Games with the hardest puzzles?

[Nightmare Doom]

So what game do you consider to have the most difficult/frustrating puzzles ever?

I would have to say some of the puzzles from Resident Evil 3 and I remember reading that Fear Effect has some frustrating puzzels aswell.

[Bank]

The ones in Grim Fandango get really frustrating especially when you realize how obvious they are.

[leileilol]

goblins 3

[stewboy]

You mean tricky puzzle games, or just FPS's with puzzles in them?

[Planky]

The advanced levels in Portal are pretty good difficulty wise.

Monkey Island III in Mega Monkey mode was irritating (only because the solutions to normal mode was still fresh in my mind).

[Nightmare Doom]

stewboy said:

You mean tricky puzzle games, or just FPS's with puzzles in them?

Any genre I suppose.

[Jello]

The Myst series... piss me off. Grim Fandano however, is a great adventure/puzzle game. They may not always make sense, but you can still do it without psychic powers or a strategy guide. As with most of the lucas arts adventure games.

[deathbringer]

I was once playing a RPG Maker game that was supposed to be great, but right near the start there was this irritating teleport puzzle that made no sense, i tried everything i could think of (going into every possible teleport, then going into every possible next one after that. And then when that didnt work going into every possible one then going straight back into the one i came out of) and still ended up back at the start. I looked through the images folder later and saw one saying "HARDEST PUZZLE IN THE GAME SOLVED!", Smug wankers. Of course i could have opened it in the editor and just built a bridge bypassing the puzzle, but i didnt want to "cheat"

[caco_killer]

Lufia 2 has some really difficult puzzles. Like the "World's Most Difficult Trick."

[Bucket]

The 7th Guest and the 11th Hour have some of the most frustrating puzzles in a game; the latter much more so. It's got a chess knight puzzle where even if you knew exactly where to move it'd still take you about 40 moves.

But at least those would be "conventional puzzles" that people have done before. Riven, the sequel to Myst, is probably the worst offender in terms of puzzles. It gives you no clues, no point of reference. You're often looking for something obscure but you don't even know if it IS since you have to immerse yourself in the environment and think like someone who "lived there". I've heard that Myst IV is even worse, since the entire game is you building this huge machine, but I haven't played it so I can't say.

[Remilia Scarlet]

There were a couple of really hard puzzles in this game I had on my first computer based on the movie Congo. There was also one level in Lemmings that I was never able to get past. I can't think of any modern day games off the top of my head, though.

Oh, and Spider Solitaire, with four suits, still kicks my ass.

[Maes]

I think Blue Ice gets the cake. Irrational puzzles, pixel hunting, combinatiorial approach to solving (trying everything everywhere) and no sort of progress confirmation or feedback, not even an ending screen. Lovely.

[Doom_Dude]

HeXen II was a pain in the ass with some of the puzzles.... especially the one in Egypt that would teleport you out if you got it wrong. O_o Plus the game had a number of puzzle breaking bugs, the most frustrating for me being the one where you travel to different times to get a staff that was supposed to blow open a door which never opened for me after hours of replaying the damned Egyptian area. No wonder I never played it again.

[printz]

Maybe not the hardest of them all, definitely not 100% funproof (there's no save facility, quick reflexes are required), but I'd add Supaplex's custom levelsets to the list. http://www.elmerproductions.com/sp/dlinst.html http://www.elmerproductions.com/sp/levels.html. There are thousands of quality levels so there's enough till game completion...

[Sharessa]

Hexen, for being so damned vague and turning into a "hunt for the last of 30 switches" thing.

And Myst for not giving you a fucking clue ever.

[Fletcher`]

That motherfucking block puzzle in Hexen 2. The one in egypt

[EllipsusD]

While most of the puzzles in Shivers and Shivers 2 weren't too bad, there were a few of them in there that were mind numbingly difficult.

[Snarboo]

rf` said:

That motherfucking block puzzle in Hexen 2. The one in egypt

I will always hate Hexen 2 for that hub alone. And I've been through the game with every class at least twice.

The newer Prince of Persia (the first one) had some good physical puzzles. The original series was good, too. Flashback, Out of this World, Heart of Darkness, Blackthorne and the first two Oddworld games are some others.

It's pretty obvious I like those old rotoscope games and their focus on more environmental or logical puzzles, huh? :)

[Lüt]

The gear puzzle at the beginning of Shivers. The rest of the game was easy-peasy cheesy-peas after that. Except I'm quite tone-deaf, so I needed a sheet music clue to figure out the organ melody.

Myst was OK, except for finding your way out of the rocket-ship age (Selenitic iirc). Funny thing is, by the end you realize you didn't have to visit any of those ages anyway. Riven was a hassle though, even with the strategy guide I only got past the first era in a week.

Hexen 2's Egyptian hub. Some of it was tolerable, but near the end there was a bridge with a 3x3 set of buttons on the floor that would teleport you backward... I've never passed it once. Hexen never bothered me.

Zelda 2 confused me a lot when I was younger :P

I could never get anywhere in Harvester or The Dig, so I'm not sure if I should count those or not.

Oh, and those early Sierra games where you had to type in action/dialogue commands and it was as much of a guessing game as to what commands or questions actually registered as it was to figure out the rest of the game once you knew.

[Sharessa]

LO_ot said:

Oh, and those early Sierra games where you had to type in action/dialogue commands and it was as much of a guessing game as to what commands or questions actually registered as it was to figure out the rest of the game once you knew.

Yeah, as much as I love adventure games, I hate the parser and text adventure games. The advent of point-and-click adventure games was a godsend. Sadly they didn't last more than a few years after that. :(

[Bank]

Danarchy said:

Yeah, as much as I love adventure games, I hate the parser and text adventure games. The advent of point-and-click adventure games was a godsend. Sadly they didn't last more than a few years after that. :(

I agree, don't know what happened to that genre, it just disappeared overnight.

[alexz721]

Haha, I never finished the Egyptian hub in Hexen II either.

[Sharessa]

There are some good things about text-controlled adventure games though. For instance, typing swear words in Quest for Glory, the game yells back at you "Odds bodkin!" I still use that phrase to this day. Or in Police Quest...2 or 3...there's this long haired individual facing away from you, and if you say "talk to man" around them, the game says they reply in a high pitched voice. If you type "talk to woman" they turn around and it's a guy with a big beard and moustache. You can't really pull that kind of stuff with a point-and-click interface. :P

[Jodwin]

Danarchy said:

Or in Police Quest...2 or 3...there's this long haired individual facing away from you, and if you say "talk to man" around them, the game says they reply in a high pitched voice. If you type "talk to woman" they turn around and it's a guy with a big beard and moustache. You can't really pull that kind of stuff with a point-and-click interface. :P

That so should be in Leisure Suit Larry.

[scorpion]

I used to love text adventure games, and I got a couple of SCUMM games on my phone...

The game which I still haven't found the 'secret game' for, is... Monty Python's Complete Waste Of Time. Apparently (according to the manual), finding the hidden game is so hard, that 7th Level asks you to send them the disk with your savegame if you actually found it. Spent a VERY long time trying to find it...

...perhaps I should've paid more attention to the title of the game...

[Kirby]

Myst IV - Revelation gets me stuck pretty damn good, mainly because of the fact that half the puzzles you don't even need are confusing as fuck w/o the proper tools or means to solve it. Myst I, II and III were pretty straight forward otherwise IMO.

Riddle of the Sphinx wasn't so much "hard" as it was confusing. I got stuck on the fist puzzle because I couldn't figure out how much of the tape recorder I ws supposed to listen to (God knows they don't tell you).

Schizim Takes the cake though. Confusing puzzles with even more confusing clues and no way to tell if you've done something right or wrong and you end up starting the whole damn puzzle over again, which was just a damn right pain in the ass.

I am looking forward to getting Myst V though.

Bank said:

I agree, don't know what happened to that genre, it just disappeared overnight.

Seconded, and it's such a shame too. Everytime I go to the electronics store, I always look for good point-and-click games only to be sorely disappointed at the new agre crap gaming companies have spewed out. Suffice to say, one gem I found was RHEM 2 which was very fun to play. Didn't get around to RHEM 1, but it doesn't look half bad either.

[TheDarkArchon]

LO_ot said:

Hexen 2's Egyptian hub. Some of it was tolerable, but near the end there was a bridge with a 3x3 set of buttons on the floor that would teleport you backward... I've never passed it once. Hexen never bothered me.

I'm pretty sure solving that bloody room is a matter of luck.

[Snarboo]

It's a mixture of luck and memorization. One of the egyptian levels before it has three 3x3 grids on a wall with certain buttons colored red, which correspond to the button order on the puzzle. You then have to guess which pattern is right. Oh and it's randomized every time ARGH.

Worst puzzle in an FPS ever.

[printz]

Snarboo said:

Worst puzzle in an FPS ever.

It may be bad, but it's severely shortened by saving before.

[Jello]

7th guest and 11th hour were mentioned as well. I never completed 11th hour, it never seemed to work quite right and the puzzles just got annoying. The 7th Guest however is one of my favorite games, probably because it was the second computer game I ever played. However, I would still like to meet someone that actually beat the microscope puzzle, I swear that thing is impossible. Thank god you don't actually have to complete it to win the game.