The Worst Puzzle of All-Time | Design Delve
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
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Today J & Ludo delve into the utter filth that is the worst puzzle of all time.
Tracks Used in Order of Appearance:
The Notebooks - Stray OST
The Abyss - Hyper Light Drifter OST
Checking in - Celeste OST
Dirtmouth - Hollow Knight OST
Hornet - Hollow Knight OST
Mantis Lords - Hollow Knight OST
Nosk - Hollow Knight OST
Resurrections - Celeste OST - Hry
![Atelier Meruru Part 3 || Unskippable Ep196 [Aired: Oct 8, 2012]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2YwXrdCewHg/mqdefault.jpg)
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Really hope you enjoyed this episode gang and I hope the rant wasn't too intense
Happy bday
Sorry Ludo I couldn't hear your rant over the sound of your pet human, JM8. I'm Just joking, Happy Birthday JM8!
Happy Birthday 🎉🎂
🎂 (pun intended) also, Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday!
No no no this is genius - in the history of warfare, no invading army has ever brought a Small Ladder that could be used to scale the maze wall and walk on top of the broad flat surface of the maze to get across. It's the perfect defense mechanism. This is next-level stratagem that Sun Tzu himself would applaud.
-B
Or, and follow me on this, a REALLY big bomb.
@@JHawke1did you just say "turn civilians into highly dangerous living weapons that can't tell friend from foe"? Because I just heard the words "turn civilians into highly dangerous living weapons that can't tell friend from foe."
I never thought of it from Sun Tzu’s perspective. I have committed the gravest sin and resign from my position as War Master of Second Wind.. p.s hit me up on Twitter!!!
Also, there's no way that an invading army might just have several different people who can stand at the location of each button without trekking across the planet each time.
But why oh Why oh WHY was that NOT a short-cut solution? Flip through enough dimensions and hey! Your inventory now includes a ladder!
To misquote SQ6: "Bet you can't fit THAT thing in your pants."
The worst part about this is you had to go back to the puzzle to collect the footage here. Your sacrifice is noble and honourable!
You found the dark price i needed to pay to make this episode...
@@DesignDelve The hero we need. The hero we don't deserve.
It's poor Ludo I feel sorry for. You can always drink yourself into oblivion (or fallout nv, whichever you prefer), but poor Ludo can't escape the memories... 😢
@@DesignDelveThe great sacrifices require the strongest wills.
'Suffering for the art' doesn't quite go far enough.
Having an army would actually make this puzzle infinitely easier because you would always have someone at each controller for the puzzle, so it fails at its own stated purpose.
I remembered loving Obduction and never being quite sure why I didn't get around to finishing it. Then at 3:33 the memories started flooding back.
yeah we've tried to beat it two separate times and both times we got entirely lost once the world really opens up..
I love how this puzzle is so bad that multiple people have completely blocked it from their memories as a trauma response
I had to draw up the five pieces, cut them out of paper, and manually fiddle them around to figure out the right way to align them.
To be fair, the whole point was to be a difficult lock for the enemies to get through, so it's *intended* to be this hard.
Contrast with most of the puzzles in Firmament, which make *zero* sense as they're not even designed to keep you out.
@@darrennew8211 Why have a solution at all if you're just trying to keep enemies out? Better yet, why can't the enemy just climb over the walls?
@@Ansalion Because you want your own people to be able to pass thru. Why have a lock on your front door when you can just weld it shut? Every lock in an adventure game needs some way to get through it, or it's just a wall.
That said, it's a game, ya know? In real life, lock picking is rather more difficult than in games too.
This puzzle sounds like it would have worked really well in coop, 2 players communicating via voice chat. That would eliminate the back and forth to swap and rotate pieces and make it a potentially fun cooperative experience. In single player it's a hell of needless tedium as you constantly have to run back and forth.
2 players might be better but I think it was designed for 4. 1 player on the primary observation point, 1 at the primary world (large) rotation switch, 1 at the secondary (small) rotation switch and 1 person observing and transporting the small sections.
Does the game even have coop?
Making it "to slow down an army" is even funnier because an army by definition is made of more than one person.
@@Tyrope Don't think so. Maybe there's mods or something.
@@Unit27 OMG, you're right - that totally invalidates the narrative point. It's not like 3 people being left behind would change much.
This was actually THE puzzle that popped into my head when I saw the title of this video. Never having seen anyone cover this puzzle before, I watched to see whether or not your "worst puzzle" would be worse than my "worst puzzle."
I'd feel incredibly validated if I weren't busy dealing with the flashbacks.
Ages ago (in 2000 or thereabouts), I worked briefly as a tester for the world's biggest games publisher (hint: at the time it had a French name), and I was testing some "puzzle adventures", as I think they called them (think 7th Guest but significantly worse).
We were basically given a walkthrough to follow, and told to look for crashes and typos - and that was it. Whenever we found a bug that didn't actually crash the game, they said "well, if we fix that, we risk breaking something else, so we won't".
On top of that, most of the puzzles were basically incomprehensible (I think they made some money selling "guides" for their own games). There was only one where I complained so much that they actually changed the in-game description of some object to say exactly where it should be used and what it would do. Even that only made it into foreign versions, the original (French) one was left as it was.
TL;DR: Some developers don't care the least bit about what playtesters tell them. They see playtesting just as a stage of _debugging,_ not as part of game _design._
Two things:
1) I don't think the intrinsic "solve in your head" moment is always separate from actually solving the puzzle, because in some games, particularly more free-form puzzle games, you might try an idea you're not certain will work, but then if and when it does you get the intrinsic reward *and* solve the puzzle at the same time.
2) As far as really bad puzzles go, Phantasmogoria 2 has a pretty infamous one at the very end of the game, which involves interacting with an alien control panel that is just pure visual nonsense and has no hints or any real intuitive through-line for solving. Could be an interesting one to look into.
To further your point 1, there's not always a disconnect the other way in puzzles either. The example that comes to mind is Celeste (which I realize isn't pure puzzle, but it would also be silly to declare it as not being a puzzle game outright.) Often in Celeste figuring out the solution to the puzzle is one reward, but managing to successfully execute on it is a whole separate reward, so actually completing the puzzle still gives that bump.
Granted, in pure puzzle games the execution is rarely the challenge, so the video's point still definitely stands as well. I just think it's worth note since so many games fall into the puzzle+other genre category.
Interestingly I think that's what the old style crazy adventure games (Ken and Roberta Williams, you crazy ****) were going for. As frustrating as it was to have to figure out that the rotting fish had to be given to the brain because "that's brain food" (an actual line from Space Quest 6) if you actually managed to create the crazy thought before you solved the puzzle, it caused exactly this. There was never a moment of picking up something and going "oh I bet I can use this on X" instead it was "darn, I'm stuck... what would get past the crazy dwarf with giant eyes? Oh I have this invisible ink, that seems stupid enough to work... YEAH!"
One of the reasons I don't care for puzzle games is probably that I'm crap at abstract thinking, so all the... visualizing of various elements and trying hypothetical combinations in my head or whatever, is largely absent. I've gotten better at observing rules, physics, stuff like "if I push this block here then I can't move it again because those other blocks can't be moved either", but it does still get tiresome pretty quickly. I also get pretty limited satisfaction from jumping through arbitrary hoops set by the puzzle creator.
Overall how would you say Phantasmagoria 2 is compared to the first? I still haven't gone to try it, and went through the original like 5 years ago to show a friend one of the games that formed my childhood opinion on the FMV games (hint: I played the good/better ones only, so I think that era gets a bad rep). Sure the original wasn't the greatest, but I still enjoyed it
@@TheLazySamurai I haven't actually played either one myself. I know about Phantasmagoria 2 thanks to Spoony's playthrough from back in the day when he was relevant. It seemed very much like a "so bad it's good" experience watching him. However, Ross Scott did a Ross' Game Dungeon video on the game praising it unironically so your mileage may vary.
Don't forget the 20 second loading scene that happens *every time* you push the button on the teleporter, something you will have to do dozens of times during the course of this puzzle!
When I played the loading screens were 10 minutes each. I thought the game crashed untill I realized the loading took forever.
Even more if you have a potato PC!
@@nochannelplease666 did you actually play through the game? I had a literal eight minute load time on the very first teleporter, but every teleporter after that took about 30 seconds. I sort of assumed that it had to do some sort of one time generation thing.
It felt way longer than just 20 seconds. _rocks back and forth in chair_ And even funnier: Firmament by the same developer has pretty much the same loading screen and slow loads. Luckily there traveling between places isn't a major part of any puzzle, at least.
Not going to lie, I loved this game, even this puzzle, because I had no problem taking it slow... but the loading screen was the biggest headache. Like, seriously? You couldn't get this any better?
Ludo last week: I fear nothing!
Ludo this week: Alright this was terrifying actually
This isn't a normal human hunting alien monster ! This is the worst puzzle of all times !!
Preposterous to imply Ludo would be scared.
She's just insulted by how bad it is and avoids hurting herself again.
I've always wondered if this puzzle was so bad because they ran out of funding. The original Kickstarter promised 4 worlds, and while they did technically deliver that, the 4th world is basically a single room. And given Cyan's financial problems in the past and then them immediately pivoting towards a safer re-release of Myst, it really feels like they ran out of money before they made the game they wanted. Possible this puzzle was in mid-design and they just threw it in instead of removing it outright.
Still. Why not put a control-panel right at the structure, put some piece-changing animation to drag some time, and not make everyone angry?
@@AmityvilleFan because that hadn't been done before the money ran dry
@@prcervi When you saw the money runs dry - which should be obvious for months ahead -, you should do emergency solutions.
My suggestion is very basic, and can be done... Well, I don't know how long animation takes, but should be cheap and fast enough.
Would also mean the difference of bad and good reputation, and later sales number would go up by a not negligeable amount.
I would put forward the cat in King's Quest V. When entering a certain screen in a town, you see a cat being chased. There is no way to know this, but you have about 2 seconds to click on that cat. If you don't, you will discover - _hours later_ - that the game cannot be completed. Note that it doesn't have the decency to tell you where you went wrong, as the item needed could not be guessed to have come from clicking that cat. So you have to comb through the entire game with a fine-toothed comb looking for anything you may have missed.
Apropos of nothing, Sierra (the developers) had a pay-by-the-minute hint hotline you could call to get answers to puzzles. Just, you know. *_In case._*
Reminds me of the Sierra Hitchhiker's Guide game that got updated with visuals (2014? gosh, a decade ago) - if you didn't collect *everything* in Arthur's house where you start the game there's a chance you'd just be blocked from finishing it (the final "puzzle" would require, say, a toothbrush which, you guessed it, can only be collected at the very start). It's stunning that this passed for game design back then...though even that's not much of an excuse, as surely anyone with a brain can see that sort of "puzzle" is BS.
@@cobalt2672 Yeah, a lot of old adventure games had a really screwed up notion of fairness. (Go read the All the Adventures Project on the Renga in Blue blog if you want lots of truly egregious examples!)
But I’d give Hitchhiker’s Guide a pass. That game’s creators were _trying_ to be evil. They _knew_ it was unfair. Douglas Adams described it as the first “user-mendacious” video game. To that point: There isn’t just a _chance_ of softlocking the game by not bringing the right tool at the end. The game actively chooses items you don’t have, if there are any.
And, credit where credit is due for that game’s genius evil: It was an Infocom production, not a Sierra one.
Yes. When I tried to think of the worst puzzles I've personally played, this is what came to mind. I feel like KQV had a few of these where if you didn't happen to do or get something earlier, you would find out hours later that you couldn't finish the game.
Broken Sword 2; The boar. If you don't avoid it "correctly" and then save, you're entire game file is unbeatable. It doesn't tell you, doesn't give you another crack at it, you're just stuck for eternity to wonder the paths of "Zombie Island."
@@TheSnaveeelPlaysGames ooh I was about to start the broken sword series thanks for the heads up! Without spoilers, anything else I should keep on my toes for?
When I first saw the bird's nest view, I was like "You just rotate the sections, seems pretty easy." And then you said "So you must go to the basement and then teleport to another planet" and my jaw hit the FLOOR oh my goddddd
Even having to rotate the segments without seeing the whole puzzle is totally fine, that would be an interesting spacial reasoning puzzle. But to have the walk be so long and to force the player to do it so many times is just absurd. Or obsurd, as the game would spell it.
It is cool to see you here!
I got a question on this topic, and since you a person I respect, I thought I might ask. You are under no obligation to reply at all.
One thing that goes through my mind when watching design videos like this is the negativity. It prescribes an almost intentional level of malice to the designer, when we do not actually know what limitations might have led to this outcome.
It is the same issue I usually have with people who rewrite movies saying they would have done better. We do not know if the actors’ schedule allowed for them on set for necessary rewrites. A special effect might have broken and an entire section of plot needs a rewrite in 30 minutes to keep with production. Budget cuts, time errors, and obviously negligence are options.
My question is how to critique a piece of media in this manner fairly? Or more to the point, I want to do criticism, but this form feels almost cruel. I am not saying that is the intent of the critic here, rather the obvious conclusion of trying to hook viewers and teach at the same time. “The worst ever-“ is attention grabbing and got me here. I agree with the assessment, and I want solutions to allow creative teams to know how to solve issues like this. I still cannot help but consider the thought process of how it happened immensely flawed. Is this a bad thought process from me? That is kinda the question?
@@ngwoo I guess they felt they had to spice it up (and by that I mean add copious amounts of tedium) because this exact puzzle was already in Myst 3, and even back then it might have already been old.
@@matthewkrumlauf9990 Why do we need to do that. Of course we don't know the circumstances and we shouldn't. This is the product we received
He didn’t really emphasize just how bad the loading times are when you swap worlds either.
As soon as you mentioned Obduction, I knew exactly what puzzle you were going to talk about and immediately got war flashbacks. This wasted so much of my time and sanity figuring out what to do, let alone actually going through the arduous and repetitive process of solving it. Finding the solution is not satisfying when it takes forever to actually solve the puzzle. Your scream of rage summed up my feelings exactly. This should not exist.
The way he described it, I understand the flashbacks.
Loved the game and story but holy good god... that one was ROUGH.
I used a guide for this one, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
God yeah, in describing the process to complete the puzzle itself and double check if rotation was right, he totally glossed over that YOU NEED TO FUCKING FIGURE OUT HOW IT WORKS FIRST.
I'm torn. One the one hand I've been trying to remember what game I played years ago and these images confirmed it was Obduction. On the other hand I now also remember this puzzle.
I thought this was gonna be about the infamous puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3, at first. A point and click game where there's a puzzle where in order to make a disguise, you need to use a long series of items/interactions that includes putting tape on a hole and scaring a cat through it so the cat's hair will get stuck on the tape, so you can use it as a moustache disguise. It even has its own wikipedia page, the "Cat hair mustache puzzle" (dunno if youtube would eat an actual link or not).
The part that I think really kicks Gabriel Knight 3's cat hair mustache puzzle over a cliff is that the guy you are impersonating doesn't have a mustache either, you draw one on via a magic marker onto his ID. It's definitely top tier moon logic, and the worst at click all the items on all the objects to figure out where to go next.
I was going to say the somewhat similar soup cans puzzle in 7th Guest which also has its own Wikipedia page for how bad of a puzzle it was and how much moon logic is required.
The whole "a puzzle shouldn't take this long to solve" bit reminds me of the (optional, I think?) one in The Witness where in order to get your little maze-traveling dot across a theatre screen you have to watch an hour-and-a-half long film.
That one is thankfully optional and kind of a super-hidden Easter egg type thing. Similarly, in Braid, by the same creator, one of the hidden collectible items requires you to wait two hours for a cloud to move into the right position.
Is the film boring?
It's a solar eclipse in real time
Cool!@@bufar
@@Gigaheart it's a very interesting lecture about the nature of easter eggs throughout history, and the awe or madness they can bring, timed to the video of a solar eclipse.
I bounced off this game directly at this point. Was really enjoying it up until the maze puzzle, and after spending like 30 minutes figuring it out I had to stop playing and go to work. Every time I thought about turning it back on again after that I just thought "Oh but then I'd have to keep doing that maze" and eventually just uninstalled the game. A+ video.
I had that same thought about a week ago to “give it another go” - so When he said “obduction” I had a flashback to that exact puzzle
I had the exact experience. Was greatly enjoying the game up to that point, but then I was called away about fifteen minutes into that puzzle. I loaded the game up three or four more times afterwards, spent a minute or two on it and went "I really can't be bothered" and went back to playing Terraria.
Bad puzzles are easy to identify, they are usually ones that are so baffling that it still makes no sense in hindsight. Tons of old Sierra games and loads of old point & click adventure games are full of godawful puzzles. Also I'm pretty sure the final hidden puzzle in Fez is the worst puzzle ever because even after brute forcing it we still have zero ideas on how we were supposed to solve it.
Remind me again, what *is* the last puzzle in FEZ? It's been so long I can't recall it.
it's not the last puzzle in the main game but rather the most difficult of a series of hidden puzzles in the game. The puzzle they're talking about is the Monolith puzzle, which players ended up solving through brute force rather than through any players actually figuring out the solution (it was the last step in a HUGE gauntlet iirc). @@DarthSatoris
@@DarthSatoris i think it was the monolith. the giant black cube that basically had no solution in game, whatever was the solution, it was on the part of the map that was burned off. Its probably SOMEWHERE in the game, but nobody found it, let alone how to solve it intentionally (though that implies that brute force WASN'T the intentional way to solve it).
A sequence you had to put into a glitchy first person view. Even knowing the correct pattern you will not input it correctly 100% of the time. The paper that the sequence was written on was half burnt and there was no way to continue the puzzle. People discovering that lined up with the developers twitter meltdown and made everyone think that it was an intentional middle finger to his fans.
As someone who did not harass him at all him canceling FEZ2 and his handling of this final endgame puzzle made me add him to my blacklist. I will never buy another game of his and will tell people to not play his games if it ever comes up in public conversation.
He much later tried to claim that there was a solution if you looked at some old sci-fi movies but it sounds like BS.
@@DarthSatoris
Seeing how he acted on twitter and canceled fezII I do not believe their was a intended solution in game. I am sure that there was going to be an ARG or something but the dev never followed through. @@paultapping9510
Oh man I remember this friggin' puzzle. The saddest part about all this is Obduction is worth playing. Aside from this one puzzle it's actually well paced and thought out. I miss the old school point and click genre but I honestly don't miss the off the wall difficulty.
So use a walkthrouht for this part to get back to the good puzzle.
honestly the game seemed pretty mid from what i experienced up until this puzzle
and this puzzle was more than enough reason to just drop the game as whole
and given that i got it for free from epic i felt no reason to go back to it
@@mikaelste-marie1275 the problem with this puzzle is not that it is hard to solve, but the way you do it requires a lot of mechanical things that are boring: you know how to walk, you are capable to press buttons. but having to interact with the same keys that are so distant to each other so many times is just... boring
It's a seriously difficult puzzle. I had to cut pieces out of paper and fiddle them around until I figured out what I had to do.
I am utterly floored. For the first time ever, I’ve predicted the specific subject of the video before it was revealed.
Me, 2 mins in: “Makes me think about that one puzzle in Obduction.”
Me, 10 seconds later: “NO WAY”
I remember this puzzle and watching a friend play it and the pure anger they went through was agonizing. And while I understand the devs might say "Yeah it's shit, and that's the point" deliborately horrible is still horrible
I find that excuse so lazy
That reasoning of theirs is an exercise in fart-sniffing.
See, you can narratively say "this puzzle was hard to slow the enemy down" while making it a quick solution for the player as a method of empowerment.
It fooled them, but you're smarter than them. YOU have the kind of brain capable of working this out.
The Zelda games do this quite often.
The ironic thing is that an army with coordination via radio can probably cut the time to get past it by 75%
"No no, you don't understand. We deliberately *chose* we make you suffer!"
"YOUR MOM, YEH?!" this is truly the spirit of second wind
That part really caught me off guard. 😂
Id say the single greatest puzzle design; the complete opoosite of this, in fact, is the finale of outer wilds. Its perfect, if you know the answer, it takes less than 8 minutes to finish the entire game - but the way you discover that answer is so entertaining, so brilliant, that it becomes a multi-hour inbestigation
Definitely agree. And the same for the DLC. It's just... so amazing to finally put it all together in a rush of combining all you've learned with just enough unknown.
I think it was actually Myst that pioneered this. If you know the answer, you can finish the game in less than a minute. But you won't know that answer without exploring the island and solving its other puzzles and mysteries.
I agree that it's brilliant that the only thing preventing you from succeeding in outer wilds is knowledge. However, even though I love the game a as whole, in actual gameplay I had to retry the ending sequence way too many times due to unlucky timing and getting eaten, even though I had it figured out.
@@MmeCShadow True, but in Myst the ending is purely a matter of knowing the answer to that one puzzle. In Outer Wilds, the ending puzzle is a culmination of several different puzzle types game mechanics and you can't skip the application of that knowledge. I like that a little bit better - you still have to prove your broader knowledge of the game rather than just the solution to one specific puzzle.
The most satisfying puzzles I've ever solved were the Truth puzzles from Assassin's Creed 2. The puzzles themselves were enough that the reward was unimportant. Which is good, because the reward was not worth the trouble.
And yes, I did solve those by myself without hints. All of them. The fact that they were so difficult and yet completely possible to intrinsically solve without outside influence or context is nothing short of legendary.
Another type of puzzle that really grinds my gears is one that requires pixel perfect timing, when it's not in a game built around timing. And there's no way to bypass it, meaning for people with poor reflexes or just can't seem to nail the timing, they have to bash their heads against it again and again or just give up.
OH GOD DAMN HERE COME THE NAM FLASHBACKS TO QUANTUM CONUNDRUM
As one of those people who can't get timing right on these types of puzzles, YES.
Timed events in puzzles is a cardinal sin.
Hotel dusk on the ds was a pretty cool visual novel but there's one chapter where you need to sneak into an office and carefully remove a paper from under a shelves. You need to use the stylus to very carefully raise the shelve and get the paper (it's not timming based it's more "very slow and precise")
If you fail the shelve crashes down and you get a long game over cutscene before redoing all the sneaking in chapter and getting to try again.
At the time my touchscreen was miscalibrated so one of the reason I loved hotel dusk was that it didn't need any precision. I spent way too much time trying to pass that check trying to draw a "straight line" while taking calibration randomness into account
Timed puzzles and time limits with unclear goals are a bane on logic. That's why Outer Wilds fails as a puzzle game. It's a story game with light puzzle elements, but the gameplay itself is trash
I can think of exactly one saving grace that would have made this puzzle bearable.
1) Only force the player to do it the long way ONCE.
2) Once its done once, unlock the 'master code' that allows the player to manually turn and swap the pieces as needed from the overlook.
They couldve even gone full monty and given us a portal gun equivalent that lets us blast through the swapping mechanics like an alien god. Wouldve been a HUGE shift in dynamic and immensely satisfying.
Or as somebody else mentioned, it is okay to have us solve the puzzle without looking at it, just don't make the player spend two minutes just to check. Maybe after the first time guessing and checking, have the teleporter go from the top to the buttons on the other planet, and don't make it take more then 15 seconds.
Or make another puzzle or gauntlet of puzzles that give you a way around that evil puzzle, thus turning it into a sort of sequence break
Or once you go the long way you manage to bring the equipment required back to the starting world.
You could still have them on different levels of the elevator so you have to do it without looking but making it so the player just has to go directly up & down without loading screens would make this far less horrific.
@@alexanderrobins7497 I had to cut the pieces out of paper and spin them around on another paper to figure out what I had to do. So once you do that, it isn't too bad.
There really is no worse type of puzzle than one that you can immediately figure out but is laborious to complete and especially so when completing does not get faster with repetition.
Theyre not only the worst for being a mind numbing chore but also because they’re immersion breaking from a design perspective.
The best format for a puzzle like this (it can still get pretty bad depending how it's presented) is one that looks complicated but if you stop and think for a moment can be done with a single swap or two. Lights Out puzzles (toggling one switch toggles some assortment of ones next to it) can often do that for example. That lets people get deep into the weeds but still allows the "aha" and solution to be close together.
I agree but they are tied to me with puzzles that are really tricky, be it to come up with the solution or implement it, and then force you to restart the whole thing for a mistake. Let's say, lockpicking or hacking minigames that need a very specific combination of parts that reset at any mistake and you need to bruteforce it. It's really annoying when a puzzle is basically trying to draw out your time, punishing you for trying to be faster while giving you no hints. You need to find keep solving each step in order, even when the first ones are already solved.
@@LuizAlexPhoenix Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna. Anything with a recorder tended to fall into this category and some were LONG.
@@adamsbja I only remember one recorder puzzle in Road to Gehenna (though I've yet to fully complete it, still trying to gather stars), and it was one in the first world where you had two fans to hop over to each side of the puzzle.
That one really stumped me initially, but yeah, definitely annoying in how it requires you to reset the puzzle if you mess up or just want to try something.
@@Tryforce8000 It's been a while, I might be misremembering what was whare. There were definitely some long complicated puzzles that could force a reset for various reasons.
The worst one I heard of is one my dad told me about. In the original Bard's Tale.
There is apparently a cave system you must go through to progress. It's a maze inside. Other caves you can navigate with a torch, but this one is in total darkness.
This is the old days before 3D, so its not like now where you could hug a wall. You just move from one black screen to the next.
That might sound bad enough, but it gets far far worse. You might have been clever and started mapping it on graph paper. Well guess what? There's places you can step on that randomly rotate you. I believe he said it doesn't indicate it happened either.
You get lost forever, pre-internet.
There is a rerelease of Bards Tale on steam. Thankfully there is an auto mapper to assist in navigation.
There was at least a spell that gave you your location in a dungeon, so as long as you cast that after every move, you could work out where you were...
I knew it was gonna be bad when you mentioned you'd rotated the piece. I mentally went, "Goddammit," because I knew you'd have to do it again for each of the other segments. That truly is the feeling of bad puzzle design: when the player says, "You're gonna make me do the exact same thing AGAIN? But I already proved I solved it!"
When he mentioned the rotation I had assumed you would need to rotate the whole platform then teleport in the peice. Not much better but would have locked in the rotation to the cardinals.
That doesn't even just apply to puzzles. I tend to have the same feeling about action-based challenges that boil down to successfully doing the same or extremely similar thing multiple times consecutively too. If I did it once, I proved I can do it. What more does doing it ten times in a row prove at this point?
it is worse, you have to do more than once for each of the 3 solutions D:
@@Alloveck I've completely lost my patience for games/challenge levels without checkpoints because of this. I don't want to have to flawlessl repeat 5 minutes of a Mario level just to get another attempt of the 20 second part I couldn't figure out. And don't get me started on Octopath Traveller making you do 40 minutes of repeat boss fights EVERY TIME you want to try the final superboss! There's too many good games to play for me to be wasting my time repeating stuff I already did.
@@CharlotteML1 Bringing up Mario games in particular is making me remember the trauma of Mario Galaxy 2's perfect run through Grandmaster Galaxy. Once I finally did manage that perfect run, after countless attempts and pointless repeats of the earlier parts just to get the chance to fail again at the extra hard later sections, I never wanted to play that game again.
I got absolutely stumped on a particular puzzle in Myst V. After hours of getting nowhere with it, I took a few steps backwards and looked up. The answer was literally written above the door.
Myst V was trash. Absolute garbage.
@@TheMaskedGamer yeah but it had Goggles, and that guy was a bro.
Players don't look up, example 234986.
@@pierreseneclauze8085 LOL, you beat me to it by less than a minute. It's even on my mind because I've been playing Far Cry 6, and it's hilarious how hard the game works at getting players to look up. Like, climbable walls are absolutely covered in arrows pointing up - along with *eye pictograms* just in case the player doesn't take the hint.
@@jasonblalock4429I do feel annoyed and distracted by how afraid the developers are that I'll get lost these days.
Along a very similar vein is one of the environmental puzzles in The Witness. The one where you have to hold your cursor in place for one hour while you wait for the moon to move across the screen so you can use it to finish the puzzle, while listening to some speech about solar eclipses that goes off on incredibly deep tangents. However that one is entirely optional, and the speech you're listening to becomes pretty funny given the context of what you're doing.
Steam description: "This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. "
Yeah, a completely optional puzzle with no reward can't really be called the worst puzzle
@@artman40 the game is fun but god damn is it full of itself lmao
I think there are multiple types of "worst" puzzles.
There's this type, the Tedious Timewaster.
Then there's "Guess What I'm Thinking", a.k.a. "What Has It Got In Its Pocketsses?" There are no or not enough clues, you just need to guess what the developer wants you to do. The old text dungeons were chock full of these. A particularly frustrating variation is those where a different solution is more obviously "correct", but the developer didn't think of it or thought it was too easy, so it isn't coded into the game. Hidden passages with no clues of their existence are another subtype, leaving you to brute force jump/touch everywhere.
And then there's "Pixel Perfect Timing". Sometimes these are twitch refllex based, sometimes they're coordination based. The last element of the final puzzle in the 80s classic "Hacker" was both this and a Tedious Timewaster. Be off by a single pixel and you lose.
And then there's "Invisible Walls". You can see where you need to go, but the game consideres a knee-high fence to be an impenetrable barrier.
Then there's RNGesus, where skill doesn't matter, your ability to succeed depends entirely on winning the RNG lottery.
And finally, there's "Bugged & Broken". There was supposed to be a solution, but a bug in the game breaks it. No matter what you try, nothing works.
At first when you said it's in Obduction I was confused because I remember that game being absolutely brilliant with its puzzle design. Then I saw it. And then I remembered.
I wish I had never remembered.
This reminds me of a puzzle in Marathon where you have to raise a bunch of platforms to create makeshift stairs. The whole problem is that the switches you need to press to raise them are scattered all over the level, and while these rooms have windows overlooking the platforms in question, you still need to manually go all the way back to make sure they're at the correct height (something that can be extremely tricky since jumping isn't a thing in the game). The worst part is that it's possible to perfectly line up the platforms so you can walk up all of them, only to realize that the last step isn't actually high enough to reach the exit, but if you raise only that last one, then everything else will be too low, which will usually result in you crying for the rest of the level.
Colony Ship For Sale Cheap is the level name iirc
@@sideways5153 Yeah, that's the one.
That was one that popped into my head too.
I didn't think a description of a puzzle could make me legitimately angry, and only halfway through the description at that. Holy scheissballs that's infuriating.
I've never felt something so viscerally that I've never seen nor heard of.....how did no one in the design team object to this?!
I've seen point and click games with moon logic less irritating than this.
You actually only need to solve this puzzle twice. You have to solve it once for going straight through the maze, and a second time for going right. After you solved it for going right, you can just rotate the entire disc to go left, which means that the third solution only takes you around 30 seconds
Ok and you also only need to spend about 25 minutes on it if you do everything perfectly, but people don't do puzzles perfectly. It's trial and error and solving problems.
Cool that you know that ahead of time. And if you didn't know that and you solved for the left path first? Then solve for middle path. Oh look, gotta do it again for the right path.
Let's not tell him about Uru's pod puzzles that require real life HOURS for a chance at, and you have to deduce this by realizing that the marks on the ground in one pod are actually important, and the sunlight coming through cracks in a nearby window is _actually_ moving over a series of hours and not just static decor.
I've just realised that the true tragedy of this puzzle is this:
If it was supposedly designed to slow an army down... Then an obvious thing to do would've been for the puzzle creator to have put in a backdoor. A shortcut, if you will, that enabled anyone who knew where it was to sidestep the puzzle.
But the player would only know about the existence of a backdoor if they'd found a clue previously.
And then you get rewarded for being clever enough to put two and two together and realise YOU DON'T NEED TO DO THE PUZZLE!!!
How on EARTH did this not occur to the devs?!
Yeah, like sure you want to slow down the enemy forces, but it doesn't make sense to slow your own people down, too.
Could've had either that or a way to bypass the backtracking in some way like a constant view from the top of the puzzle. Or some secret signs the aliens had where if you know how they look like and where they're located you can know what piece is supposed to be where and what orientation.
@@TakioMx Yep. There's nothing wrong with fiendishly difficult, monotonous, tiresome, frustrating puzzles SO LONG AS YOU, THE PLAYER DON'T HAVE TO DO THEM!!!! 🤣
a puzzle that initially seems tedious but the *real* puzzle would be to find some sort of backdoor to make it possible in a reasonable time would actually be pretty interesting...
though i think a flaw is that players who werent thinking along these lines might just brute force it not realizing there's a better way, causing them to get the same bad experience
@@electra_ True... But then they'd go online to complain about it and get told "um... didn't you talk to the NPC in the last room who tells you about the candlestick?"
@@electra_ There definitely needs to be some tell for it. Could be that a few of the prior puzzles turned out to have one of these shortcuts (that you may or may not have been able to access beforehand (without some gadget or smth)) so that people go "There must be a shorter way for this". Maybe some plans you can find that tell you about it. Or just the character saying something to that effect directly, tho that would probably rob people of that "Aha!" effect.
This video was an emotional arc. From seeing in the description that the "worst puzzle ever" was apparently in a game I honestly really enjoyed, to "I guess this part was a little annoying" to reliving my repressed memories at how bad that puzzle was. I think it's the only part of the game I took full-on notes for, aside from learning the number system enough that I didn't need the notes any more (I did that in Riven too, that sort of thing is totally my jam and I love when the game goes "surprise you need to know this more complex bit of their system as well" and I derived that hours ago for fun).
The worst part is, the narrative could have worked, but the first steps would have been you teleporting the controls over to the top of that elevator as to cut out all the traveling after your first go xD
Or just a time skip, fast travel feature,
I would actually wager that Cyan went into creating this puzzle fully aware, because there is actually a precedent for such a puzzle that deliberately wasted your time and forces you to get information at an entirely different location to give you a hint whether you are on the correct track to the solution or not: The Mazerunner sequence in the original Myst (and its remake).
For those who don't know about it, the Mazerunner sequence is a puzzle on the second island where you have to ride a subway cart through an underground labyrinth from within the cart, using only five buttons - or two levers and a button in the remake - and audio cues to guide you through the maze - no visual cues or hints whatsoever. Thing is, there is only one hint to solving this puzzle, and it's located IN AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT AGE - a toy that you can pick up and makes sounds after certain actions. You need to have picked up the item and made notes of the sounds BEFORE you even encounter the subway maze - only when you hear the audio cues (among the other noises during the sequence, so chances are You don't even notice them the first time around) do you realize that the toy and this sequence are connected. Only - once you're stuck in the maze, you can't go back to the other age and learn the correct prompt! You COULD try brute-forcing it (like I said, five buttons, so it takes many times), but make ONE mistake, and you have to do the entire sequence again... AFTER the current run has concluded ... and each attempt takes 7(!) minutes and is unskippable!
/Edit: oh and the worst part is, on your first attempts you *might* think that at certain junctions certain sounds would cue you in which button to press to get closer to the exit... but you'd be WRONG! You absolutely have to go a roundabout way. Which of course you wouldn't know unless you've already attempted the sequence several times, even with having learned the toy audio cues beforehand! Stupid piece of....
Yeah, so I'm not really surprised that such a bad puzzle has been found in a Cyan game. The Mazerunner had me completely soured on Myst back in the day, and by extension most Myst-likes as well for a very long time. /Edit2: and while I haven't played any of the Myst sequels myself, from what I've heard Cyan simply loved tossing in at least one complete time waster of a puzzle in every one of them - I've heard similar stories about such a puzzle in Riven and in Uru at the very least.
I really don’t remember the maze puzzle being that bad… I didn’t make the connection to the hint in the other age, but seeing which paths were blocked off at each junction quickly ruled out which of the sounds could mean which direction. Maybe they made it easier in some versions of the game? I think there’s at least four.
People complain about this puzzle and then go and grow fake cabbage for fake sheep... Wtf?!
It's fun to learn why some puzzles might resonate poorly with players; this isn't something I had ever thought of before.
@@LucifronzThat's a bad self serving assumption and is mostly reflective of you not enjoying solving puzzles period. Videogames in total are a waste of time and so is anything you enjoy about them. The important part is that you are enjoying yourself. Pretty much nobody likes puzzles with long input times because the fun part of the puzzle is already finished.
It speaks volumes that this is the one time I've ever heard him go from slow, polite and slightly afraid, straight into devastated fury.
All I can think of here is that some environment artist really, really loved the idea of having this nice long cave with lots of environmental storytelling in it, and nobody had the heart to say "this is a massive waste of time".
Design Delve is quickly becoming a favourite of mine. Long live Second Wind!
For me, the worst puzzle is one that doesn't even HAVE a solution.
In Borderlands 3, you find Doctor Tannis' lab, and there's one of those puzzles where you press different buttons that turn on and off a sequence of lights. You know the type, where you try to get all the lights to be on at the same time.
And there's just... not a correct way to do it. It's placed there just to mess with you. I spent twenty minutes testing out solutions and finally gave up which I almost never do, and when I looked up the (lack of a) solution I was so mad I didn't go back to the game for over a year.
They could easily retain the story of a puzzle designed to waste time by introducing a twist, where once you have the pattern down and it sinks in how onerous the rest will be you get help from an unexpected source that allows you to "cheat" the rest of it, instilling a sense of relief and gratitude for the intervention.
Before watching this video I would've said that knot-untying puzzle from Broken Age. Basically there's a complicated knot you have to untie, and the only clue is a vague diagram several screens away, and if you fail the knot resets in a different configuration and you have to go back to look at the new vague diagram.
Up until I saw this video MY worst puzzle was the goat one in Broken Sword.
For those not in the know this relatively simple puzzle required you to interactant with a goat to get it to move (via knocking you down), then click on some farm equipment to move it (trapping the goat). The problem was you had to click on the farm equipment while in the animation of falling, the first and ONLY time you've ever been able to interact with the environment while in an animation.
I remember playing and enjoying Obduction, but I don't remember that puzzle. My mind must have blocked out all the memories of it to protect my mental health
When I think of horrible puzzles, my mind immediately goes to one of the last puzzles in Return to Zork where you had to yeet your inventory items into a pit to progress and if at any point you failed to pick up something essential, you were soft-locked and had essentially wasted your entire time with the game
That's a bug specific to the CD-ROM version of the game, and if you did encounter it, you can raise the bridge by throwing respawnable items at it (like hay or steak). You can't softlock it, but it is annoying if you encounter it.
At the end of the Hitchhikers Guide game, there's a part where you need to give Marvin a tool. It's randomly selected from one of twelve, and the game will actively prioritise inaccessible tools. Two of them can be found at the start of the game, and are quickly demolished after this point.
Oh, and if you don't give a dog a sandwich at the start, you lose at the end. You can fix this in the middle thanks to time travel.
@@LordSusaga The other infamously frustrating puzzle in Hitchhikers Guide is the babel fish puzzle near the start. After a long sequence of gradually working out the various steps needed to beat it,- which are teased to you one at a time as you break the puzzle down, you find that the game is unwinnable if you failed to pick up an inconsequential item as the game was hurrying you out of your house right at the start. Basically, Douglas Adams just loved doing this to people who played his games.
@@euanduthie2333 that counted as replay value back then - like NG+
@@euanduthie2333 To add to the nightmare of that particular puzzle, you had limited attempts to solve the puzzle - and the limit is specifically one less than the number of steps it takes to break the puzzle down one piece at a time.
Shoutout to the color wheel "puzzle" in Armed and Delirious. You have to try up to 512 permutations of a color wheel. There is no clue in the game as to the order. You just have to brute force it. It can take up to 45 minutes.
The first thing that came to mind when I thought of "worst puzzle" was the boat puzzle in The Witness, where the solution involved listening to the ambient ship creaks and water drops in the background.
yeah there it is at 0:38
This reminds me of something Yahtzee said. "i'll remind the developers that deliberately annoying is still annoying."
I wasn't prepared for the sudden "YOUR MUM, YEH?" in the nifty game design video essay show, but I appreciated it all the same. Awesome rant and great writing/performance/editing to keep it in-tune with the rest of design delve, great stuff!
This is making me think of one of the puzzles in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst where you had to get something in a pitch black cave past a waterfall area. The solution involves travelling to a different world where it rains every few minutes, noticing that if you hang out around some fireflies they start to follow you, but stop following you if you touch any water or run or jump, travel back to the waterfall with the fireflies (if you didn't already lose them to the rain, or running, or jumping), cross the waterfall area by stepping on iffy woven baskets to avoid touching the water, then getting all the way to the cave where the thing you needed to find is finally interactable. I guess your character isn't able to feel around with their hands in the dark.
I remember having to look up the solution to that puzzle and getting so upset at how convoluted, unintuitive, and frustrating it was. Even knowing the solution, it took me a solid 30 minutes to get through it.
UPDATE: I just read a walkthrough to see if I was remembering correctly, and I forgot you have to get the fireflies TWICE because you're forced to jump to get to the last part of the cave. This is making me mad all over again.
An honorable mention for Hareraiser. For people that don't know, it's an old computer puzzle game that when solved correctly would lead to you to a place IRL to dig up a treasure worth a lot of money. Only downside is that the game doesn't seem to have a solution, and the winners won by having a connection to one of the people that buried the treasure.
The story is even weirder then that, you are basically only half right, you seemed to confuse the book that inspired it, (which is the one someone had a connection and cheated on) and the actual terrible game (that has no know solution and was to come in two parts and is just repeating screens of nonsense) if this sounds interesting to anyone go watch Ashens lecture on the worst game ever: Hareraiser.
There's actually some evidence that the computer game *did* have a solution, but that it had so little charm and cost so much for the time that no one figured it out before the solution became defunct. There's a whole website by a Russian guy that walks through the clues step by step and makes a very strong argument that the rabbit was in Harrods' deposit box when the contest was ongoing.
@@dado__ That's even more insane, I love it.
For me, the worst one I've had to suffer through was the jewellery box in the Resident Evil 1 remaster. I spent over an hour and a half stuck on that puzzle, only to eventually give up, check a walkthrough, and get completely baffled by the solution.
The box, for reference, has a hemispherical indent where the keyhole would be, which is described as being "about 2 inches in diameter". I reason there must be some round key hidden somewhere which fits and opens the box. After checking the walkthrough, it turned out the key was actually a cut red gem which I'd taken from a deer's head trophy mounted on the wall in another room. The gem's description makes no reference to its size, and the shape is a traditional diamond cut, so it's pointy on one end, and flat on the other, so nothing about it indicates that it would fit the hole in the box.
If the gem was more spherical or hemispherical, or the description mentioned its size, or the hole in the box was angular and pointy rather than smooth and round, then I would have figured it out and gotten on with my life, but I wasted an hour and a half running around looking for an item which didnt exist. I don't see how to figure that out other than to just brute force it by trying to combine every item in your inventory with it until something works.
2 years later and it still makes me angry xD
I think I recall my GM putting nearly this exact same puzzle before us in TRPG, but nearly immediately caving into our demands to streamline and by pass the challenge when we identified it as an annoying waste of time and he couldn't justify it to himself either.
The trauma of having to do it himself must have made him do it to you. That's how hazing rituals persist over time, the mentality of: "I had to suffer so you have to suffer too."
TBH I feel like unless they wanted you to describe each action, it could be a fine puzzle. Use some handouts with the pieces drawn or printed and have the player assemble the solution. Could completely solve the issue in the video.
@@Feroce This explains all English Lite classes.
If I had something like this, I'd tell the players "Now that your party knows what to do, it will now take the better part of an hour to implement the solution. Narrate for me how your characters handle this hour of mindless tedium."
Just because I put the _characters_ through an hour of tedious hell doesn't mean I have to do it to the _players._
Ok, I had forgotten about / suppressed the memory of this puzzle, so definitely a good candidate for worst. The design sin that grinds my gears, which this one doesn't commit, is when it Requires out-of-game tools / knowledge to solve. I was recently reminded of a certain puzzle in The Talos Principle, where the clue you need is in a QR code that you need to scan with your IRL phone, then send the result through a hex-to-text translator. (exacerbated by the fact that QR codes are all over the levels as a narrative device, it's just that this one code is the only one that doesn't get translated for you when you hover the cursor over it)
I feel like the big issue there isn't that it requires out-of-game tools, but that it requires "out-of-logic" tools. I.e. the game has shown you the logic/rules that "this is how you solve puzzles", and then suddenly ignores that for no reason, with no indication. All other puzzles are solved in-game, so how is anyone supposed to realize that this one is different?
Puzzles requiring out-of-game tools can be really cool, as long as that's part of the expected logic for the game, because it rewards you for having real life skills and experiences (or learning them). E.g. I loved the MMO The Secret World which had insane amounts of out-of-game stuff. It probably has more out-of-game puzzles than purely in-game ones, with everything from going to a fake corporate website to find the next of kin of a dead employee, to having to understand morse code to decode a radio transmission. One of my favorite early quests in that required everything from paying attention to in-game textures, to finding clues to riddles by reading quest text (and if you just tried to brute force it, the game would give you new clues that seemed valid enough, but would intentionally send you in the wrong direction), to having to look up passages in an actual bible.
But they key difference is that TSW explicitly tells you from the start that the game will do all that, and more, and encourages you to seek solutions outside the box (and the game), because you won't find them if you don't.
As a big fan of puzzle games, seeing this type of design just made me go: "Oh no... oh god no..."
This is the type of puzzle that would cause me to fling my controller at the screen in rage.
Since I'm always a bit on the nervous side, "human error" as you mention it, would frequently come up if I'd try to solve this. I can only imagine the amount of rage you had while trying to obtain the right footage for this.
As much as I love Cyan's games (Riven being their best, in my opinion), I totally agree with you about this puzzle. I was really enjoying Obduction up until that point. Once I realised the amount of work involved to complete it, I gave up on the game, never to return. A real shame.
I feel like the ideas behind their games are great, but I could never get anywhere with them because there's a tendency to have the exact issue that this puzzle has, only on a smaller scale.
MYST has so many puzzles that rely on you pushing multiple buttons in disparate locations that don't seem to do anything, even when you successfully get the solution, because the area that you've opened up can't be seen from where you are.
Unless you know what the puzzle does and have a prepared strategy to solve it and haven't missed the cypher written in a book that you can't take with you, or scratched onto a wall on the other side of the island, it's really difficult to know if you're getting anywhere.
MYST also starts by facing you away from the one place on the first island that can give you meaningful context for what you're meant to be doing and if you do turn to face the door in question the button to open it can be difficult to find.
I wanted to be able to engage with the story, but the way the game is designed means that it is incredibly easy to just not face the correct direction as you pass by something that you didn't realise was important.
The only real difference between this and the older games is that you can't just click the mouse to move between the different parts of the puzzle more quickly and instead have to actually walk there at a set speed.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090I have to agree. I couldn't finish Myst without a walkthrough. Riven was worse: there are _multiple_ instances of hard-to-find passages which you can only find by looking behind doors, and of course the final Riven puzzle was infamously awful.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 I feel kinda vindicated to read this. So many comments were singing MYST and Riven's praises I felt like I might be the only one who'd had a hard time with them. When I first played MYST I was too young to really grasp the puzzles and just used a walkthrough, so I never got an untainted experience of its puzzles. I gave Riven an honest try though, but I just couldn't grasp what it wanted from me. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, or what effect my actions were having.
MYST III seems to have been largely forgotten, which is a shame because it's my favorite in the series. They brought on Presto Studios (miss those guys), and they really knocked it out of the park. I almost always knew what I was trying to do, and what my tools were to do it, and it was just a matter of working out the solution. Plus you got Brad Dourif being crazy, and that's always a treat.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 I was actually smart enough at 16 to beat Myst. Most of the puzzles reveal themselves through trial and error and it wasn't too hard to traverse from one place to another to see what cause and effect you were having.
Riven was absolute nonsense though. It was a video game for people trying to show off to their Mensa friends. When I saw the walkthroughs later I regret all the hours I spent trying to succeed at it lol.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 When Myst has something happen elsewhere, it often goes out of its way to indicate what has happened. The way that the clocktower has a tiny version of the gear that opens up to tell you to go check the full-sized one, for example, or the way the model ship raises out of the fountain to indicate that the large one has as well.
And while the chamber next to the dock is very important for progressing through the story, the instructions for where it is and what you need to do there are in the letter you find by going the other direction. This is one area where I think the remake failed miserably, because with how important that letter is, they made it very easy to walk past it without seeing it, when in the original game it was nearly impossible to miss it.
Speaking of happy brain chemicals, I can't even tell you how justified I felt at the moment when this video's puzzle was revealed to be THAT puzzle. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I encountered this puzzle in Obduction. I was sure that there was some button somewhere that I was overlooking, because no way would Cyan have intended THIS to be the way this puzzle was solved.
I don't know about that "there's always a bit of time between mentally and physically solving a puzzle". Especially in Baba is You, there were plenty of times where I was convinced I solved the puzzle, only to not notice something at the last moment, or be completely unsure if this dumb thing is gonna work until I saw the win screen.
My first thought was to one of the last puzzles of samorost 3. once you figure it out, you have to solve it multiple times, treking back across the entire world (and multiple cutscenes) to regrab materials, then come back and do it again. like 4 times in total IIRC. but it was still just like 15-20 minutes, this is so VERY much worse.
The writing and performance by Jm8 are particularly great on this one. Really captures the madness of an awful puzzle. Here I thought it as gonna be about sliding tile puzzles that curse many a great game like RE4 and Zelda
spent a lot of attention to the pacing and writing in this one so i appreciate this
I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually quite like sliding tile puzzles. It's scratches a very specific spatial reasoning itch. But I don't need a lot of them 😅
One of my least favorite puzzles is Grin Fandango's racetrack puzzle where you have to figure out the date and time of a winning ticket based on the history of the race track. It's actually fun but I end up having to look up the puzzle cause I mis interpret a clue or enter the numbers wrong.
Oh, I remember that one. I had trouble with it because I never realized there was another window you could go to at the race track if you just clicked in a different part of the lobby leading up to it (that had no signposting whatsoever, so I had no idea that it would go anywhere, never mind anywhere different), so I never got the right window to get the ticket at. Even when I broke down and followed a walkthrough it was like go up to this window and do this, but I couldn't do that, because I was supposed to go to the other window that that I had no idea existed, but looked exactly the same as the window I was at, so I kept trying to do the thing at the wrong window, and obviously failed to do the thing because I was at the wrong place to do the thing, even though the place I was at looked exactly like the place that the thing could get done at.
@@ericjobin2843 I also hade so much trouble whit that wen the game was new and replayed it last year and cud still not figure out how to get the right number and way (mady a cultural thing) tusdays and cats are related somehow
@@paultapping9510I remember being stuck on that for ages, but not what the solution was… Guess I’m in for a good time if I ever play the remaster ;)
When I hit this puzzle, I immediately figured out what to do and how to do it. I have pretty good spatial perception and logic that way, to those without the puzzle must be maddening. The *problem* is as said it takes repeatedly swapping worlds, which actually involves unloading all the assets, then loading up all the new assets, and loading the new area. Due to how much sheer data and geometry is being streamed, this is a lot. You need a good SSD to run the game smoothly... but it doesn't mater how fast your drive is, that age swap takes minutes MINIMUM. EACH. TIME. So you see the puzzle, you figure 'oh! Here here here, and we're through!' and then proceed to take half an hour to get from 'here's how to solve' to 'solved!.... wait, I went the wrong way first, I need to go NORTH first so I have to do it AGAIN----' which is... a little frustrating.
I love Cyan's games to death, and love Obduction too. I'd debate it being the WORST puzzle ever (just ask anyone in the Uru fandom about '15 minutes') but every single point there is one that can't be refuted. With some tweaks (like some vague camera pictures from the other age maybe, or lines to show what's up, and a moved button, and maybe NOT HAVING TO DO IT MULTIPLE TIMES) it'd be perfectly fine!
I never understood either how that one got through either without some tweaks. Shame because it's a clever puzzle in a clever game.
It’s like the mechanical island rotation puzzle from Myst but 1000 times more tedious
Weirdly, my video lagged just when he was talking about the puzzle taking longer due to loading screens. Honestly thought he’d included a “loading screen” because it was so perfectly timed!!
Once again, a very interesting episode. Thanks!
The excellent Idle Thumbs podcast had a meme about adventure game item combination logic with "Honey on the Cathair Makes A Moustache", a reference to an infamously awful Gabriel Knight puzzle. Someone actually made an cross stitch of it!
The infamous cat hair mustache puzzle has to be at or at least near the top of any terrible puzzle list. I LOVE Sierra On-Line, I grew up on Sierra On-Line adventure games, they were my childhood. As a veteran of Sierra games, I am no stranger to moon logic. I can think in moon logic, but there are levels to these things and the cat hair mustache puzzle is on a completely different level of moon logic. I'm not going to spend 6 paragraphs detailing all of the steps of the puzzle and how ludicrous the leap in logic from each to the next is, but this is the snow level of moon logic. It's moon logic within moon logic within moon logic.
All I remember about this puzzle is that you had to make a fake mustache so you could disguise yourself as someone who doesn’t have a mustache.
The instant the title "Obduction" came up I thought "Oh hell, the maze. It's gonna be the maze...". I got the game free on Epic ages back, had fun going through it, occasionally having to check a guide to make sure I was on the right track a couple of times, then I got to that monstrosity of a puzzle. I figured out WHAT to do, then realised HOW to do it... and quit the game. Haven't touched it since.
Thanks for reminding me that the game was free on Epic; turns out I have it.
That'll be something to torture myself with. I suck at puzzle games to boot
While not *quite* as bad as the example you cited, one that springs to mind for me is found in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Within the first couple of chapters, you find yourself in another world and have to open a door by interacting with three runes to produce four notes. You're actually given the hint right before you do this, but it's sort of a "blink and you'll miss it" deal which is made worse by having the notes play more regularly in later chapters. Another example comes from Final Fantasy XV and exploring Costlemark Tower. There's a point where you're in a maze with a pretty low ceiling and all of the paths forward look identical. Taking the wrong exit puts you in a fight with a bunch of high-end monsters but the correct exit is marked by a thinly carved circle in the floor. Playing normally it's so easy to miss something like that, and I did. I spent over an hour in that maze because I couldn't see a circle on the floor.
This is a great series. Really high production values and great lessons.
the worst puzzle is the unsolvable one. So for me the worst I remember was in Laura bow and the dagger of Amon Ra. At the end of the game in act 5, you were being chased by a murderer and found your ally shoved in a container. One of his boots is missing.
If you take him out of the container, he trips/steps on something/slips/explodes, and game over. You need to have a replacement boot to give him, and one can be found... in the previous act. Hope you made multiple saves
Nothing like some old-school dead-man-walking puzzles, where you doom yourself in 20/40/120 minutes because you missed something. A lot of old point-and-clicks had this same issue and it was as annoying then as it is now.
I love that game, but I remember being stuck in act 1 for aaaages because I didn't realize you had to accept a ride in the cab full of garbage and rummage around in that garbage, randomly dragging pieces out of the way (uhm, it's a point and click game, not a click and drag game 😐) until you unearth someone's old dry-cleaning ticket, so that you can dress appropriately for the museum gala 🙄
The fact that it's from the team that designed 'MYST' isn't surprising at all. In fact, my first thought was of the musical puzzle in 'MYST' where you have to match multiple tones by manipulating sliders, and you have no idea which one's are set correctly and which aren't. So you're just randomly trying to identify which of the 7, or 12, or whatever is the one (or more) ever so slightly off pitch, and then bump it only one slot at a time on an unmarked slider.
That's not even the only puzzle in obduction that has the same sort of solve loop. There are a _lot_ of sections where you have to swap an orb but then spend a minute or two running to a different swapper just to get back to your original position to see your results. I think the majority of my time in that game was spent backtracking.
Harkening back to a previous episode, that bit at the start is my biggest beef with Ocarina of Time's water temple. I might know what the solution is, but if I slip and fall into the water at the wrong time, I have to spend about 10 minutes going through the level, changing the water level 3 times, constantly fiddling with the boots, just to get back to where I can implement on the puzzle solution I already knew. And this can easily happen more than once. A fall into lava or a bottomless pit sets you back like 30 seconds.
Going in, i thought this was going to be about the infamous Gabriel Knight cat mustache puzzle. But I was pleasantly surprised! This is a good series and I'm glad we have it.
Or the goat!
I was thinking of the infamous cat mustache puzzle. I'm sorry to see that it has been dethroned.
The Babble Fish Puzzle from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was exasperating
Ah. Yes. This one came up at Christmas 25 years later for me, it was that rough.
Easily my favourite discovery after supporting this channel and going in completely blind to the team (bar Yahtzee), this series is not only excellent, but the scripts are fantastic and the voice over absolutely perfect.
This and Cold Take is it for me outside of the obvious also.
Ok if the person who got you into the game and is replaying it with you gets PTSD and intense guilt upon re-encountering a puzzle...yeah thats a good indication its a bad puzzle.
You mentioned that a QA tester would have caught this. Would that have bern within their job description, or would that be more of a playtester issue? I've always understood, at least as a rule of thumb, that QA is more "Is this functional and relatively bug free?" and playtesters are on the "Is this fun and balanced?" side. But maybe I've got that completely wrong, and I could certainly see on smaller teams or deeper into gaming history, the roles may have been combined or the job titles swapped or any number of other things.
I think the worst puzzle I've ever interacted with was the mantra puzzle of the first La-Mulana. For a brief summary, in the game you get this item that allows you to chant "Mantras" that you find throughout the game, yet seemingly have no effect at first. Through some La-Mulana trademark cryptic riddles and nonsense, you (presumably) figure out that in order to fight the final boss, you have to find 8 specific mantras, then chant each one in a specific room of each area in the game in a specific order. With alot of moving parts and the sheer density of puzzles in the game, getting everything straight in your head can be a bit of a task in and of itself and then there's the added frustration of the constant back and forth you gotta do, similar to this puzzle, made harder by the fact that due to the open design of the game, you can never really be sure where or when you're supposed to be solving a puzzle. What really brings it over the edge is the fact that even if you catch on to the puzzle's logic and find an intuitive way to solve each riddle, you still cannot completely solve the puzzle with the information provided in the game. Specifically in the remake of the game (The one that is being sold on Steam), in order to correctly deduce the location at which you need to chant a mantra, you need the *instruction manual* to tell you a hint with which you can solve it due to design changes in that version of the game. Even if said manual is free and being held in websites of the game's designer, just the fact that you need esoteric logic given to you from outside the game to properly solve a puzzle is never a good move. I might be doing a shit job at explaining the full extent of that puzzle and part of it is the fact that dredging memories of La-Mulana taps into the parts of the brain that game rotted away from me.
The worst puzzle I have ever played was one you showed in the video. The Witness puzzle on the rusty boat. Needlessly complex, annoying, and relies on difficult to hear and distinguish sounds, making it an accessibility nightmare. When I finally solved it, I spent a long time trying to figure out why it even worked. I was not able to.
Now, as for Obduction, I agree that the puzzle you mentioned was absolute death. Still, ages spamming brute force solutions into a grid and trying to understand the differences between water droplet sounds is more painful to me than a puzzle with a logical solution that is just very tedious. One is very clunky, while the other is outright evil, is most likely solved by exhaustive random searching, and when it finally is solved, you do not even know why, nor do you need to, because it's a one off puzzle. I feel like it sticks out all the more because it's in such a great game. I can totally get picking the Obduction one though, especially since it's required.
I've seen some other people mention the monolith puzzle in Fez as another one that we had to brute force, and don't understand the solution to this day. I suppose that one is worse, but it's not integral to completing the game or anything, more of an Easter egg.
Hearing you talk about this puzzle made me think of the "puzzle" in Marathon 1's Colony Ship for Sale Cheap as described by Mandalore Gaming. Sounds like it commits a lot of the same sins only with combat added in.
“At least it’s not a maze”
“At least it’s not a maze”
“At least it’s not a maze”
The most infuriating adventure game puzzle that always sticks out in my mind does so for how far outside the box it expected me to think to solve it.
Which was a point in Chaos on Deponia where in order to turn off in-universe music that was making the character forget the door-knock code he needed to memorize, I had to actually go into the game's settings and turn off the music there.
THose fourth wall breakers can be kind of fun. The metal gear solid examples of checking the CD box for a password, or switching the controller slots to prevent a boss from reading your inputs are pretty fun and memorable.
Shame what happened to that studio, my little sister loved Deponia
That one got me too, but I gotta admit, it was pretty brilliant. Loved those games
Well, I remember a contest for the game DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death), where the forumers had to create the room that would theoretically take the longest time to solve, knowing that a room is composed of 32*38 squares (a very big chess board).
The record is held by a room where even if you only make perfect moves, it would take 1.7 x 10^45 moves to complete. It doesn't look like much, but what it means is that if you do 10 moves every second, it would take five and a half sextillion years to complete.
You could say it's worse. :) But then again, it was exactly the point of the contest.
I mean, I was going to mention the knot puzzle in Broken age, but this one takes the cake.
The Broken age Knot puzzle was mostly bad because you could only interact with it through obtuse dialogue. So you are shown a knot on screen(There are many variations, and each time you fail the puzzle, it adopts a new one) that a man is carrying(person A), which you then have to describe to another person(Person B) a distance away.(Looks like an alligator eating a pretzel, looks like a lazy pole vaulter etc).Person B then gives you a step by step instruction on solving the knot they think you describe. You then take that diagram to Person A on and describe the steps in similarly archaic terms (Poke the clown´s nose, tickle the foot), and have to rely on you interpreting the dialogue options correctly based on what you are seeing. Assuming you didn't fail to describe the proper knot to person B in the first place.
I think the issue with Obduction stems from the fact that by today's standard Myst is actually pretty easy. The devs are trying to hard to invoke the feeling of their older titles, leading to obtuse and bad puzzles in Obduction and Firmament.
A lot of Myst and Rivens difficult honestly originated from how long it took to move accurately around its world. The real skill of the game was just remembering something you saw from one part of the map and realising its importance at the other part of the map. The biggest antagonist of the game was how much it wasted your time in reality.
Nah there are still some puzzles that require a lotta thought and effort. Like the rail section in the space area of Myst.
@@TheBiomedZed oh man, I remember our copy of Myst came with a freaking DIARY. As in, a hardbound notebook intended for you to take notes in. It had *at least* 50 pages! We uhh...we filled so many of those pages with red herrings from the library. I was probably like 7 or 8 at the time and it was an absolute blast. Never beat it back then, but did manage to solve channelwood, stoneship, and the minecart one. Sadly had the sound-y age spoiled for me later in life, but...damn, what a wave of nostalgia I just had. Pretty sure our notebook had meticulous drawings of *every freaking constellation*, among many other things. Oh to be able to play it again for the first time...
@@christopherlyndsay8611 The issue with the rail puzzle in Myst isn't an effort thing, it's that it's the singular puzzle in that game where the solution is only available in another age. all of the other puzzles can be figured out within their respective ages, so you get into the mindset that you are provided with all the resources you need for an age within itself. that one puzzle breaks that standard, so is extra annoying to solve because it's hard to realize that it's that different.
@@thejackscraft3472 I thought the way to solve the rail puzzle was to figure out that the different sounds of the button in the railcart were related to different directions on the compass??
I tend to assume most designers of puzzle games are halfway up their own butts, just by default, but this is like, they've become some impossible singularity-butt-ouroboros.
"some impossible singularity-butt-ouroboros" is now one of my favorite phrases I've ever seen on the Internet.
You can write for this channel!
XD
Ouroborass
They could've maintained the "slow down an army" narrative by having you solve _one_ tedious quarter of the puzzle and then stumble into a different solution that the soldiers had no access to. You get a _sense_ of the tedium without actually spending an hour of your life _living with it._
Or?
Make it so the other ¾ are pre-solved, showing the army made progress.
On "worst puzzles of all time" the old infocom hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy game had puzzles that required items from earlier in the game that were easy to miss.
So like "how do you solve this puzzle? We'll in your case, you start the game from the beginning and play it right this time".
I'm going to try and remember this.
You had to grab "that thing that your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is" which could hold infinite things inside of it(your dressing gown could only hold three things but if one of them was "that thing that your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is" you could stack up a lot of things.
Anyway you had to grab that and a bacon sandwich but not eat it because you had to throw the sandwich to a dog before the earth was destroyed otherwise the dog would eat the fleet of spaceships you were stuck on later in the game after you time travelled, the fleet in question wanted to destroy the human race because you(the player, not the characters in the game) accidentally mistyped a word(which is inevitable) and the typo went through an accidental wormhole and was broadcast across their atmosphere and the misspelt word was their greatest curse word so they built a fleet to exterminate humanity but didn't realise there was a huge difference in scale between us.
You find yourself on the spaceship about four hours after you see the dog, it is utterly impossible to know you need to feed it before then.
Great game.
Worst part is it only informs you of a single missed item each playthrough, and that puzzle's towards the end so you might need to replay the whole game like a dozen times.
This was common to many games in the genre back then, unfortunately. Multiple King’s Quest games could be made unwinnable by a seemingly innocuous choice, but you wouldn’t find out you were doomed until HOURS more of playing. Horrible, baffling game design.
The time it takes when you know about everything from the start is what makes this one special. There's always the Space Quest 1 situation where you need an item at end of game that could have only been picked up in the first 2 minutes of gameplay, and is trivially missable... leading to having to do a full replay of the game. But that only happens if you aren't warned about the issue: You can help your friends to avoid a full game replay.
In obduction, that hour long puzzle is unavoidable.
Brand-new fan of Design Delve and absolutely loving the framing device around this series: the caves are gorgeous, the animations simple and engaging, and the ~dangers~ of the caves are a logically clever way to send the message about frustration without making the video a 20-minute incoherent mess. Just imply you got gas poisoning and had to be dragged to safety! 8D
I also love your insight into "reward happens when the player figures it out, even if the puzzle isn't solved" because that makes it easier to see that Portal reinforces its puzzle gameplay wtih narrative payoffs. You solved the puzzle in your brain 30 seconds ago, but you're still happy to get the door open so you can hear what sinister, sassy thing GLaDOS has to say next. You can build in other rewards separate to your puzzle gameplay too, but it's definitely tricky to get the hybrid balance right.
That's still another reason that this Obduction puzzle can FUCK RIGHT OOOOOOOOOOFF :D
Happy Friday, happy birthday, thank you for your hard work!!!
You don't have to do the puzzle three times. After you solve it to one path, you only need to swap one piece to change it from the left and right paths to the straight-through configuration.
Once you've solved it to go right, you only need to rotate the entire thing for the left path. The straight-through configuration then only requires rotating one of the 90 degree bend segments.
They're not solving it right!
I also said that it didn't have to be solved three times. It's been a few years since I've played but I remember only having to do it twice with a massive rotation to get to the last destination. I guess we were lucky to do it the certain way?
Cool, if you already know the solution, the mechanics, the order, and where to go first
But you don't. So you have to solve it three times.
@@chrismanuel9768 I've only played the game once and didn't know any of these things before hand and only had to solve it twice, so it is possible.
I just happened to solve the middle path first, then the right path, then a rotation of the right path's solution turns into the left path solution. It's possible to do it for the first time in that order.
As a Mathematician I find the satisfaction for proofs (which are just number theory puzzles) is never just having the lightbulb moment on how to progress to the solution, if anything that is never the real payoff, after all you can be incorrect or only at a partial solution - its only rewarding when you actually finish the proof/puzzle you were stuck on and know that idea was the entirely of one possible solution. It doesn't matter how long it takes from having the correct idea to actually finishing as long it the process by which you are implementing that idea is not pure bovine excrement (which it clearly was in this example - a few markers on the floor of the rotation room that provide orientation so you don't have to guess would have gone a long way here (assuming you insist you can't just have the rotation button a less annoying distance away)).
For instance more than a few of the dungeons of Ocarina of Time Master Quest were tricky to figure out and then required some skill to pull off if memory serves - satisfaction comes from both finding a solution AND then pulling it off even though in some cases it takes quite a while traversing the temple to do so.
Puzzle games are my favourite, but Obduction I found really difficult due to the planet swapping, and being unable to construct the cross-planet interactions in my head as part of the solution. I gave up after huge ski-lift level, as I found myself searching for guides too often
I don’t remember hating this puzzle. I know it took a while to do, lots of back and forth but I think I enjoyed myself. Trying to visualize the rotations and swaps in my head was challenging, but I felt proud doing it.
Same here
Same
I mean, there is the gas puzzle from Schizm: Mysterious Journey, which requires you to start with a cryptic clue, then figure how to read a gauge that has no provided translation, takes significant time to input each attempt, has no visible progress for your inputs, requires you to do it twice in a row, and has the absolute gall to change the answer every attempt.