Puzzles in Games

[Moonface]

I just randomly remembered the "puzzle" I posted in the first post of the Nonsensical Situations in Games thread and decided why not make a thread to talk about puzzles in video games? Do you have any puzzles you love/hate, or maybe there's just a whole puzzle game you have something to say about?  


I'd have to say the games with the hardest puzzles I've played is the original Tomb Raider games on PS1. There's a level in Tomb Raider 3 that I can't even beat using a guide because the puzzle is just so difficult for me, and it involves the entire level so trying to keep track of everything becomes a real nightmare. I feel like a lot of the puzzles in the original games would take someone an incredibly long time to wrap their head around without a guide in all honesty.
That said, I did really love the puzzles in Lara's Mansion in Tomb Raider 3 to figure out how to get into the trophy room and gain access to the dirt bike course.


Another puzzle I really liked was the roman numerals one in Uncharted 1. The whole puzzle involves knowing what numerals to follow that are marking different paths, and going the wrong way will lead you to a dead end or actual death. It's one of the few I also like doing on replays of the game because it doesn't slow you down at all once you know the solution as it just involves going the right way, whereas most other puzzles in the series actually make you stop to do the solution which gets annoying for me.

[Maniakkid25]

There's a puzzle I really like, not because it's good, but because it makes less sense the more you think about it. And no, I'm not talking about Gabriel Knight 3 again.

The game is Silent Hill 3. See, the game actually has difficulties, and the puzzles and their solutions change depending on the difficulty level.  As an example, the same game's first puzzle on Hard mode requires you to have a working knowledge of Shakespeare plays to solve it. But for this puzzle, we are trying to input a code for a keypad. On easy difficulty, you are told the movements needed to hit the numbers. The medium difficulty requires a decent amount of Algebra.

Hard requires you to interpret a poem about eating someone's face.

Y-you think I'm joking? Here's the poem in full:

Trigger Warning: this is actually about eating a face!

Pure eyes, blue like a glassy bead---
 You are always looking at me
 and I am always looking at you.

 Ah, you're too meek ---
 beautiful, unspoiled:
 thus I'm so sad, I suffer---
 and so happy, it hurts.

 I want to hurt you
 and destroy myself
 What you would think
 if you knew how I felt.

 Would you simply smile,
 not saying a word?
 Even curses from your mouth
 would be as beautiful as pearls.

 I place my left hand on your
 face as though we were to kiss.
 Then I suddenly shove my thumb
 deep into your eyesocket.
 Abruptly, decisively,
 like drilling a hole.

 And what would it feel like?
 Like jelly?
 Trembling with ecstasy, I obscenely
 mix it around and around: I must
 taste the warmth of your blood.

 How would you scream?
 Would you shriek "It hurts!
 It hurts!" as cinnabar-red tears
 stream from your crushed eye?

 You can't know the maddening
 hunger I've felt in the midst of
 our kisses, so many of them
 I've lost count.

 As though drinking in your cries,
 I bring my hopes to fruition:
 biting your tongue, shredding it,
 biting at your lips as if tasting
 your lipstick.

 Oh, what euphoric heights I would
 reach, having my desires fulfilled
 like a greedy, gluttonous cur.

 I longed, too, for your cherry-tinted
 cheeks, tasty enough to bewitch my
 tongue.
 I would surely be healed,
 and would cry like a child.

 And how is your tender ear?
 It brushes against my cheek;
 I want it to creep up to my lips so
 I can sink my teeth into its flesh.

 Your left ear, always hearing words
 whispered sweet as pie ---
 I want it to hear my true feelings.
 I never lied, no...
 but I did have my secrets.

 Ah, but what must you think of me?
 Do you hate me? Are you afraid?
 As though inviting you to the agony
 at the play's end; if you wish, you
 could destroy me --- I wouldn't care.

 As you wish, you may destroy me
 --- I wouldn't care.

Yeah, that's your clue. Now, this is the keypad.



If you are able to figure out the code from this, you are more unhinged than I. And quite possibly the developers, too. It is truly exquisite in it's ludicrousness. I love it!

[Moonface]

@Maniakkid25: Holy shit, that is an insane puzzle and I've never heard of any game that changes the puzzles based on the difficulty level like that.

I'm gonna try and figure out that puzzle solution, although right now the hardest part is not knowing how many digits I even need.

[Maniakkid25]

It's a 4 digit code. Good luck.

Actually, the new System Shock remake does this, too. There are difficulty settings for puzzles, combat, cyberspace sections, and a few other things I forget. It's not common, but it's not necessarily uncommon, either.

[ShiraNoMai]

I've always been pretty bad at puzzles, even as a kid. I always say to streamers I'm watching that I have massive sympathy for them playing puzzles to a live audience because the pressure to figure them out as quickly as possible would be so overbearing. I already have performance anxiety when it comes to doing things right when focus is put on me and when I'm already pretty shit at figuring out puzzles at my own pace, that would make me even worse at them.

I would've hated Tomb Raider growing up, I think. I'd be intrigued to do them to get the satisfaction of solving but hearing of their particular brand of obscurity would have that shelved and retried for years on end until I would eventually seek a guide like you did, Moony.

Zelda puzzles in particular make feel quite dumb but I do figure them out. It's largely what I appreciate the new era of Zelda for, giving the player many ways to solve a puzzle rather than one isolated solution. I didn't actually complete OoT until I was an adult cuz I would frequently get stuck on puzzles as a kid, and even if I got stuck on those same ones as a kid, I tend to find solutions after stepping away from it for a period of time.

I do quite enjoy simple puzzle games, though, like Picross or similar pattern-based puzzle games like Two Dots. They're satisfying to complete when it takes many little solutions to solve the bigger one. Which, now that I think of it, is really funny to me considering that's the very aspect of mathematics that I hate
I guess when I know it's a game it changes my perception of the outcome, whereas in things like trigonometric equations that take multiple minutes to come up with one solution through sheer computing (not the thought process to solve but the actual work involved in the computation) are wastes of time to me.

[Kyng]

The Talos Principle has some great puzzles in it.

The game's standard objectives consist of a series of puzzle chambers - where you have to use the equipment in the chamber to unlock the path to the exit. But where the game really shines is in its bonus objectives (the Gold Stars). To get these, you usually need to either:

• Use equipment from multiple chambers, or;
  
• Find a way to get a piece of equipment out of its chamber.

Here's one example, which requires you to use equipment from two different chambers:



I spent ages trying to collect all of these gold stars!

[Moonface]

I've always been pretty bad at puzzles, even as a kid. I always say to streamers I'm watching that I have massive sympathy for them playing puzzles to a live audience because the pressure to figure them out as quickly as possible would be so overbearing. I already have performance anxiety when it comes to doing things right when focus is put on me and when I'm already pretty shit at figuring out puzzles at my own pace, that would make me even worse at them.

I feel the only way to do this (other than ignoring the people in chat making a fuss over it) would be to play a puzzle game as soon as it drops so that way the number of people in chat who already know the answer is very low if not outright non-existent. Granted, there's still the possibility of pressure by trying to solve it without a lot of viewers already figuring it out before you and making you feel stupid, but that could happen in any game that has a moment where you need to figure out a solution to something or where to go/what to do, etc.

I would've hated Tomb Raider growing up, I think. I'd be intrigued to do them to get the satisfaction of solving but hearing of their particular brand of obscurity would have that shelved and retried for years on end until I would eventually seek a guide like you did, Moony.

Zelda puzzles in particular make feel quite dumb but I do figure them out. It's largely what I appreciate the new era of Zelda for, giving the player many ways to solve a puzzle rather than one isolated solution. I didn't actually complete OoT until I was an adult cuz I would frequently get stuck on puzzles as a kid, and even if I got stuck on those same ones as a kid, I tend to find solutions after stepping away from it for a period of time.

Oh, something else worth mentioning is that for TR1, you can only save at designated spots in a level, and each spot can only be used once and I don't think most levels had more than maybe two of them in total. If you died before getting to one of them, you'd go back to wherever the last save was (or start of the level if you didn't reach a save point in it yet) and a lot of puzzles in TR1 can kill you. At least in TR2 and TR3 you had the ability to save wherever and whenever so you could have a safety net before trying anything that might be wrong or deadly.

I can't recall any of the puzzles from OoT to comment on them, but even in TotK where there's freedom to the puzzle solutions I often find myself clueless as to what the "intended" solution is supposed to be. It makes me wonder how many areas I'd be stuck in for ages if I could only use a single solution like the older games had.

The Talos Principle has some great puzzles in it.

The game's standard objectives consist of a series of puzzle chambers - where you have to use the equipment in the chamber to unlock the path to the exit. But where the game really shines is in its bonus objectives (the Gold Stars). To get these, you usually need to either:

• Use equipment from multiple chambers, or;
  
• Find a way to get a piece of equipment out of its chamber.
  

Here's one example, which requires you to use equipment from two different chambers:



I spent ages trying to collect all of these gold stars!

I assume you did, but did you see the announcement for The Talos Principle II?
I haven't played this myself, but I did watch a streamer play some of it and from what I can recall it really challenged them at times and even watching it I often couldn't figure out something much faster than they did whenever they stopped to try and think of what to do. I can't recall if they got to the end of the game or lost interest before that point.


@Maniakkid25: I've not got far with figuring out that poem puzzle you posted yet. At first I thought maybe the keypad was supposed to represent a face where 7 and 9 are eyes but the things described in the poem wouldn't all fit onto it such as ears. I also thought maybe it's about the number of parts described, such as one for the single eye, three for the tongue and lips, two for the cheeks and one for the left ear, but I really don't think that's right or even close to how the poem needs to be interpreted. XD

[Maniakkid25]

You're closer with the second interpretation, but you aren't spacing the facial features wide enough. I think a walkthrough on GameFAQs puts it best.

First things first, although this poem is about eating a face, it is still referring to the keypad next to the door, which, as you might have noticed, doesn't look a god damned thing like a face.

So, just to make things a bit easier, 1 and 3 are eyes, 5 is the nose, and 8 is the mouth. Should be mostly solvable from there. Hopefully.

I'm actually with Shira; I don't like puzzles all that much in terms of actually doing them, because I suck at them. When a decently difficult puzzle is in my way, I usually throw in the towel and just look up a guide so I don't have to deal with this crap. Oh, sure, solving it is supposed to instill a sense of pride, but half the time I'm saying "Get on with it!", and the other half I'm saying "Wait, I can DO THAT?!"

Also, speaking on insane puzzles, there's one I love bringing up that I'm surprised doesn't have a wikipedia page: The Soup Cans. In the FMV game The 7th Guest, there is a point in the game where you have a bunch of soup cans with letters on them. You are meant to shift them around so that they spell out a rather long sentence, but there are two problems with that!

1. You aren't given a hint in-game about the sentence outside of how many letters each word has, and even that is obscure!
   
2. Your only vowel is the letter "Y"
   

Your hint is buried in the instruction booklet, and even then you'll need to crack a thesaurus out in order to get the sentence, and even better, the sentence is talking about the house you are in, and has a minor spoiler in it! Here's the hint, by the way.

Bashful nomad, craftily, agilely, meet secretly near my underground vault.

Now, about that obscure hint. All the letters are grouped in such a way that they are kept together, and are set up so that you see how many letters are in each word the sentence has. An image is helpful.



So, as you can see, the first word has 3 letters, then 5, and so on.

Oh, and I'll spoil the answer so you can check it when you inevitably give up.

The sentence

"Shy gypsy slyly spryly tryst by my crypt."

Oh, and before this point, you didn't know the house HAD a crypt!

[Kyng]

I assume you did, but did you see the announcement for The Talos Principle II?
I haven't played this myself, but I did watch a streamer play some of it and from what I can recall it really challenged them at times and even watching it I often couldn't figure out something much faster than they did whenever they stopped to try and think of what to do. I can't recall if they got to the end of the game or lost interest before that point.

Honestly, I hadn't heard about that at all - but, thanks for letting me know! I'll definitely have to play it at some point.

Myself, I managed to complete the base game, but I gave up on the expansion for three reasons. First of all, it got too difficult for my tastes. Secondly, motion sickness. And finally, the story just wasn't as compelling (it was basically just poking fun at forum culture, instead of the philosophical dialogue that the base game had).

[Moonface]

@Maniakkid25: So I don't know why I said 7 and 9 are eyes when I meant to say 1 and 3, and I had figured 5 was the nose and 8 the mouth, but was getting hung up on the ears and cheeks. I thought I had figured it out as 4 (left hand on cheek), 1 (the eye they drill out), 8 (biting the tongue/mouth), but then when it came to the ear I had no idea where it would fit, and thought maybe it's 6, and the cheeks are lower which makes it 7186. I decided I'd just look up the answer to the code and see if I could reverse engineer the solution, but 4896 is a bit off from mine and I saw that things I did factor in (the mouth) are either earlier or have a detail I didn't really pick up on, such as 4 being beneath 1 where the blood is flowing down to. A good puzzle but man, I dread to think how long I'd be stuck in the game doing it blindly with zero help. XD


Having played Elden Ring again lately, I've had two puzzles in the game where I gave up and looked up the solution. One was involving an invisible bridge nowhere near where the puzzle starts, so I would have likely never found it, and another I just didn't know the game had items that can make enemies fight each other which was what the puzzle wanted. I don't know if this is the first FromSoft game to have puzzles like this since I can't say I recall ever seeing any puzzles in Bloodborne or Sekiro.

[Dragon Lord]

I do enjoy me some puzzles in games. Not really sure if I have a favorite type of puzzle... I just don't like when the puzzles in games are too simple. Give me something that's going to make me think and actually work for the solution. One of the few criticisms I had for Hogwarts Legacy was the fact that the puzzles were too simple and copy/pasted all over the place (though that's a problem with open world games in general, they just copy/paste the same few puzzles every where).

Though that doesn't mean I require a brain-busting puzzle all of the time. Older LoZ games had fun puzzles, despite being very simple and way too easy to solve. At least they were still fun though, and creative at times. Compared to Breath of the Wild, that just copy/pasted a bunch of shrines with the same boring puzzles all over the place (again: open world problems).

One type of puzzle that I do tend to like a lot is ice floor/sliding puzzles, when they are done right.

[Moonface]

I do enjoy me some puzzles in games. Not really sure if I have a favorite type of puzzle... I just don't like when the puzzles in games are too simple. Give me something that's going to make me think and actually work for the solution. One of the few criticisms I had for Hogwarts Legacy was the fact that the puzzles were too simple and copy/pasted all over the place (though that's a problem with open world games in general, they just copy/paste the same few puzzles every where).

Though that doesn't mean I require a brain-busting puzzle all of the time. Older LoZ games had fun puzzles, despite being very simple and way too easy to solve. At least they were still fun though, and creative at times. Compared to Breath of the Wild, that just copy/pasted a bunch of shrines with the same boring puzzles all over the place (again: open world problems).

One type of puzzle that I do tend to like a lot is ice floor/sliding puzzles, when they are done right.

What probably also hurts puzzle design in games like Hogwarts Legacy or BotW is that they're tailored to the widest possible age range, so younger players need to be able to figure out a solution just as easily as older players will. If not for the amount of work open world games already require I'd say a good solution would be to do what Silent Hill 3 did, where puzzles scaled up based on difficulty.
On the subject of BotW puzzles, I'd say TotK does a good job at avoiding repetitive shrines, although BotW was only really repetitive with using Test of Strength shrines everywhere. The only criticism I'd give to TotK's shrine puzzles is that some of them feel like they end just as they start to get going, and others have really cool ideas that never turn up anywhere else in the game.

I'm trying to think if I've seen any sliding floor puzzles outside of Pokémon games, but nothing comes to mind.


Also since you've played most of the Souls games @Dragon Lord, do you know if those games have puzzles at all? I was curious in my last post whether Elden Ring was the first time FromSoft put some puzzles in their game, albeit they're pretty rare.

[Maniakkid25]

Hello there, everyone. It's Maniak with another puzzle I "love". This time, however, it's a cautionary tale on how you should make sure you don't use slang for the solution to make sense.

In Monkey Island 2, there is a general agreement for what the worst puzzle in that game is: the Waterfall. See, Guybrush comes upon a pipe powering a waterfall, and has to turn it off in order to progress. He needs a wrench/spanner to be able to do so, but there's not a single wrench/spanner on the island to be found. See, the solution to the puzzle is a pun, which is par for the course with this sort of game. But the pun they chose was "Monkey Wrench".

Yeah, that's not only a joke that doesn't translate out of English; that's a joke that doesn't translate out of AMERICA!

For those that are unaware, if an American asks for a "Monkey Wrench", they're usually asking for one of these. Needless to say, this is a vernacular that is pretty much exclusive to the US, so when this game was localized for other regions, all hell broke loose. So not only were you expected to follow the moon logic to get to the answer (Hypnotize a monkey using a banana), you wouldn't even get the joke at the end of it!

This is the sort of thing that can happen if you aren't very, VERY careful when designing your puzzles. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, a lot of puzzles lean on the creator's general knowledge base. This can unintentionally lead to situations where cultural boundaries make a puzzle difficult or nearly impossible. You gotta be careful, guys! Don't let the Monkey Wrench happen to you!

[ShiraNoMai]

For those that are unaware, if an American asks for a "Monkey Wrench", they're usually asking for one of these. 

 ...

[Maniakkid25]

That's why I said "usually". Chances are, if you showed a layman a pipe wrench, and said "monkey wrench?", they'd say "yes". Or maybe I'm just weird, because I've always seen that reference, but no one else has. Google images seems to agree with me, anyway (along with standard adjustable wrenches, for some reason).