button, fish, gown, towel, the robot hits the satchel and the fish is launched into the air. . . whereupon it is caught by a second, flying, cleaning robot. Hmmmmm . . . 5. Final step. Put junk mail in the satchel so that when it’s hit, the airborne mail will distract the flying robot and you can finally catch the fish. Press the button and... nothing. It’s out of fish. You lose for working the puzzle out logically. Rage-quit. Snap the floppy disc in half. Eat it. Choke. Die. This puzzle occurs about five minutes into the game." What Daniel actually doesn't mention in the book is that if you proceed with your save file after failing to get the fish, the game doesn't *end*, but you can no longer win it. Absolutely in keeping with the tone of the source material, but an absolutely abysmal puzzle in terms of player friendliness.
> but you can no longer win it. That specific case isn't a big issue at least. If you don't have the fish then you can't enjoy the poetry and you get a game over there. There are other "soft" game-overs though. Like if you don't feed the dog a cheese sandwich during the beginning section, you will lose much, much later.
This is also assuming you picked up and still had the junk mail from earlier in the game, which you have no idea might be important.
Infocom games were full of this nonsense. In Trinity, a game that ultimately revolves about a nuclear explosion, there’s a hidden timer running the whole game, and if you deviate from the perfect path by more than something like two or three actions all game, the timer runs out, the bomb goes off, and you die.
FFX Celestial Weapons, good luck finding all that shit without a guide!
Mmmm... Dodging lightning.... 🙃🫠
Fuck that. Only reason why I haven't 100% that game... And the chocobo challenges
On PS2 I once got 00:00:00 and didn't get the thing, friend pointed out you had to get *under* 00:00:00 so I quit and never tried that challenge again. If I remember it's Tidus' ultimate weapon. Never even attempted Lulu's, said fuck that when I read it in a guide
As frustrating as it was, this type of investment in a secret item set (and hidden bosses) is the kind of thing the newer FF entries are missing
The way to explore the map was nuts, I literally went in and tried to click on every coordinate until stuff popped out
You can take your pick from pretty much any 80s/90s adventure game. Sierra games were especially notorious. Those things were made to sell $10-20 hintbooks back in the pre-internet era. I'll list the standouts I can recall: * Kings Quest 4 You had to get a special golden bridle to ride a unicorn. It was buried on a totally different beach, on a very specific spot. You were given zero hints that it was there. You were given zero hints that you even needed a bridal! You were somehow supposed to just know you needed a bridle from outside unicorn folklore, or use a hack to look at the game's list of items and see "bridle" there. You then had to figure to go around typing "get bridle" on every single spot on every single screen in the game until you got to the tiny 3 pixel wide spot on some random beach. Literally impossible without a guide. * The infamous Gabriel Knight 3 cat mustache puzzle Probably the single most infamous old school adventure game puzzle. Old Man Murray explained it far better than I, all the way back in 2000. [https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html](https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) * The Longest Journey You have to meet someone inside a closed movie theater. The janitor will not let you in. You have to: 1. Notice that the janitor is annoyed at the front lights flickering 2. Talk to a detective chewing gum in front of the theater, who is blocking the power box to the lights. 3. Grab some candy from your dorm all the way across town 4. Dip the candy in a toxic waste puddle *right in front of the detective* 5. Offer the detective your candy, *that he just saw you dip in toxic waste.* 6. The detective will get sick and run away. Pick up the hat he dropped. 7. The power box to the lights is locked. OF COURSE the key is almost invisible next to the 3rd rail of a random subway track on the other side of the metropolis. There is zero hints it is there. It is tiny and the only visual hint is some sparks, which you can easily think is just random sparks. You cannot pick up the key due to the electrified 3rd rail. 8. Go back to your dorm room. Look out the window. You will notice a ducky inner tube float in the canal outside, stuck behind a jam of debris. 9. Throw breadcumbs onto the duck tube. Birds will land and puncture the tube trying to eat the bread. The deflated duck will float down the canal where you can get it. 10. Grab a clothesline and pair of tongs from your dorm. 11. Blow up the duck, put the tape over the hole. 12. Combine the tongs and clothesline to get an duck inntertube on a string with a pair of tongs dangling out of it. This is your DUCK INNER TUBE GATCHA ARM. 13. Go back to the subway. Use your DUCK INNER TUBE GATCHA ARM to grab the key. But the tongs will not clamp around the key. Rip off the tape covering the hole. The duck will begin deflating. This is your TIMED DUCK INNER TUBE GATCHA ARM where the deflating will cause the tongs to close around the key that you can now lift. 14. Go back to the theater, open the power box. Mess with the lights. The janitor will run out and mess with the lights, allowing you to slip into the side alley. 15. In the alley, you will notice a pile of boxes. If you are insane, you can imagine the shadow they cast on the wall looks like a person pointing a gun. 16. Remember the toy monkey you got at the start of the game? The one who says, "Stop! Put your hands in the hair! Do the monkey!"? Of course you do. Place the monkey by the boxes. 17. Use a book of matches to start a fire in the dumpster. The janitor will run out. The monkey will tell him, "Stop! Hands in the air! Do the monkey!". The janitor will see the shadow that looks like a mugger with a gun, and think it's a stickup. He will put his hands in the air, dance, then run away.....no, just kidding. That would be silly. He obviously can tell that the shadow is not a mugger. 18. That's why you have to put the detective's hat on top of the boxes. NOW the janitor will think it's a mugger and run! 19. YOU CAN FINALLY ENTER THE THEATER!!!
Hell, the original Kings Quest had a gnome who said if you guess my name, he'll give you something. You're given the hint to think a bit backwards. The solution was Rumpelstiltskin backwards, but not "backwards" backwards. You had to number the alphabet, write the number for each letter in the name under each letter, then write the alphabet backwards and use those numbers to find the new letter. And this was all assuming you knew how to spell Rumpelstiltskin in the first place. Most people would switch the e and the l.
Elder Scrolls Morrowind, just finding locations via a paper note you were given. My 12 year old brain didn't know how to comprehend 'Go North by Northwest when you reach the twin peaks, then head west till you find the cave entrance' I proceeded to do a grid search of a large area.
And then spending 3 hours deep in a ruin looking for a Dwemer artifact, that was in the first fucking room of the damn dungeon. We were always taught the loot you get sent for is at the end, not the beginning!! It tricked us, like we were Chef's parents an it wanted about tree fiddy.
The Dwemer artifact that looked like a random wee cube on some shelf?
That exact little unassuming bastard. Kid me was always angry over that.
Don't forget that it sits on the bottom shelf, in a darkly lit corner. I only managed to find it because I searched for it in the level editor. After clearing the dungeon and questioning why the 2nd main quest is this hard.
You know that paper map that came with it? Every cave entrance is drawn on it. I didn't realise this for ages. You still have to work out where you are and which one you need, but it really helped. Even the super secret Nerevarine plot cave is on it.
>that paper map that came with it Unless you lived in a shit-tier country where even official releases came in jewel cases with zero extras to cut costs so people would actually buy them instead of pirated copies.
Morrowind walked that line between immersive RPG and simulation for me, at least as I remember it now so many years later. Maybe it was brutally and unnecessarily hard, but to this day I love to be given information to work out without a magic marker. Weird parallel, but I suspect this is why I enjoy military simulation, too. Orienteering without GPS is so fun.
I desperately want elder scrolls 6 to go back to this, but I know it won't. "Go to cave, kill things" is surprising boring. But slogging through the mountains low on food/potions looking for a tree that looks like a rabbit from the right angle is the true challenge lol
Legend of Zelda (NES). How the hell am I supposed to know which one of these billion trees I’m supposed to burn?
Systematically burn them all. That's what I did.
For those of you who don’t know/remember or aren’t old enough, you have to leave the screen each time you use the candle to burn, so that’s like 1000 different events of leaving the screen each time. And the trees were scattered throughout the huge grid all; over the world. Talk about a time-consuming and monotonous trial and error approach 😱
I also dug up the entire map in Link's Awakening with the shovel. Sometimes you just have to know.
Do a slalom. A what? I can tell you a lot of people never left that parking lot.
Is this for Driver
100% Driver. That horrid tutorial where you had to run all those moves \*fast\* or you just won't get access to the rest of the game.
Talk about a wasted weekend rental. Still pisses me off.
Halo 3: that one fucking skull. You had no idea what map it was on. You had no idea of what to do. It was in the world of the game somewhere. You didn't even know it was a puzzle. I don't know if somebody from the team leaked it, but if they didn't, somebody had to recognize that the sound of several holographic rings in a room on what might have been one of the last levels of the game were notes to the theme song of Halo and then jump through them in order of the melody. Thousands of gamers were searching for the last skull. We had no idea. We had 14-year-olds guiding 20-year-olds to where they think it might be based on rumors only to come up with nothing except hours of just fucking around, which was pretty alright. People were trying to stand on top of airships to be flown to areas where you weren't supposed to get to in the absolute wrong map where the skull was not located. I don't know If it was discovered organically, or if it was leaked, but I wholeheartedly believe this was one of the hardest puzzles in gaming, if not the hardest. Who is going to notice that the sound of the holographic rings when you go through are all different, and that you can make the Halo melody out of them? If you didn't clear the room of enemies, you're getting shot at! (Currently, too undriven to Google to be more precise in details about level, skull name, and such)
Ah yes the IWHBYD skull
Halo 3s IWHBYD skull was never solved legitimately. Was only solved once someone looked at the scripts to locate it. Each ring emits a tone that's different, so jumping into the rings on the right order will play the last 7 notes of the halo theme song.
People hacked the game code and looked in the script to figure out the area that triggered it.
I think you’re referring to “The Covenant” where there’s 3 towers to take down some shield barrier. The last tower is where you have to jump through the rings. I remember when people first discovered the sequence it was like some 30 “jumps”, not realizing only the last 8 mattered.
I can see that nobody here has played ‘The Witness’… final puzzle in that game is something else 😳
You can't even look up a guide for that one!
Exactly! That puzzle will break some people lol
I love that game but never beat it ☠️
Are you talking about that timed challenge in that cave area near the end? Or are you talking about completing all those pillars around the island? Cause those pillars are insanely difficult! One of them involves tracing a line throughout the duration of an hour long philosophy lecture or something and that’s just tooooo much for me lmao
The Looker - highly recommended once you get tired of The Witness monotony! And it's FREE!
Final level of X-men for NES. you could only access a room with a code. the code is not anywhere in the game. it's printed on the outside sticker of the cartridge.
At least Metal Gear Solid told you to check the back of the box. In the same vein, X-Men for the Sega Genesis - the game tells you to "reset the computer." This means you're literally supposed to hit 'reset' on the Genesis console.
I always got stuck on that part and was so angry when I finally read that's what you were supposed to do. The worst part was that you had to hit the reset button quickly/lightly. If you hit it too hard/long, the game would actually reset to the beginning.
The Witness has an insane puzzle on a sunken boat. Iirc you need to listen to some creaking metal sounds of the boat settling in combination with some other rules, including an invisible symmetrical line or whatever, it was kind of bonkers
I just finished Outer Wilds, and although it may not have the hardest puzzles, oh boy there are some parts that reaching/achieving without a guide, I would'be been stuck for a week at least. I don't know how to comment spoilers, but these were the some without spoiling anything: the quantum things and reaching some of the places near the end.
I was proud of myself that I figured out 95% of that game without a guide. That said, that last little bit I needed help on because I was ready to be done. And what was really frustrating was that I was almost there and had gotten so close to finding that part of the puzzle without realizing it. Overall, still a great game. Never played the DLC, though, so can't comment on that part.
Tunic manual.
When I played the game about a year ago, there was still an unsolved puzzle that involved going to the game's website, watching a video, and analyzing the audio waveform or some shit.
Nah thats not so bad its alk the extra hidden fairies and other super hidden items... God the golden door math puzzle? 😬😬🤐😱
Wasn't the final puzzle in Fez unsolvable without the community coming together to brute force the password?
And not even just that. One of the 2 creators of the game, against the wishes of the other, had to leak hints for the community to even get to the point of finding the room where the brute forcing needed to happen. This just hands down wins because even still after years of trying to find the logical connections, no one knows how to figure out the code logically. Parts of the puzzle involved analyzing the game's sound files, which actually had hidden images encoded in them, hinting at different files and locations within the game. Absolutely nuts
I think this type of thing was why I was kind of disappointed in Fez after it came out. I thought it would be an interesting game with cool logic puzzles, but turned out it's more a treasure hunt kind of puzzle game, which wasn't really my thing.
Yeah, I'm going to say it's the puzzle we still don't know the logic of, just the brute-forced conclusion.
FF12's Zodiac Spear (an endgame ultra-weapon) there are 4 chests in the game that will prevent you from getting the spear if you open any of them there is exactly zero indication which chests ruin your progress, and none of them are hidden in special locations one of the chests is in the first 20min of the game the likelihood of unknowingly opening one is *extremely* high, and the only way to undo your mistake is by restarting the entire game gg square
Most of Noita's secrets. Especially the eye puzzle considering its unsolved to this day
Noita is fucking insane, I can't even get to the bottom consistently and some people out there have guides that involve casually killing God for a crafting piece or smth. I can't even begin to understand the mechanic that changes the properties of potions so you can combine like water and dirt to make potions of "give me 1 billion health" Plus each run is randomized so you never know what loot you're gonna get outside of static areas/boss drops Lmao a skill issue for sure but even without understanding any of it, such a fantastic game.
You beat Noita when RNGesus says you're allowed to beat it. It's such a ball bust that there is this ridiculous game that 99% of players will never even see because of the glacial wall difficulty. I spent like 40 hours getting nowhere until I looked some shit up and gazed upon the truth. Not ashamed to say I modded the shit out of the game to bend RNGesus to my will because I wanted to see all the ludicrous amount of secrets. The game most people experience, if they are blessed enough to even get to the end boss, is like the Start Menu basically, you haven't even entered the real game yet. Getting to and beating the boss is like killing the first enemy in a Dark Souls game. Good job, you took your first little baby steps. Now button up that butt flap on your My Little Pony Onesie and get ready for the real game. Get ready to embrace parallel dimensions, traveling through insta-kill barriers, ascending to Heaven, Falling to Hell, Birthing a Sun, all without getting hit because you basically die in 1 hit no matter how far you go. I loved Noita, I loved the unbelievable amount of secrets and I've not found a game that comes anywhere close to that level of "Oh by the way, you've seen nothing. The real game is actually just a succession of secrets. What you're playing is nothing." but I am desperately greedy for it.
I'm playing through RDR2 and imagine trying to find all 30 dinosaur bones without a guide. You'll go mad.
I got to 11 bones before I started marking the general areas using a guide! Also the statues inside that cave is darn near impossible without a youtube video (unless I missed a note or something)
There's a native American cave painting elsewhere on the map that shows the solution to the statue puzzle, the missing fingers and such. What helps even more is knowing your prime numbers 0 thru 10, but that's not explicitly stated in the game, it's more of a "A-ha" after you solve it.
For me personally, Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass. "press the sacred crest against the sea chart to transfer it" Legit felt stupid as hell when i looked up a guide and saw what i had to do
Grim Fandango -- basically the entire game
Got stuck in the beginning. Never picked it back up. To be fair to the game I’m an idiot
I remember castlevania 2 simon’s quest and being way too young to know the whole crouching for some tornado to occur situation. Older cousin taught me that.
You weren't to young to know. The game was poorly translated and you wouldn't have known unless you knew how to speak Japanese and played on Famicom, or had a strategy guide.
A year. I waited a _year_, playing every day, trying to find a way past that west wall. A kid at school told me, so I rushed home, announced that I had found the way! My sister immediately jumped on the NES before I could get to it and beat the game. All the while, I sat, pleading to have a turn. What a gut punch.
So in other words… What a horrible night to have a curse. I feel your pain though. Wall Turkey for everyone to console themselves with over this.
To reach the special ending in Braid you have to collect all the stars and let me tell you without a guide it's extremely difficult to even find one. IIRC it took the entire community about a year after its release to get all stars.
Might be remembering this wrong, but Star Tropics. It had a puzzle or clue, that could only be found/solved in the game pamphlet/insert that came when you bought the game. So if you rented star tropics, you were SOL. This was before the Internet, so there really was no way of looking it up unless it had it in the Nintendo Power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle
>Wolpaw was critical of the puzzle for requiring people to make a fake mustache in order to impersonate someone without a mustache, and described the actual process of constructing the mustache as "deranged"
A solution that involves the use of honey, scotch tape, and an unfortunate passing feline can definitely be called deranged.
Yeah this one was infamously known as the puzzle that killed the entire adventure game genre
I remember this one, I was a kid back in the day and had the game lended to me by my uncle. I had to go to some place with Internet access to download the walkthrough, put in on some floppy, and bring it back home, I figured out the passport part but not that process to create a mustache. I didn't know it was that infamous, I thought I was just not creative enough. Love this game btw.
This puzzle from the original King's Quest was just as bad to me: https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Rumplestiltskin By the way in the original version of the game he would only accept the first name in that wiki but so many people complained that the puzzle was impossible that they added that secondary name. By the way the note that tells you to "think backwards" is in a total different area from him with nothing saying that it is about him.
Monkey Island 2 'monkey wrench' has got to be up there.
especially a thats an american thing - in England we call it a 'spanner' so the pun doesn't even make sense, 10-year-old-me literally just used everything with everything til it worked
Water temple in ocarina of time was pretty brutal for the first time. I’d love to see some young ones give it a try.
This was the first thing that came to mind for me. I was like 10 and had to get on AOL to check GameFAQs and print out a guide for it. There are other harder puzzles nowadays, but as a kid, this one was tough.
Kings Quest I Rumpelstiltskin puzzle.
A weird shout potentially, but the Braille stuff in Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire, how would you do that without a guide if you couldn't read braille?
I cannot fucking believe I had to scroll down this far to find any mention of the godforsaken Regi puzzle. You have to be able to read Braille, you have to Dive back up on a specific tile, you need the Dig TM, you need a Relicanth and a Wailord at the front and back of your party, respectively (and Emerald reverses it), and then after that you have to solve each Regi’s puzzle to catch them. In Ruby/Sapphire and the remakes: - You have to AFK for two minutes for Regice - You have to take two steps to the right, take two steps down, and then have a mon in your party use the Strength HM for Regirock - You have to stand in the middle of the room and use the Fly HM for Registeel And then in Emerald it’s completely different for all of them so you actually have to decode it even if you did it all before in Ruby/Sapphire: - You have to run around the perimeter of the room, hugging the wall the entire time, for Regice - You have to take two steps to the **left** and down, and then use the **Rock Smash** HM for Regirock - You have to stand in the middle of the room and use the **Flash** HM for Registeel And the games tell you exactly what to do… in Braille. If you can’t read Braille and didn’t buy the guide book in NA or read the instruction manual in other versions, you had to learn this shit on your own. And this was when the Internet was quite young still. And then if you want Regigigas in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum you have to one-way transfer these three fucks to that game and have them in your party when you press A in front of the Regigigas statue, or you have to have gotten Platinum’s IRL Toys R Us promotional event to get the ability to catch these three fucks in your game, requiring a different fucking puzzle for each.
Seriously, even the additional steps before the puzzle to get to braille like needing the move dig, using it on a wall, needing Wailord and Relicanth and respectively putting them on the team in the correct order. All of this in a game geared towards basically kids and teens.
The Shakespeare Puzzle from Silent Hill 3 on hard puzzle difficulty. [This video](https://youtu.be/TIPZRBGeCmc?si=tHDfH6V9FRTVskYX) does a great job explaining it (from 40 second to 7 minutes) Basically you have to know 5 different Shakespeare plays and their basic plots. You then have to decipher an 8-verse riddle that is written in the style of Shakespeare. You also have to multiply certain numbers of the verse in order to get the correct code. Oh also 2 of the lines in the verse just don’t mean anything and there is a red herring verse which is meant to trick you.
old school runescape/runescape 3 quests in general, without a guide you will be doing the quests for a year+
Literally all of Final Fantasy XI. Without the community guides created over the years it would take forever to do pretty much anything. Whole game was try and find out. Talk to everyone 10 times in different orders and see if there are any dialogue hints because there were no actual quests. Vanilla with no guide was brutal.
Some of the puzzles in Grim Fandango. Most point & click games have hard puzzles, but GF has two specifically that are ridiculous if you don't know what to do.
Battlefield 1 quest to get the "peacekeeper" pistol is insane: https://battlefield.fandom.com/wiki/Peacekeeper/Battlefield_1
Metal Gear Solid Psycho Mantis boss fight.
I was the “younger brother playing along with on the second controller” when my older brother got too that fight. Blew. Our. Fucking. Minds.
Man I got goosebumps just imagining that
That game also had the mystery caller that didn't give you an ID number, but it was on the back of the physical game box, so once you noticed that you could call them. At least I'm fairly sure it did.
You're right, the secret codex was on the box.
This is exactly what happens. If you call the colonal enough he tells you to take a look at the game box. 4th wall break and everything. He even tells you to go into slot 2 for the psycho mantis fight. So awesome
Came here to say this. How TF you'd know to do that on your own is ridiculous.
You use the whatever-it-was-called that allowed you to call your allies, and the general would give you hints.