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The most ridiculous puzzle you’ve ever witnessed
So, I’m playing Egypt 1156 at the moment - even though the game has its shortcomings, and every character (male or female) in the game looks exactly like the main character, I’m sticking with it for I like the atmosphere and the subtle edutainment, BUT - could the “boomerang puzzle” be one of the most foolish in the history of the genre?
Here’s the thing: You step into the garden with a pond and trees… and after a while, some invisible archer is shooting at your direction. No biggie, you have the boomerang. BUT, the problem is that the game doesn’t tell you where the archer fired from, and to make matter worse - Egypt 1156 utilizes one of the more cruel puzzle systems where you need to “guess” what part of the screen is relevant for the puzzle, because it’s not a hot-spot until you place an object there. Now, you don’t know where the archer fired from, but you throw your boomerang anyway, and it comes back to you, doing nothing. (Did I mention you can also die if you wait for too long or every time you make the wrong move?) You reason: “Well, I can’t kill the bastard with a boomerang, I need something else.” And you would be WRONG - because you need to place the boomerang at EXACTLY tiny part of the screen which is by default non-hot spot 
Boy, were those designers on some psychedelic mushrooms or what?
Young Ramose, dodging the arrow
Can you match that?
Recently finished: Four Last Things 4/5, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout 5/5, Chains of Satinav 3,95/5, A Vampyre Story 88, Sam Peters 3/5, Broken Sword 1 4,5/5, Broken Sword 2 4,3/5, Broken Sword 3 85, Broken Sword 5 81, Gray Matter 4/5\nCurrently playing: Broken Sword 4, Keepsake (Let\‘s Play), Callahan\‘s Crosstime Saloon (post-Community Playthrough)\nLooking forward to: A Playwright’s Tale
That sounds BAD, yes. But I wouldn’t be so quick on blaming the psychedelic mushrooms. I mean, they’re GOOD stuff. 
The stupidly ABYSMAL slider puzzle in Art of Murder: Hunt for the Puppeteer and the TERRIBLE maze sequence in Moebius: Empire Rising spring to mind.
I like the subtle edutainment
Oh yes? I don’t know if I’d trust educators who think boomerangs came from Egypt. 
Mine is from Hugo 2: Whodunit? where you play as Penelope, crime-solver extraordinaire. Here you are in front of a chasm, which you need to cross to get a banana (yes, that’s a banana). It’s too wide to jump, naturally. If you get too close you slip and die.
So what do you need to do? Find a ladder to cross it? Use your trusty whip to swing across? Well, not really.
It turns out that you need to walk right down to the bottom of the screen until you stop walking (Penelope is keyboard controlled), where there is a concealed narrow ledge which you can walk across. If you aren’t in the exact (hidden) one pixel wide spot you won’t be able to cross the ledge and will die. There is no way to know this without trying it.
Amazing, huh? 
I like the subtle edutainment
Oh yes? I don’t know if I’d trust educators who think boomerangs came from Egypt.
Well, I did say subtle!
Amazing, huh?
Not to mention that the chasm seems small enough for Penelope to just walk, let alone jump across it. Gender discrimination? 
Recently finished: Four Last Things 4/5, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout 5/5, Chains of Satinav 3,95/5, A Vampyre Story 88, Sam Peters 3/5, Broken Sword 1 4,5/5, Broken Sword 2 4,3/5, Broken Sword 3 85, Broken Sword 5 81, Gray Matter 4/5\nCurrently playing: Broken Sword 4, Keepsake (Let\‘s Play), Callahan\‘s Crosstime Saloon (post-Community Playthrough)\nLooking forward to: A Playwright’s Tale
Weren’t Hugo games mostly filled with horrible puzzle design? It’s bee ages since I’ve played them, but I recall them being relatively poor in that area.
Oh, and my nomination, the Gnome name puzzle from original AGI KQ1. You know the one.
Great theme Diego! If I take into consideration only recent adventures, I’ll go with a music volume settings puzzle from Chaos on Deponia.I’m a big fan of Daedalic, but puzzle where you need to leave the game and go to the main menu to lower the music volume is just absurd!
The 3D maze at the end of SQ6. According to Josh Mandel, even the designers were unable to solve it and had to hire someone to find the solution and write a walkthrough for it.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
That’s funny, I don’t remember a maze at the end of Space Quest 6. I vaguely recall something about innerspace, dealing with robots and collecting pills. Do you mean the datacorder puzzle? It’s been so long, I’m not even sure what I’m talking about anymore.
Cracked has an article series about these:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19974_the-6-most-absurdly-difficult-video-game-puzzles.html
(has the rubber ducky, babel fish from HHGTTG, the gnome puzzle from KQ1, cat mustache and two non-AGs)
http://www.cracked.com/article_21015_the-5-most-absurdly-difficult-video-game-puzzles-pt.-2.html
(Has discworld, Zork II, non-AGs)
http://www.cracked.com/article_21764_5-video-game-puzzles-clearly-designed-by-hateful-people.html
(Has The Samaritan Paradox, written by yours truly)
I’m not sure it will beat your example Diego, but I recently played the first Black Mirror game.
[spoiler]Near the end there is a hole you have to stick your hand into to get and item… well nothing wrong with that you are probably thinking, Perfectly normal AG behaviour. The problem however is that a few minutes before I came across a 100% identical hole, and when clicking on it a spear came out and pierced Samual’s skull right through the eye, so when seeing this hole I of course though: HA! I’m not falling for that one again, I know what will happen if I click on that hole… except this time we have to.[/spoiler]
But that is not even the worst part.
During the game you will often ask someone else to do something for you, develop some photos, look up some information etc. and they will tell you that it will take some time, and that you should come back a couple of hours later. So we continue the game, follow some other leads and when we have accomplished something else, we can go back and get our photos… Right?... WRONG!
There is absolutely nothing else we can do, the game won’t let you progress until we get those photos or whatever! So we take a little tour of the scenery, visit the pub where we can’t eat or engage in idle conversation while waiting, go back and ask are you done yet… No come back in an hour or two… and after doing that about 5-7 times, we finally get our photos and can continue with the game.
And that is not even the worst.
THE ZODIAC PUZZLE!
So we get to this slider puzzle, which is bad enough in itself. There is some clear hints as to which tile goes in each corner, and what the middle part should look like. So I carefully arrange them according to the hints and after about half an hour, I get all the tiles in the right position and… absolutely nothing happens???
Double check that everything is placed correctly, a bit of head scratching until I finally check the all knowing internet, and it turns out that the signs on the tiles are actually the zodiac signs, and you not only have to arrange them according to the in-game clues, but also in chronological order 
At this point I started to search for save-games right after this *beep* *beep* *beeeeep* puzzle.
You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ
I like the subtle edutainment
Oh yes? I don’t know if I’d trust educators who think boomerangs came from Egypt.
Mine is from Hugo 2: Whodunit? where you play as Penelope, crime-solver extraordinaire. Here you are in front of a chasm, which you need to cross to get a banana (yes, that’s a banana). It’s too wide to jump, naturally. If you get too close you slip and die.
So what do you need to do? Find a ladder to cross it? Use your trusty whip to swing across? Well, not really.
It turns out that you need to walk right down to the bottom of the screen until you stop walking (Penelope is keyboard controlled), where there is a concealed narrow ledge which you can walk across. If you aren’t in the exact (hidden) one pixel wide spot you won’t be able to cross the ledge and will die. There is no way to know this without trying it.Amazing, huh?
To me this would actually be a puzzle I’d enjoy. I like when a game plays outside of the realm of conventions and exploits our expectations.
I have encounted numerous of these kind of ‘perspective’ puzzles in 3rd person RPG’s(Zelda, Lufia, Final Fantasy, Golden Sun etc) so I am naturally trained to inspect every nook and cranny.
The puzzle also kind of reminds me of one of last puzzles of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where time is an element to solving the puzzle.
You reach the third trial and you have to pass a ravine, but only a man with the courage of a lion will be able to. So the trick to crossing this ravine is to immediately walk forward across the ravine, revealing an invisible path, the moment you enter the screen. If you linger too much the game registers that as doubt and any subsequent attempt at walking forward will lead to you falling down.
These kind of puzzles seem frustrating as hell, yet after knowing their solution I can really appreciate them.
To me this would actually be a puzzle I’d enjoy. I like when a game plays outside of the realm of conventions and exploits our expectations.
If you’re wondering what the rest of the game is like, this feature article on the Hugo series is rather amusing and may save you several hours of torture.
Great theme Diego! If I take into consideration only recent adventures, I’ll go with a music volume settings puzzle from Chaos on Deponia.I’m a big fan of Daedalic, but puzzle where you need to leave the game and go to the main menu to lower the music volume is just absurd!
Jonas Kyratzes did something similar in The Sea Will Claim Everything. You can only enter a cave of horrors [spoiler]when you turn the in-game graphics off. The button is on-screen. You find your way in the dark and at certain spots you can turn the graphics on again for a second, and see faces of politicians monsters. [/spoiler] I quite liked this. Out of the box. I think the game nudges you in the right direction.
See you around, wolf. Nerissa
I like the subtle edutainment
Oh yes? I don’t know if I’d trust educators who think boomerangs came from Egypt.
Well, I did say subtle!
Sorry to spoil your fun folks but the Egyptians DID use boomerangs. There’s loads of info out there about it but I’ll just post a link to short item: http://www.historyrundown.com/tag/egypt/
Life is what it is.
Sorry to spoil your fun folks but the Egyptians DID use boomerangs.
Until Advie confirms it, it’s all hearsay to me.
Recently finished: Four Last Things 4/5, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout 5/5, Chains of Satinav 3,95/5, A Vampyre Story 88, Sam Peters 3/5, Broken Sword 1 4,5/5, Broken Sword 2 4,3/5, Broken Sword 3 85, Broken Sword 5 81, Gray Matter 4/5\nCurrently playing: Broken Sword 4, Keepsake (Let\‘s Play), Callahan\‘s Crosstime Saloon (post-Community Playthrough)\nLooking forward to: A Playwright’s Tale
Great theme Diego! If I take into consideration only recent adventures, I’ll go with a music volume settings puzzle from Chaos on Deponia.I’m a big fan of Daedalic, but puzzle where you need to leave the game and go to the main menu to lower the music volume is just absurd!
Jonas Kyratzes did something similar in The Sea Will Claim Everything. You can only enter a cave of horrors [spoiler]when you turn the in-game graphics off. The button is on-screen. You find your way in the dark and at certain spots you can turn the graphics on again for a second, and see faces of
politiciansmonsters. [/spoiler] I quite liked this. Out of the box. I think the game nudges you in the right direction.
[spoiler]There was a hint in Deponia from a farmacy worker who said, that he sometimes wishes that you can turn off the music.But I would have expected in-game solution for this. 
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