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[NewGame]

Have you ever played a puzzle in a game that just felt good to solve? I remember countless games that have puzzles in them but the puzzles themselves are sometimes not always memorable. The other day I went back to play some of Silent Hill 2 and found this little ditty:

Old Man - Coin of an old man

Snake - Coin of a snake

Prisoner - Picture of a lady prisoner

"First lies the seat of
He who is Peerless
Silent and empty,
heartless and fearless

Beside him sits one who knows
The place of the servant is
next to throne

Dozens of feet,
yet not a single toe
The One that is Hidden
beside him doth go

Seducer of dreams,
creature of Hades
Lying further from
Man and closer to Lady

Man and Woman seeing all
Heedless to the Raven's call

Silent and Hidden the two may be
They be not there for you to see

Return them to whence
they would be
And blessing shall
descend on thee

I speak thus with
the North Star behind me
The birth of the sun is
the start of the story"

-=-=-=-=-

I just love this sort of stuff randomly popping up in a game. Any other interesting riddle or item related puzzles that you enjoyed?

 

[lt519]

I remember finally figuring out the Wild Arms puzzle with the books where words in the books you read on the shelf hinted at the order of some switches. It wasn't a difficult puzzle but I was young, it was one of my first RPGs, and I eventually did it without the Internet's help. Pretty satisfying when I did it. The annoying part was running back and forth between the shelves and chests when failing and the high random encounter rate.

Here was the puzzle clues:

Bookshelf #1 - Closed minds will lead Filgaia to it's doom.

---

Bookshelf #2 - The Elws have gone to another world...

---

Bookshelf #3 - For a thousand years people have torn apart the land looking for the future they've lost.

---

Bookshelf #4 - A foolish woman opened the box and all the desires of the world were released. This is human nature in its purest form.

---

Bookshelf #5 - What do you search for with those closed eyes? This is Filgaia, a dying world...

 

[Akzel]

This was one of my favorite. (When I was young)

 

[BGBW]

Throughout Another Code:R you come across various doors that you must use the functionality of the Wiimote to unlock. First it's as simple as pressing the right button i.e. the code would be something like AB12, then they introduce motion like rotating the Wiimote 90° and pressing A. Then they introduce the plus and minus buttons by including numbers like 0 which would be entered as 1 then minus then 1.

Then you come to this door:

It is nothing like you've come across before. T? 1 over 2? How does that work? But when you realise the solution it is genius.

Spoiler

The first symbol is the home key. So press that to bring up the home menu (http://imgur.com/i0AyLbJ). That black border at the top is the key. As that comes down it covers the top half of the code making it look like 1102. That's the real code.

 

[matrix-cat]

From Fez. This was one of those moments where the idea suddenly floats into your mind when you aren't even playing the game; I was out walking my dog and all of a sudden it clicked for me.

Spoilers:

Spoiler

Throughout the game you find examples of this glyph alphabet, which is clearly supposed to mean something to you but the game seemingly offers no way of translating it. Until you find this place, with a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog, ahem hem, and all of a sudden it all becomes clear.

 

[aibaby]

Not really a real puzzle, but I remember almost pulling my hair out in Wild Arms 2 looking for the solution to a riddle and a set of stairs that goes to nowhere. Then all you had to do was rotate the camera so you can read the word "ray" spelled out on a wall.

 

[Ray Wonder]

“The first to light his fire dared not march on the end.
The Second, by the First, Played a woeful Lament.
The Third kept close to his faithful beast.
The Fourth marched not beside the First, yet like the Second, played a tune.
And thus they stood o’er their queen, who slept beneath flickering stars.”

The Witcher 3 Guardian lamps. It was pretty cool.

 

[lt519]

Awesome awesome puzzle. That game was way over my head sometimes but did have some great puzzles. I loved the 3D tetromino puzzle.

 

[Mango The Magician]

People always say they hate them, but I love block puzzles in Zelda, especially ice block puzzles.


In particular, I love the puzzle in Snowpeak Ruins, the way you stack blocks against one another is really clever.

Likewise, as a non block puzzle, I like the puzzle at the entrance of the Sacred Grove in TP, where you have to guide the statues, it's really unique.

 

[TM94]

The Clank puzzles in 'A Crack In Time' were brilliant.

 

[spons]

The Zanarkand Cloister of Trials in FFX. Looked like a Tetris game.

 

[PetrCobra]

Landstalker had pretty interesting puzzles, often with a rhymed advice on the wall.

 

[Coxswain]

Managing to solve, from start to finish, the entire "Hell and Bach" Investigation quest in The Secret World, without looking up a single spoiler or hint, was one of the most gratifying things I've done in a video game. The level of observation required, and having to follow your hunches, and then eventually making that one obscure connection (based on your own real-life knowledge that certainly isn't universal and is never even hinted at directly by the game) that lets you finally crack the code on it, was just goddamn incredible.

Almost all of the Investigation Quests from that game were top-notch. The game wasn't afraid to say "You know what? If you don't know how to read sheet music, or morse code, or you don't understand this reference? Well, you've got the Internet, time to take a crash course. The puzzle will wait here until you're finished," nor was it afraid to present you with some actual lateral thinking problems, and so when you finally managed to figure one out, it always felt like you'd really earned it.

 

[matrix-cat]

People always say they hate them, but I love block puzzles in Zelda, especially ice block puzzles.


In particular, I love the puzzle in Snowpeak Ruins, the way you stack blocks against one another is really clever.

Likewise, as a non block puzzle, I like the puzzle at the entrance of the Sacred Grove in TP, where you have to guide the statues, it's really unique.

When people talk about hating block puzzles I think they're mostly referring to this kind of sliding block:

I despise those, but I can't get enough of the Zelda/Pokemon style of sliding-around-on-ice puzzles:

 

[mrmickfran]

Zelda: Wind Waker - Earth Temple mirror puzzle.

One of my favorite parts of the game, it's just awesome seeing your progress in the puzzle in such a fun way.

 

[Ashler]

Basically all Myst games' puzzles.

 

[Fancy Clown]

Silent Hill piano puzzle

 

[roytheone]

From Fez. This was one of those moments where the idea suddenly floats into your mind when you aren't even playing the game; I was out walking my dog and all of a sudden it clicked for me.

Spoilers:

Spoiler

Throughout the game you find examples of this glyph alphabet, which is clearly supposed to mean something to you but the game seemingly offers no way of translating it. Until you find this place, with a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog, ahem hem, and all of a sudden it all becomes clear.

I live in the Netherlands, and here they naturally don't teach you about

Spoiler

the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

in school, so I had to look up the solution

 

[GoodMorningPluto]

Letter puzzle in first Broken Sword. Felt like a professional code-cracker after solving it.

 

[Mango The Magician]

When people talk about hating block puzzles I think they're mostly referring to this kind of sliding block:

I despise those, but I can't get enough of the Zelda/Pokemon style of sliding-around-on-ice puzzles:

Why do people say they ha te block puzzles in Zelda than? I mean puzzles like thwt aren't that common in Zelda.

Either way I do agree that those suck.

Zelda: Wind Waker - Earth Temple mirror puzzle.

One of my favorite parts of the game, it's just awesome seeing your progress in the puzzle in such a fun way.

I love this puzzle as well, in fact anything with the mirror sheild is fun.

 

[mclem]

I live in the Netherlands, and here they naturally don't teach you about

Spoiler

the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

in school, so I had to look up the solution

There's a few different 'ins' to

Spoiler

the language puzzle

; I definitely didn't do it that way. I'll see if I can find my notes to figure out where I did do it, but it may well have been done with

Spoiler

cryptography on a large block of text

.

I've written a lot about puzzles on GAF in the past, so I'm curious to see if anything comes up that's not been mentioned before. For now, though, I'll just quickly mention in passing what I believe to be the hardest puzzle I've solved unaided, Riven's Fire Marble puzzle.

Six marbles, a 25x25 grid; place the marbles in the grid correctly. Solving this requires travelling across the world, exploring the environment, making certain key associations with relationships, not falling into one or two traps, and eventually piecing all those chunks of information together. You can't realistically brute force it, which I think is a positive; I've occasionally seen puzzles where the correct answer is the brute force technique, and so being able to immediately discount it as a possibility is nice.


As an aside: I have not yet played Gabriel Knight 3, but I'm well aware of the reputation of Le Serpente Rouge, and I'm rather looking forward to it.

 

[ffdgh]

heh

 

[lt519]

heh

Evil evil evil

 

[tuffy]

I rather enjoyed the Babel Fish puzzle in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Press the dispenser button and the fish flies across the room and out some hole, just below a hook. Since the hook is mentioned, it must be important. I tried to hang the towel on the hook, but it falls off. The robe I'm wearing does hang on the hook, though. Press the dispenser button again and the fish hits the robe and goes down a drain. Aha, that's where the towel comes in. Cover the drain on the floor with the towel and hit the button again. This time the fish hits the robe, lands on the towel, then gets picked up by a little robot who exits via a floor-level panel. That panel must be important too so I block it with Ford's satchel. This time the fish hits the robe, lands on the towel, gets picked up by a little robot who hits Ford's satchel, which sends the fish flying only to get picked up by another little airborne robot. I'm running out of things in my inventory at this point. But putting the pile of junk mail on top of Ford's satchel gives the airborne robot too much stuff to collect at once, and the fish is acquired successfully!

It's not a very hard puzzle actually, but I felt pretty pleased when I figured it out just by following the fish's trajectory through the room and placing objects in its path.

 

[Kyne]