7 Impossible Puzzles You Had No Chance of Solving Alone

[@chrisschoenthaler5184]

The fact that the Fez puzzle was solved by hundreds of people working together to brute-force an answer through process of elimination is both inspiring and disappointing.

[@renobutters]

I wonder why they didn't simply reverse engineer the program... Like, disassembling it or something.

[@skvaderarts7009]

@@renobutters ... Probably because the vast majority of people have literally no idea how to do that.

[@ThePhantomStinker]

It's probably for the better. I'm not sure I want to know the "solution" of a puzzle concocted by the mind of a man who rage-quit his entire career just because people were picking on him online.

[@alexanderekblom8093]

​@@skvaderarts7009that's how people figured out how to unlock "the lost" in 'The Binding of Isaac', so it's definitely a fair question. That said, if Fez is console exclusive, that would complicate the reverse engineering approach.

[@Grimrapings]

Disappointing? Nah. At some point, you have to just call it a bad puzzle.

[@lozzimusprime]

People who create walkthroughs for ridiculous puzzle games are true heroes.

[@Avalon_1991]

I wouldn't have finished Uncharted 4 without them

[@evilpompom]

That they are!

[@0002pA]

Lmao

[@danielsand500]

B bb🎉😏

[@nathangoedeke694]

Idk how often it is the case, but some walkthroughs are written by the developers or people who hacked the game source code, meaning that no one actually solved the puzzle conventionally.

[@brknglasses2734]

One of the best feelings in all of gaming is coming back to a hard puzzle you couldn't solve as a kid, and nailing it! One of the worst is coming back to those puzzles you could never solve; and realizing nothing has changed.

[@GardinerAlan]

The final Witness puzzle w/ the Hall of the Mountain King soundtrack. I could get to the final pillars but never quite to the final door

[@HoradeFidges]

And directly the worse is coming back to a puzzle you beat as a kid easily and now have not a single clue how to complete it

[@3possumsinatrenchcoat]

honestly sometimes it's a relief. "oh was I just a dumb kid? no, the developers were just smoking crack when they cooked up these supposed puzzles."

[@TheOmegaXicor]

the absolute worst is coming back to a puzzle you nailed first time as a kid and not remembering how or being able to figure it out now without a guide.

[@misticsword7561]

Even worse, is coming back to a puzzle you solved easily as a kid, but you don't remember the solution and now you just can't get it solve.

[@saoirsedeltufo7436]

I'm so used to clickbait that I naturally assumed these would be tricky but doable puzzles but no, you weren't wrong, these are absolutely ridiculous. 10/10 video

[@casedistorted]

Tbf the riven fire marble puzzle was totally possible by yourself without the very small internet back then. It was tough but doable

[@RedTail1-1]

Must not be familiar with this channel if you think they'd use clickbait.

[@evanprince3875]

@@RedTail1-1 for real, OX always delivers exactly what they say they will. My brother who rarely plays video games and when he does it's CoD, was in absolute stitches when he walked in on me and my sister watching the presh mems highlight reel.

[@Daijaga]

My teenage son and I solving the Tunic puzzle together was the highlight of my gaming year last year. Ill never forget us flipping the pages and drawing the map, finding the extra save file, hurriedly jamming in the hundred keys....such a cool culmination of gaming we got to share together

[@vincentwatson2960]

But, how did you find the extra save puzzle? Was there a clue?

[@Daijaga]

@vincentwatson2960 idk exactly what the requirements are for the save file to appear but I must have completed them organically. I also played it over the course of a couple weeks so I turned the game on and off many times and found the file organically as well, pretty early on before I had any clue what the Golden Path was. Once we started filling it in and got to the page 9 section, it illustrates the fox wondering about the save screen, so with the context we had already learned up till then and having wandered around there a few times it clicked right away.

[@smalf00]

​@@vincentwatson2960i also solved it by myself, i found the extra save by just recognizing they wouldnt have there be no golden path in the menu page for nothing, espesically since the game autosaves, and saw the fox was confhsed about the hidden gold question block so i quit and went to the load screen and found nothing, then just went through every option and when i went back the load screen it was there, so if the only requirement was just to close the load screen i guess i did extra, but im not sure whst the requirements were since the narrator was wrong about what some lines meant (a dash through a line doesnt mean ignore it, it means you need to do that imput again)

[@mattball8622]

I love that you can tell that Andy's 'instructions' are actually a D&D character sheet

[@archerelms]

Glad I'm not the only one that noticed, I love it too

[@Dr.Callaham]

So what...Did Andy make a character with the instructions, wonder how complex that character would be if that is the case

[@bast713]

I thought so!

[@gingipride]

I just saw this now and had to search the comments!

[@MegaBearsFan]

Really surprised not to see the final puzzle of P.T. in this list, considering that it was deliberately designed to require international cooperation over the internet, it was only solved because somebody accidentally stumbled onto the solution, and (like with Fez) the community still doesn't exactly know what the solution actually is supposed to be, or how the developers intended players to solve it.

[@ComicCrossing]

How does someone accidentally solve a puzzle like that?

[@DannyboyO1]

@@ComicCrossing The magical power of "fucking around", and HUGE numbers of players. A 1 in a million chance, if you've got 30 million players, is probably going to happen at least once.

[@dvdbox360]

​@@DannyboyO1if i wasn't mistaken it was a british girl that first figure it out

[@Jaknize1]

Played myst and Riven back in the day with my Dad. Took us 2 years to figure out the marble puzzle. One day it just hit my Dad and we got it. It was overly complicated.

[@DeSardet46]

Nah mate, he totally looked it up. After two years, who wouldn't?

[@z216ghost]

I remember my first playthrough of Myst, and forgetting the #$&%$$&&$$=&*&%$_

[@Jaknize1]

@@DeSardet46 No he didn't lol This was over 20 years ago man when we wouldn't really even know where to go on the internet to find something like this. KZbin probably wasn't even a thing yet. We didn't have a strategy guide. We stopped playing for most of that 2 until we just randomly went back and messed around with it. I was watching when we figured it out. Plus why would I bother to comment if we had looked it up lol makes no sense to lie about something like that. So no mate, he didn't look it up.

[@aliyada]

The OG Myst shipped with a notebook to help figure things out. My dad completely filled it between Myst and Riven, and figured out so many of the puzzles I am so glad that you also have fond memories involving your father and this series

[@djshanz8585]

​@@DeSardet46they finally had internet 😂

[@twinklefeet]

You could probably make an entire list of these purely from the Discworld games. I love them, but some of the puzzles are incredibly inscrutible. Such as the one where you need to travel back in time to the previous evening, put a frog in your past self's sleeping mouth to attract a butterfly, the wings flapping causing a localised rainstorm over a monk in a completely different location via "chaos theory", who then hangs his robe out to dry, which you can then steal and use as a disguise. The puzzle was so obnoxious they made fun of it in the second game.

[@dobbinb76]

I came to write something similar, "Discworld, yes all of it" the first Discworld game is just a total mind frak of puzzles, the second is just marginally easier and Discworld noir about the same, but the first is just ridiculous. Now I've written all that I'm going to have to play them again this weekend, and no doubt feel dumb all over again

[@MidBoss666]

To be honest, the general weirdness and abundance of "moon logic" are very fitting the Discworld setting XD At the very least, none of those games require you to impersonate someone using their ID, but using a fake moustache and scribbling one on said ID to do so.

[@DanRPGMan]

Don't forget to give prunes to a vendor in order for said vendor to use a toilet and drop his pants in order to get his gold belt buckle to give to an octopus. I call it 'Discworld Logic'

[@OrangeDog20]

Also if you release the butterfly in the wrong place it doesn't work, you can never get it back, and you have to restart the game.

[@TheOctavian316]

@@DanRPGMan That's not it. You have to give the octopus a love potion, and put it into the fishmonger's dunny so when you give him prunes and he rushes off to the loo, the octopus grabs him and stops him being able to grab his gold belt buckle away from you.

[@obelus72]

My mom and I used to play Riven together back in the day and the puzzle that stumped us was the animal sound in the stone circle puzzle. Ended up buying the guidebook just for that answer and played the rest clean. We had a full notebook going and circled around so many times trying to figure out what we... myst. I'll see myself out.

[@BooBaddyBig]

The fing animal sound. You heard it once, and you were supposed to remember it when you needed it which could be months later. Like WTF.

[@marhawkman303]

A lot of these old games EXPECTED out-of-game records.

[@MarkDeSade100]

@@marhawkman303 I remember when some RPGs required the player to draw their own map on grid paper. It was fun for a while, but I love auto-mapping so much now.

[@marhawkman303]

@@MarkDeSade100 Oh I did that incessantly with Dragon Quest Monsters 2. It had randomized levels that didn't have relevant maps since any in-game map was merely the CURRENT floor. So I drew on paper actual layouts with multiple levels. also in that game you kinda needed to write down what your skill planning was going to be as it had an esoteric method to upgrade skills that required having a collection of specific skills.

[@barret-xiii]

@@marhawkman303 Yup. Escape from Monkey Island was a notorious offender. The Monkey Kombat minigame, which was necessary for story progression, had you switch between several stances to beat your opponent, in a twist on Rock-Paper-Scissors. Unfortunately, to switch stances, you had to memorize a series of input combinations to go from one specific stance to another. Not only were there dozens of combos, they were all RANDOMIZED for each playthrough! Thankfully PS2 players were spared this horror, and not only did they remove the randomization, they also gave you an on screen guide for each stance change.

[@K4RN4GE911]

"A good puzzle makes you feel smart once you have that 'AHA!' moment, while a bad one hides half the pieces from you!" - Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

[@marhawkman303]

what about a puzzle where half the puzzle is finding the pieces?

[@K4RN4GE911]

@@marhawkman303 Well, it needs to be telegraphed well enough that you would know where said pieces were through the right logical process, otherwise it's frustrating. It's a delicate balance.

[@MidBoss666]

I see you have good taste in shows, my friend ^^

[@Bakerstreetgaming]

Riven is the one game I can not complete

[@Bakerstreetgaming]

What about grannies garden and the 4 dragons puzzle

[@kevin_f]

I loved Tunic, but there was no way I was figuring out that save file path. Thank you, walkthrough makers!

[@BenMarcWilliams]

8:05 MacBeth is the _one_ Shakespearean play I'm familiar with, yet that hint somehow did _nothing_ for me. I can only imagine how "helpful" the other hints must be. Also, the difference between the difficulty of the Normal version of that puzzle and the Hard version of that puzzle is a gap wider than the grand canyon.

[@nashvontookus7451]

Yeah me too How is the central theme supposed to be lying and not wanton political assassination

[@MarkDeSade100]

I know Macbeth pretty well too, but I wouldn't have gotten it because that hint is just too vague. A lot of plays involve lies and deception.

[@Tabbyclaw]

I was sure it was Othello.

[@DarkRubberDucky]

I could only figure out a couple of them, that being "playing at death.... she pierced a heart rent by sorrow" Romeo and Juliet. And "a game of turning white to black and black to white " Othello is a game with black and white pieces and the story of a black man and white woman. I always hated Shakespeare 😂

[@Lilnaomi3]

@@nashvontookus7451 Most likely the lying/deception is more relevant to the game and it's characters. this puzzle was still probably easier than solve for T for most people.

[@Ashtarte3D]

The worst part of the Fez puzzle is even after the community brute forced and tried to reverse engineer how they were meant to get there many members asked creator Phil Fish how it was supposed to work. He proceeded to do the most Phil Fish thing he could, bitching that they cheated the solution and he'd rather die with the secret than reveal it to cheaters. I'm so glad Marcus Beer drove Fish to ragequit gaming.

[@marhawkman303]

I like the notion that it's a movie reference, but I have no idea HOW you'd derive it from the movie 2001.

[@nashvontookus7451]

Beer might be annoying, but at least he can take criticism without shutting down his entire career because of it lol

[@SverigeHobbes]

I'll bet Fish realized that he screwed up designing that puzzle and used the "cheating" players as an excuse not to admit it.

[@Lauren007E]

Bro acting as sadistic as Albert Fish with that one

[@PikaLink91]

That man is a piece of work. I mean I would be a little annoyed too if I was the creator, having put time into a puzzle the players just brute forced, but at the same time it would bolster my ego to know I was that smart.

[@christopherrimes2647]

I just came home from a difficult funeral of a really close friend/boyfriend. His name was David; you guys are right, that is a good name ❤ Thanks for your videos as they bring me so much comfort.

[@joecrow7666]

No way, similar situation here. RIP Nikstlitselpmur, gone too soon.

[@staceyb1873]

I managed to do the mountain door puzzle with the help of my mum! I got the 9th page by accident simply because I was trying to find something hidden in the page, gave up for the day and quit. When I came back, spooky save file! Then noticed the line, mum figured I should record the directions and the rest is history! I still have the piece of paper with the huge pattern of the directions on it XD (we drew it all as one consecutive line)

[@CptnBillHarris]

Jeez. That woman gave birth to you AND helped you figure that shit out. Hope you got her a hell of a mother's day present.😂

[@octochan]

I also kept the pages of notes and diagrams I drew on graph paper playing Tunic

[@vt-1493]

Tunic's puzzles actually go even further. There are actually some puzzles in the game that you wouldn't even know are there unless you learn to read the "Incomprehensible Language" runes. Spoilers to follow for mostly "beyond critical path" content. On one of the last pages of the manual, in the memo section, is a series of hand-written notes meant to give you hints on how to translate it. First there is a picture of a Sword and the Fox, with the last rune of Fox and first rune of Sword circled to highlight that they are the same Rune. That is supposed to clue you in that the Runes are actually phonetic English; Fox ends and Sword begins with the same "s" sound. Next to that is a chart that shows a bunch of runes split between their outside portion and inside portion, which shows you all of the possible phonemes and clues you in that each Rune has two parts, a consonant (inside, which you know from "s") and vowel (outside). On a completely different page it notes that a circle at the bottom of the Rune flips its order; it's normally Consonant then Vowel, but for a word like "is" you need to do the vowel first. From there you need to guess at what a word is in order to fill in your translation chart, which lets you read more words, which lets you make more educated guesses for more phonemes. Eventually it is possible to translate all of the text in the game, which lets you read up on the game's story (or you could look up existing translations online). It also reveals a few more clues. For example, if you stand in water for 60 seconds then the first page (back of the front cover you got after the mountain door) will have more text on it, which translates to a poem, which you have to interpret into button inputs (ex. "Corrected" means Right), which needs to be entered in at a location specified by the adjacent picture. The reward is a golden statue. There's 12 of those golden statues. If you get half or more of them then a portal appears in their trophy room (which itself is easy to miss). That takes you to a new area which has runes show up if you start using the 'holy cross.' What you need to do here is use another clue in the manual to enter the 'golden path' (the mountain door puzzle)... backwards and as viewed from the inside. There is no indication that you did it right except the Runes can be read. The runes give you a URL for a website with a looping gif. I managed to get all of that on my own with only minor hints, mostly from spoilers. The rest I've only read about. If you inspect the website's source you will find it has an audio file available to download. It has music, but also some interesting sounds. People decided to turned it into a Spectrogram, and lo and behold there are Runes hidden in it! With corresponding series of rising or falling notes... Wait, you mean there is an audio version of the language encoding too?! Things like the Turrets talk?! ... Is this one of the reasons the game is named Tunic? Yup!

[@thmsbarber]

yep the second language is referred to as tuneic

[@HaIfaxa]

I ain't reading all that but good for you

[@DeathnoteBB]

I love puzzles but damn, even I have my limits

[@nebulae5236]

@@DeathnoteBBtrust me - for tunic, it’s worth the effort

[@ericb3157]

this sort of reminds me of that "dinosaur language" in "Starfox Adventures". it's actually explained in the manual, as a simple letter-for-letter substitution. "kao"="the", for example. you don't really need to do anything with that in the game, IF you turn subtitles on...

[@Alipes]

The Witness has what could be considered an even harder puzzle - "Hall of the Mountain King". It's more of a puzzle gauntlet - timed and randomized - so you can't just lookup a solution online to get through it.

[@chriswest6988]

I felt like that was pretty easy after the insane ordeal of getting down there via those light bridges.

[@swandive46]

Iirc without the patches installed, you could take a photo of the puzzles with your phone, suspend the game while you solve it, and go back to the game with no time-loss.

[@raimarulightning]

But it importantly was possible to solve on your own, so by definition, it can't be on this list.

[@electricspider2267]

Great you got that song stuck in my head, so thank you for that... great tune tho ngl. I haven't played the game but im assuming that the song with the same name is played as bgm. It's a catchy one with a soft and sleepy start but then becomes more and more chaotic as it goes.

[@EngiNerd1988]

It gets a bit easier yet also a bit trickier for other reasons (namely memory) when you find out that the fourth puzzle in the challenge (the one on the table with two dots) is the path through the wall maze and the two dots are where the ninth and tenth puzzles are.

[@alamand4769]

Immediately thought of west of loathing's military cemetery puzzles, it starts out with fairly straightforward morse code before getting more and more complicated until near the end you're expected to see random times and realize you need to convert them into naval semaphore flag codes. Even more evil it gives you a reward soon after that step that a reasonable player might think meant they had solved it, but there's still a couple steps to go until you get the final reward.

[@marhawkman303]

that does sound fun. does it at least have the decency to teach you Semaphore?

[@laterkater4213]

I have a mate who's favourite game as a kid was Myst and who ended up going to uni for game design. They somehow managed to solve the Tunic puzzle while streaming on twitch with no hints and I still have no idea how they cracked it, even with Mike explaining the solution to me. 🤣

[@meathir4921]

The golden path ain't even the hardest puzzle in TUNIC.

[@PikaLink91]

Some people just have dumb luck.

[@mikesannitti6042]

Myst III actually was a bit easier. It came out a bit after Riven and I was very proud to beat it while avoiding online hints for the whole game... although it was collaborative with my uncle.

[@nebulae5236]

The mountain door was nice, but the tools they left for the player to solve the language blew my mind. Solved it without outside help over the course of 9 months and I can say with confidence that it was worth it - the secrets in this game go SO much deeper than just the mountain door

[@ShadowEclipse777]

​@nebulae5236 yeah I need to try to decipher it again. Sadly I needed a hint to unstuck my mind. Was too dead set on Tunic's language being like FEZ'S where 1 character = 1 Letter since the game reminded me of FEZ so much

[@etxgaming2303]

Mike's ending statement to The Witness was classic.

[@Cuiasodo]

I audibly groaned in frustration when the marble puzzle from Riven came up. I spent SO LONG going through that 3D pin map, writing down coordinates, only to be off by like two spaces and have to look up the solution. Which, back then, required one of those Prima Official Strategy guides.

[@Puncherjoe1]

Takeshi's challenge is an entire game of "I should have a guide ready"

[@HelenMaxwellfan]

One of the strangest things about Takeshi's Challenge is that the first guide released for the game had a big mistake. The solution for one of the hardest puzzles was wrong. The company had a second guide printed that gave the correct solution to the puzzle. You just can't make this stuff up.

[@LET4M4RU]

Takeshi's challenge was supposed to be a series of frustratingly dumb puzzles. I mean, when you finally finish it, spoiler alert, takeshi basically says "wow, you really are a loser, spending your time on stupid video games like this". The whole game is a troll

[@markhohenbrink5230]

The biggest bs part about the Frenzied flame ending for Elden Ring is that they mase this ridiculously convoluted way to cure it and they didnt bother adding anything for Mealina after you cure it.

[@Murtaugh395]

I wonder what a Mealina is.... Could it possibly be Malenia?

[@marhawkman303]

@@Murtaugh395 um no... Melina. Still though seems odd, but I guess doubling the number of endings would be a bit much.

[@markhohenbrink5230]

@murtaughdram3950 my bad man there is like 4 different characters that start with M in Elden Ring with 2 of them being extremely close together; Melina Malenia

[@azuredragoon2054]

Simple. She has no reason to believe there is any means to cure it. And the only way TO cure it is to go beyond the point where you'll have denied her purpose by becoming the kindling she is supposed to be. Either she's mad at you for denying her purpose, or she believes you've succumbed to madness and are not worthy for her assistance.

[@marhawkman303]

@@azuredragoon2054 It'd be interesting though to see her redefine her purpose in life though.

[@claratalbot7613]

What about getting those stars in The Talos Principle? Not only do u have to do things like connecting lasor beams that are in complete different puzzle areas, but for some of them it requires u to literally break the puzzles by taking stuff out of the areas they're supposed to be in just so u can then take them to a completely different area to use them to get a star. Why do we want to collect the stars? So we can solve another puzzle to get a secret ending

[@DavidWeinehall]

I loved that game. Some of the puzzles in the DLC were just brutal though.

[@SquintyGears]

I didn't 100% it but those moments came pretty naturally to me because it doesn't really say you can do that so i would very often try and solve the puzzles the "wrong" way. In a "I can see what you want me to do but I'm going to try my way" kind of deal. And i was fresh off of watching portal sperdruns where every rule is broken 😳

[@chriswest6988]

I figured out some of those, but nowhere close to all of them, and I didn't even get through every normal puzzle. I actually thought it did a pretty good job by having some stars visible in non-puzzle areas, some being just obviously impossible with the tools you are"supposed to have" in an area etc. They're still really hard, but there are some pretty clear bread crumbs that you need to completely change how you thought about the game as a series of distinct puzzle areas to get them.

[@claratalbot7613]

I did find a few of them randomly while trying to solve the puzzles, but some were just so out of the way I had no idea how I was supposed to ever get them on my own

[@punkdigerati]

I would absolutely play a Talos Principle 2, with even more convoluted stars.

[@katfromthekong414]

The rumpelstiltskin riddle was bonkers!! 😂😂

[@lisah-p8474]

The fact that the devs misspelled the name!!! I would have punted my keyboard out the window in frustration.

[@JohnCliver]

Games were brutal if you failed to learn something or interpret some info right back then. I think it was Kings quest V that I had to replay (maybe more than once) after not knowing I was supposed to grab something from a nest and then needing that item much later. Wow, the memory/pain of it really sticks with you. This is probably why I’m such a thorough explorer in modern games.

[@katfromthekong414]

@@JohnCliver I was born in 81 so I remember how games were back then (aka a pain in the behind), but no one can reasonably be expected to solve the rumpelstiltskin riddle in 3 tries. Bonkers 😆

[@JohnCliver]

@@katfromthekong414 your only hope must be that one of your school friends bought a strategy guide.

[@katfromthekong414]

@@JohnCliver hahaha those existed?

[@Wolfiyeethegranddukecerberus17]

I'm realizing the second code for the Black Monolith puzzle was probably an obscure reference to something in 2001: A Space Odyssey

[@EngiNerd1988]

Given that one of the other red cube puzzles is a riddle that results in the name of an obscure angel from Kabbalah, you're probably right.

[@hugofontes5708]

​@@EngiNerd1988this made me even more annoyed at "references are not puzzles"

[@ShadowEclipse777]

​​@@EngiNerd1988 be me who didn't rotate the letters when deciphering the language so my key was all wrong and also couldn't comprehend what the fuck "the first half of my name is what it is" was supposed to mean

[@dragour8723]

In Morrowind there is a unique weapon called Eltonband, it's a powerful katana which is upgraded from Goldbrand.. but the process is simply impossible to do without a guide

[@MarkDeSade100]

I remember getting Eltonbrand and thinking it was a silly name for the strongest sword in the game. Can't even remember how I got it, Morrowind was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I did use a guide. 😅

[@WorldsUnhealthiestFitPerson]

Well, it's a dev item, really, because someone working there went to Duke, so thus the name and the weirdness.

[@eddythefool]

I messed up the needle quest when Millicent fell to her death after we barely managed to kill the invaders. I was going for the chaos ending anyways, but I still wanted the option to back out open.

[@Lia-A-Eastwood]

RIVEN was my entry into the Myst universe. I played it in 1998 (at a time where walkthroughs weren't a Thing at all). It took me 5 weeks to solve the whole game. And it was brilliant! Patience is virtue. I still have the written and painted notes in my puzzle book.

[@emilydefrances5981]

Me and my English major friends actually did solve the Hard Mode Silent Hill Shakespeare puzzle- or we did up until the math part! Then my other friend- a Theoretical Math nerd watched us struggling over our collection of Shakespeare books and was like “it’s just simple math you dorks”. So shout out to my math friend.

[@caratownsend1166]

I'd already stumbled upon that weird save file in Tunic before getting to the final puzzle, which helped. Took me several attempts to enter the code correctly, though 😅 The maddest puzzle in Tunic is actually the fact that the language is translatable, and that someone did translate it from first principles! It's a phonetic version of English based on the lines in the runes!

[@TheLurkingWriter]

I spent four hours working out how to translate the language whilst watching someone stream the game. The part that acted like a Rosetta stone for me was the Compass directions on the Beach map page of the manual. After the stream ended, and I'd translated roughly 10 or so of the pages, I found out people had already translated the entire manual(!!!) 🦊🤣

[@codebracker]

There's an even madder puzzle, involving a second hidden language that's hidden in the music of the game

[@BikoFactory]

Yeah I had to give up on that one secret trophy where you need to translate a sentence. When I realized it's not even just a cypher I couldn't be bothered anymore.

[@rocketlanterns]

Tunic's golden path is the easy one, the real challenge is the glyph tower ARG, which not only requires actually learning the language of the game, but also solving a bunch of cryptic riddles, all of which is to find a rosetta stone that teaches you how to _speak_ the game's language, I love it so much.

[@nebulae5236]

Right??? The fact that the game extends beyond the scope of the game, introducing a second, hidden language on top of the first one, and realizing that it was so perfectly integrated into so many aspects of the base game blew my mind

[@DeuxLeftHands]

Mike, I believe I got the page 9 trick by accident, no idea you were supposed to be on the manual page before quitting. But the satisfaction to compete without a guide was indeed worth it.

[@ArceusDX]

I never even did the page 9 trick, I had no clue about it, still somehow managed to map out the route.

[@hugofontes5708]

Same, I noticed the game was pointing at something there, quit to look, left for life stuff and when I came back to look again it was there lol But the pages with golden square marking lines of different colors as part of the golden path completely threw me off

[@spheresong]

I really liked the riven marble puzzle. I took notes during the entire game and it was really rewarding to each time I hit a challenging puzzle and I could put together the solution from those notes.

[@marhawkman303]

Which is probably how it was meant to be played honestly. I remember a lot of GBC games where... I MADE a guide book while playing just to be able to remember where to go to do stuff.

[@typacsk]

I think my favorite thing about Riven (apart from the visual and sound design, I mean, my GOD) was how the puzzles were integrated into the world of the game, and how they supported the overall plot. There was no "SO, Stranger! You've made your way into my secret la-bor-a-tree! BUT--can you solve this arbitrary challenge that I've put together for no reason, before time runs out on this elaborate deathtrap? Muhuhahahahahaaaaa!"

[@marhawkman303]

@@typacsk Yeah the mark of a true puzzle game is that the WORLD is the puzzle. Puzzles aren't tacked on afterthoughts.

[@taragnor]

Yeah, Riven was really well-done. It was hard, but fair.

[@xarenanotmyrealname4134]

My mom is a huge Myst fan and the puzzle that infuriated her was the one where you needed to put musical notes in a certain order but the only way to know what that order was is from the previous puzzles which are hard on their own Myst is the only game where my mom has a whole notebook dedicated to Myst notes.

[@typacsk]

I had to count the notes one by one as I was dragging the sliders in that puzzle, because I don't have perfect pitch >_

[@rashkavar]

I adore Riven as a game, it's such a wonderful environment and the puzzle elements are blended into it so well, it actually feels like it could be a real place. Except, y'know, that the water floats when heated and there's linking books to teleport you around and so on. The Fire Marble puzzle is definitely a challenge, but it doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as what the video makes it out to be. For one, by the time you're solving this puzzle, you've been working up to things and are very used to taking notes by now. The island shapes show up on a number of diagrams, usually split apart as the islands are rather than meshed into a single large grid as we see here. This is far from the first time we see them, and there is even an island that allows an in depth analysis of each island's topography by selecting an island (deliniated in the grid by the darker lines), and a specific sector of that island (each of the 25 5x5 squares that the islands are blocked out as). Similarly, the colour symbols are presented to us as colours, and are presented at several prior points allowing their identification. In short, the Marble puzzle isn't the marble puzzle, it's the culmination of several distinct and more abstract puzzles in the game, such as: -How are numbers written? -What do these colour symbols mean? -What are these sets of square grids that show up on several places? -What does this giant dome structure try to do? -Where are the smaller domes found on each island? -And then finally: how do I use all of the above to gain access to Ghen's lab on the 233rd Age? (The marble grid puzzle is a big part of this step.) That said, I can certainly see the perspective of the Marble Puzzle being a major thing with an extremely convoluted answer. It's very possible to find your way to that area quite early on in your explorations, and if you're a mission focused player, you might latch onto solving that as your mission way before it's actually reasonable to set that as an immediate goal rather than a long term aspiration.

[@FaTerokiMenra]

Mike was framed!

[@Nix_Abyss]

We all know it was Andy 😂

[@tylermurray2191]

Well, to be fair, Andy was paying a good amount for the frame job. How could I say no to that.

[@empurress77]

Shadow of the Colossus has a mountain door that took a decade or so for players to even figure out it was really solvable.

[@hugofontes5708]

Wasn't that just added to the remaster?

[@empurress77]

@@hugofontes5708 Not sure about the remaster even being a thing. I would hope it's in the remaster. It's a great secret quest.

[@hugofontes5708]

@@empurress77 I just double checked, this door secret quest is not in the original release for PS2, it's new

[@empurress77]

Interesting. May i ask the source? @@hugofontes5708

[@arellajardin8188]

I did solve the Riven marble puzzle those many years ago, back before the internet was commonplace. And it's slightly harder than described here. The grid actually doesn't show the shapes of the islands. Instead, you have to find a 3d map of the islands and figure out how they match the grid. And one of the domes on the map isn't shown, you have to correlate its location by traveling to where it's hidden and using landmarks on the map. Compared to some of the others on this list, the Riven puzzle isn't nearly as hard. It doesn't require out of game knowledge, or calculations or anything. All the clues are laid out plainly. They're just spread out all over the entire game.

[@marhawkman303]

yeah the real trick is figuring out the in-game logic.

[@E-L337]

I recently played through some of the Myst games, and for the marble puzzle, I literally had to bust out graphing paper - something that feels was a lot more common to have in your house back in the day. Worse than that though was actually one of the early puzzles in Myst 3. It's actually on the main hub island! Where you had to look through a lens and line it up with an object just perfectly by panning, zooming, and tilting it at just the right angle. That sounds easy, but that was just so you could make note of the position of the little dots surrounding the lens, which you needed to use to get a pattern of multiple of these, to unlock the NEXT area for you to go... by SETTING THE DOTS IN THE CORRECT POSITIONS ON THE TRACK. And if that wasn't enough, you also needed to divine which track which symbol needed to go. I was only able to solve it by realizing the devs intended for you to take a sheet of paper and overlay it on the screen, so you could get everything lined up perfectly.

[@marhawkman303]

@@E-L337 Wait... like... ONION PAPER?!?!

[@arellajardin8188]

@E-L337 I hope you're enjoying the series, I loved it in its time. Even read the books. If you make it to Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, then I wish you luck. It was originally intended for multi-player, and the solutions to be discovered collaboratively. They a genuinely frustrating to solo. No shame having Google at the ready. 4 and 5 of the mainline series are good, though.

[@AlexSamaras]

@@E-L337 Back in the day, the original MYST CD-ROM came with a notebook and the suggestion to take notes while playing. I carried that same notebook into Riven and still have it now. Indeed, all of the clues are there in the game, you just have to note things down and possibly sketch or draw diagrams and eventually you see the connections between the clues and piece it all together. . It was an amazing feeling back in the day!

[@cae2212]

Now I wonder if getting a goat to head bump the troll of that bridge is also supposed to be solved through a fairytale. I do remember reading a fairytale to my cousin where three goats tried to cross a troll infested bridge. The first two goats just cross by telling the troll to not eat them since the third goat is bigger and a better snack than they could ever be. The third goat is strong enough to just run the troll over.

[@BenMarcWilliams]

Yeah, the fairy tale's called the Billy Goats Gruff.

[@joepersch6779]

Funnily enough, you could also pay the troll with diamonds you find, but I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be used for something else

[@kjm4721]

@@joepersch6779 From what I remember you shouldn't use diamonds and other treasures for anything, because they give you points for the score. Paying the troll, or losing them in other ways reduce your overall score

[@TrimutiusToo]

This reminds me of those puzzles that some dev hidden in Hearthstone... They literally needed to be solved by whole community and some od them are just impossible to solve solo because the maze one from second batch would literally require 20+ accounts to figure it out solo because it is impossible to figure out outer shell od puzzle unless you know other starting locations and your account get locked into starting location and it cannot be changed And even if you do know the solution from walkthrough which is required that puzzle still takes over 2 hours to complete and it is easy to make a small mistake one our in and have to start over

[@roguebanshee]

Those puzzles were what my mind went to as well.

[@zombiedoe3404]

Here's another: the artifact ending from Signalis. It requires going to three specific rooms and tuning your radio to a specific frequency, then interacting with an unmarked object in each to get a set of three keys, which you need to be holding when you complete the dial puzzle near the end of the game. Then, you need to use the keys on the safe, and enter a twenty digit key-code which was only shown when you first visited the room at the very start of the game.

[@DavidCowie2022]

You missed a couple of steps: 1) Realise that the radio signals contain image data. 2) Use third-party software to extract the images from recordings of the radio signals. To be clear: this is done outside of the game. 3) Identify the resulting low-resolution images as locations in the game. Apart from *that*, great game, and the other puzzles are all reasonable.

[@MrMe917]

And even after what the both of you said, you still have to understand what in the fuck the cutscene right after even means. Or the rest of the game, for what matters.

[@G00berella]

Just wanna say that I appreciate you always putting classic Sierra games on your lists. Usually because they're absolute bonkers with BS puzzles, but were imperative to my childhood.

[@Icam_here]

there is a lot more effort then i would be willing to do to solve a lot of these, well done to all those that figured these out, especially that Fez one

[@LoJo]

I love the nods to old Sierra games. They hold a special yet infuriating place in my heart. 😂

[@angelxe1]

In more recent games: Tormented Souls has the best / hardest puzzles I've encountered in survival horror. The pharmacy door drove me nuts - husband had to help me figure it out - while the Infinite Room Puzzle was so much fun.

[@dsbanimations2593]

What about the infamous babble fish quest from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy text based game? They gave out a t-shirt if you actually figure it out

[@joma185]

Can we assume you never got to the part where Arthur Dent had to hold 'tea' and 'no tea' at the same time? I'm still stuck on that one.

[@mindwarp42]

The old Invisiclues game guides, where the guide was in invisible ink, are the only way I finished Infocom games as a kid. 😅 HHGTTG in particular, while sparking a love in all versions of the story in all media in me as a kid, really needed the guide to get past puzzles like the above as the fact that no two versions of the story have ever completely matched means that even if you read the books/watched the TV show/listened to the radio shows meant that you had no help solving stuff like the tea/no tea puzzle. Thanks, Douglas N. Adams! 😅

[@drunkoccult]

I am, medically speaking, Very Old, and came here to say this.

[@Artaimus]

The Riven one was actually quite easy for me I found. Mainly since you were able to figure out the correct colors for four of them, which left you with two left over and an easy job to switch them out once you used the map room to locate the dome.

[@marhawkman303]

yeah, most of the hilariously numerous "wrong answers" are because you don't know what coords to place marbles in. even if you randomly place marbles, having the right coords means it's only * does math * 720 combinations, and those can be cut down pretty easy if you do the other side puzzles.

[@OrangeDog20]

You have to work out what the whole thing is for first.

[@Frito5123]

Even crazier about Tunic page 9 is that the game (at least the Steam version) would auto-load your save file with the default Continue option on the title screen. I did actually figure out the page after being stumped for ages, just based on the save/load being the only gold on the page, and realizing that I couldn't remember even seeing the file screen.

[@codebracker]

haha same

[@Maus_Indahaus]

There is the final puzzle in Dracula 3: The path of the dragon. Even with the guide I still have no idea how it was supposed to be solved. The guides only mention what to do, without explaining why, and it feels as if we were supposed to collect some additional pieces of info earlier but missed them.

[@onlysmiles4949]

Solving the mountain door puzzle in Tunic on my own is probably one of the proudest achievements I've done in any game

[@Rusty84CV]

You probably looked up the solution

[@codebracker]

@@Rusty84CV I actually solved the whole thing myself Tho after that I still looked it up because i got one line wrong and didn't want to go check every page again to be sure

[@shawntraub7249]

@@codebracker Out of curiosity, was the one line the one in the top right square where you have to press right twice?

[@codebracker]

@@shawntraub7249 actually i was missing like 3 bisecting lines

[@BigJasonMc]

Suuure buddy.

[@cedriclothritz7281]

3:05 I actually did figure this one out by myself. Having played Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club, I just assumed there'd be something waiting for me in the loading screen, but I think the save file was already there without me having to press 'cancel'. I did have to look up what the the golden grid meant, though.

[@diamondsmasher]

That Tunic puzzle reminds me of some old Commodore 64 games that were so cryptic you’d just give up and never try to finish. Thanks for adding Tunic to that list for me.

[@macdjord]

The Riven firemarble puzzle was... difficult, but eminently solvable. You had all the information to get it right.

[@Merlewhitefire]

Yeah, the marble puzzle was obtuse, but not impossible

[@addison_v_ertisement1678]

How?

[@marhawkman303]

@@addison_v_ertisement1678 the game has an in-game map, and 5 of the 6 locations are on it. you have to go to the sixth manually and then annotate that. Then just change map formats to the grid system for the puzzle. While only 5 locations are visitable to do the marble color mini-game having 5 solved right means the sixth is just whatever is leftover. the real difficulty is that the marble puzzle... in and of itself... doesn't actually tell you how to do that.

[@jeffreywells1832]

⁠@@addison_v_ertisement1678 It's been a few years, but...on each island there was one golden zoetrope dome. each zoetrope dome corresponded to a specific symbol when you looked at it through its corresponding viewer. Each *symbol* could then be linked to a certain color based in the underwater room where the giant whale-shark think could be directed around. This allowed you, via a two-step process, to associate a color to each of the islands. Put the marble of that color at the exact spot on the world map where the dome was IRL for each island, and presto, power plant is on. My spouse and I solved this one without hints back in the 90s, and it was a rough one, but not pointlessly obtuse.

[@UTSNicole]

Yep, I solved it. I took lots of notes, but I got there.

[@kingspilly4381]

Cayne, the short game that takes place between the two Stasis games, has a puzzle that most players will almost certainly have to solve by just trying every item combination until something works. There is a room where the fuse box connected to a door has blown a fuse and needs a replacement. What you have to do is cover an ID card you picked up earlier with protein powder, then press it against the fuse box to get an outline of the exact shape of the fuse onto it, so you can then cut the card into the shape of the fuse. It doesn't help that the narration is inconsistent about whether the card is made of metal (which could theoretically work) or plastic (which definitely wouldn't).

[@torstenk.9445]

The Clock-Puzzle from Control's AWE-DLC. At one point you encounter a clock in an empty room. To solve the puzzle and proceed you need to listen to the song "Take Control" by The Old Gods of Asgard (aka Poets of the Fall) that is playing through the Ashtrey Maze. In here there are three sequences that are playing backwards. When you play the song in reverse you get the instruction how the clock has to be set to reach a hidden area.

[@medichampion328]

Fortunately, there is a radio near the beginning of that section also playing "Take Control", which hints at its usage

[@creepypastakingthedragones3679]

You gotta admit though take control playing though the ashtray maze fight section was awesome though

[@jolan_tru]

19:21 "'Witness' that, fothermucker." Absolutely cracked up. Like "spat out my tea" levels of cracked up.

[@StretchDude]

All the directional input puzzles in Tunic are insane. How anyone was supposed to figure out the one hidden in the ROTATING reflection of a pool of water on the wall of a cave is beyond my comprehension.

[@codebracker]

good thing you don't have to find all the fairies to get the good ending the one with the broken gold monolith was also ridiculous

[@hugofontes5708]

Somehow I did, thanks to symmetries. But the ones with tones were just impossible for me

[@shawntraub7249]

Once you know about the the directional puzzles, a lot of things become more obvious. If a room is seemingly empty, there is certainly a puzzle there. Once you notice the lines, you'll know what the puzzle is. I ended up writing the pattern down on a small piece of paper, slowly rotating it along with the screen over many cycles.

[@kinjedl]

Might and Magic II's final puzzle. With a 14 minute timer, and the clue "Preamble", you need to provide a text-based answer. You are given a block of encrypted text, which you need to figure out is the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence - except modified, so that instead of starting with "We the people of the United States", it starts with "We the people of Terra" (the world the game takes place on.) You then need to, using the English version of the preamble as a key, figure out that they want you to encrypt the word "preamble" using the same cypher, and provide that set of characters in order to beat the game.

[@NGMonocrom]

Actually yes, Andy; Dave is a nice name indeed. Give you *1* guess what my name is. Congratulations! You've won me, giving this video a thumbs-up. Nicely done. 😇

[@forestghost1186]

Daves of the World Unite! And with our numbers we can create more Daves, sure they would call us mad? All we want to do is to create the perfect genetic Dave! Not for power, not for evil, but for good! They shall march out of our laboratory and sweep away every adversary, every creed, every nation, until the very planet is in the loving grip of the Pax Daveonica! 🌎

[@scottishrob13]

I actually didn't mind that ship door puzzle. The only thing I didn't catch on to immediately was that the sound mechanic was back. Once I knew, it was pretty obvious what the sounds were indicating, and what sounds to listen for. I remember that game having even harder puzzles than that, especially some of the environmental ones. The rest of the puzzles on this list though... yeah, no thanks haha

[@ShadowEclipse777]

Yeah some of the environmental obelisk puzzles are evil

[@masonr1666]

The silent hill series (1 to 3) were always about the puzzles for me. My favorite will always be the piano 🎹 puzzle. The puzzle gives you everything you need to solve it, but requires you to think logically in order to solve it. This is why it is my favorite puzzle.

[@Scribblerjohnny]

I also love that puzzle! And the clue poem!

[@CassiusZedaker-pr7kc]

I failed and rage quit SH1 at the piano puzzle.

[@CelesteBertin]

Came here to say this! Solved it by pressing the keys in different orders until it worked.

[@themetalone7739]

The Phantom Operative tasks for Battlefield 4. The entire thing was a series of insanely difficult puzzles that took the whole community to solve. Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen anything else quite like it.

[@KuraTheDog]

Community puzzles are always fun. Reminded of old Destiny 2 stuff like the giant Corridors of time puzzle. Wasn't meant to be solvable solo, though. Giant maze where each person had like a 5 step path that was easy to follow on their own to finish it normally, including a piece of a giant map under the floor, together which made a like 50 step path

[@ShadowEclipse777]

And all we got for it was the Bastion Kinetic Exotic Fusion Rifle 2 weeks early xwx

[@ShadowEclipse777]

As least I was able to make an ungodly amount of Legendary Shards that basically carried me the last couple years as I started playing less and less

[@williamst.romain7393]

One of the most infamous puzzles is in the text only game from the 80s: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galay. It near the start. The babel fish puzzle. I found the answer online decades after I played it.

[@cpljimmyneutron]

Ok, AC Origins has a puzzle involving Final Fantasy (totally not a joke). The game gives you absolutely no way to solve the puzzle, which involves using arrows on a giant sundial at certain times of day, that you must actually wait, using the time skip feature goes too far and fails... But, the mission (A Gift From The Gods) is not always available as it is only active during crossover events, apparently. I believe it is currently available, I stumbled upon it during my first playthrough. Also, the rewards are really good gear from Final Fantasy.

[@BeornGreymane]

A friend of mine had Riven in the 90's and he, my brother and me spent a weekend figuring it out. Wrote down theories on paper, made maps, had it all spread out on the floor. I particularly remember the feeling of enlightenment when we figured out the numeral system.

[@chrisjones5949]

Well, the front cover isn't your ONLY reward for the Tunic door puzzle. It's also the only way to unlock the alternate ending. Also, I figured out all of it myself... EXCEPT page 9. But still, the feeling of "OHHHHH" when I initially figured out what the golden lines meant was super satisfying.

[@permberd4185]

I actually discovered the TUNIC puzzle on my own, page nine I figured out by accident after I noticed that I had my save file,my brother's save file, and then a completely separate and unrelated 3rd save file and, my gosh mapping out the whole thing was glorious. I still feel the incredible puzzling power for figuring out all that.

[@joshuaarnett762]

From what I've heard you don't need to kill Placidusax to use the needle. So you know, a tiny bit easier.

[@NeoHellPoet]

It's a really fun fight though. One of the top dragon fights in the series and it's both amazingly epic and visually unique. You go there to fight him, the pin is purely coincidental.

[@joshuaarnett762]

@@NeoHellPoet oh I agree, I was just pointing out that you technically don't need to fight him to use the needle to quell the flame, just need to enter his arena

[@LegendaryDorkKnight]

As soon as I saw the video title, before I even clicked, I thought to myself "Just any door or gate puzzle from The Witness." And sure enough, you guys featured the EXACT one I was thinking of.

[@mchelpa]

It’s not the _most_ difficult of gaming achievements, but I was amazingly happy to complete the original FF VII with no FAQ or guide. I missed a ton of side content of course, didn’t get Vincent or the best gear, but I did get Yuffie. Also… so… many… stairs…

[@grieveromega6060]

The "hard puzzle" I remember the most was the "5 lever puzzle" in the palace of Midas in Tomb Raider 1. Since they had limited the vision towards the gates you want to open, you didn't know whether a combination you've selected changed anything and I just run around to double check each time. There is a hint above each gate which lever has to have which position, but I didn't recognized that back then.

[@jessebushnell7253]

Fez is such an amazing game and I think that puzzle was built for the community to solve together, seeing as how it has a bunch of “mess with the system” type puzzles it has

[@secondmemelord8859]

La Mulana has a good amount of puzzles that could fit on this List. For Example in order to unlock the optional Hell Temple you have to do things like jumping into an random background object, sleep infront of an certain statue, going down an seemingly infinite series of lava filled rooms until you can break an hidden wall on the 20th screen and more. Also you can accidentially screw yourself and render the puzzle unsolvable, by talking to an npc at the wring time.

[@Merlewhitefire]

The marble puzzle isn't impossible at all. It's obtuse, but it's not even the most tedious puzzle in Riven (That honor goes to "Working out the entire new base five number system from scratch" IMO)

[@shawntraub7249]

The numbering system was doable once you found the classroom. There was a small game on a desk where you would pull a level and a symbol would come up. Then a figure would drop down a number of times closer to a shark. The number of times it dropped was the number in their system. I think this taught you 1-9, and you had to figure out 10-25 on your own. Since they use a base 5 system that maxed out at 25, you were able to see the pattern.

[@Merlewhitefire]

@@shawntraub7249 I remember the game, but it felt so tedious and unintuitive working out the rest of the number system.

[@Zackaria_sMax]

12:26 Famous "Gladiatrix" actor Russell Corvide?!?!

[@kalin6149]

How about Manifold Garden? The trophy for completing the entire game without using a god block? It's literally so hard, and so mind blowing, that idk if anyone did it naturally.

[@MurderWho]

It feels a lot more difficult than it actually is. The game moreorless shows you exactly how it's possible in one moment in the late game, where you're travelling across a bridge over a corridor. An obvious door down that corridor reveals a passage back to the very beginning of the game. From there, you can recall a door that you never got through on your first playthrough that you now know requires holding a godblock. (Alternately, you can also find a hidden door beneath a stairway at the end of the game that would allow you to climb up somewhere while holding a block, and that's it's only possible purpose, and you end up asking yourself "what block would I even be holding . . .?". And the pathway up to that point has been hinting at a godblock in a particular orientation, but they all should be placed at that point. Working backwards on a maingame playthru, it's easy to figure out what your path must look like up until a point where it MUST involve a secret passage, and that solves a significant part of the no-godblock playthru) And then you just follow that path through that door. Everytime you come to a deadend you ask yourself "How can I open up more without placing a godblock?", and the game has already taught you how to think in the right way to find a solution. And you've seen enough secret passages your first playthru, usually from the wrong side, to start learning how to look . . . but especially because you find so many secret passages that dump you out in deadends, and the only possibility from there is either: there's a secret passage in this deadend, or I can smuggle a block to/from here. Eventually you get to the end. It's a much faster playthru than the main game, even though there's no good way to smuggle a particular block through a particular corridor to a particular hidden door that I know of, and you end up just doing an agility test :/ And despite all that, I am still aware of back corridors I haven't found the entrance to yet. Both the main game and the no-godblock game are much, much easier if you start keeping a nodemap of what rooms lead to what rooms.

[@kalin6149]

@@MurderWho I'll leave my response to this as simply as I can. I'm impressed you were able to write all that and still say it "feels more difficult than it actually is". Secondly, I'm impressed at your ability to simply recall those steps at all. Not gonna lie I used a guide to get that platinum and I'm man enough to acknowledge it. Good on you man, nice job!

[@worldoffood123]

I love the design and vibes of Riven, but those puzzles are absolute nonsense! More fun to just wander around the world

[@samuxan]

"you can easily blunder into de 2 fingers..." well I finished the game twice, got that needle, kill the 2 bosses needed and explore the area the fingers are without finding the place they're hidden. The drops needed to reach that are so impossible that I had to look that up, I just assumed it was a bottomless pit. Getting the bad ending was the hardest part of getting that platinum trophy

[@marhawkman303]

also it's debatable as to if it IS a bad ending at all. Seemingly the true good ending is the moon one, the regular ending is apparently the mostly bad one, and the dung one is the worst.

[@RivendellPanda]

"Riven is monumentally difficult, enough to be off-putting" Feeling like I picked my IRL first name appropriately! That was a wonderful moment in this video that I wasn't expecting :D

[@PatrickSon14]

I did the Mountain Door puzzle in Tunic without a guide, and it was one of the most rewarding puzzles I've ever done

[@Christopher-md7tf]

I understood the general principle of the puzzle fairly quickly, but those save file shenanigans completely eluded me. No idea how you're supposed to know to cancel out and then go back into the load screen again. That being said, I don't even think The Golden Path is the hardest puzzle in the game lol. Anybody who manages to find all the secrets without a guide has my utmost respect.

[@PatrickSon14]

@@Christopher-md7tf yeah, I used a guide for the remaining secrets and that weird optional tower puzzle. Those were way harder than the Mountain Door

[@cearnicus]

@@Christopher-md7tf I'm not sure you need to hit cancel for it. Or perhaps I hit it by accident at some point. I think I noticed the extra savegame well before I even started with the mountain puzzle; but since I didn't have the context to know its importance, I never loaded it.

[@cjlister8508]

Yeah the mountain door made perfect sense. I can't believe that it's on this list.

[@greedyProphet]

Same. It took a few attempts, but the two days of playing and brainstorming at work were so fun. Also, for one of the crystals I was describing how hard and nebulous the puzzles were including one I couldn't solve, and in describing it I figured it out. Right up there with The Outer Wilds for best puzzle experiences ever.

[@Keevacom]

Y’all forgot that there’s a traveling merchant note behind an unbreakable wall on the way down to the Frenzied Flame Proscription that if you use an enemy in the area to like bullshit break it reveals the note that contains a slight hint as to how you can cure yourself.

[@Helios9826]

So basically, the way to solve Tunic's hardest puzzle is to rage quit?

[@Arindilwen]

The FMV game "Temujin" had some really insane puzzles. Pretty sure the one to "make a cup of tea" involved zero steps typical to brewing a regular cup of tea. Never would have completed that game without online guides.

[@littlefurnace]

I found the witness okay, but the problem with it is that the puzzles are all intuitive and add rules over time, so you have to solve them in order, but I didn't play for two weeks and forgot where I got to. The only way to remember was to replay the whole game an I am NOT doing all that again, no matter how nice it is to listen to Ashley Johnson read me poems.

[@GalacticNexus]

The revelation of what exactly the Mountain Door puzzle was and my subsequent solving of it across far too many sheets of graph paper is without a doubt the proudest moment of my gaming career. Page 9 drove me up to and crashing straight through the brink of insanity. I wouldn't have it any other way.

[@thetute59]

Destiny puzzles are, at times, also insanely hard. I think there were also multiple that were only able to be solved by the community.

[@frankwest5388]

Did they ever find out what the last wish was? I saw a video a while on that weird place called wishing wall and I don’t remember if they got all of them

[@jimmyju76]

honestly, puzzles like these take the fun out of games

[@IndustrialBonecraft]

I think if they're completely optional, they're great. Not going to bother, personally, but it's clearly someone's kink and it creates some fascinating stories and weird communities and keeps people talking for a while. But only if it's optional. The rest of us just want to move on.

[@DavidRBrown7]

Ah, Riven. That takes me back. Played all the Myst games when they first came out. They were literally the first PC games I ever played. I had no access to the internet and solving the problems would take hours. I remember solving the marble puzzle. I am pretty sure there was a way to solve the last marble but I cannot remember how I did it now. I remember the later games eg Exile and Revelation were much easier than the first two.

[@cigoLxeL]

I remember spending a good two hours on _Riven_ trying to figure out some puzzle that involved lighting and extinguishing several pilot lights, only to be rewarded for solving it by having a small bucket raise up and a colorful frog jump out of the bucket and vanish. That was when I traded the game in for something fun, and judging by what I now see the game puts you through later, I don't regret that choice in the slightest.

[@lysanderxx1664]

That Tunic puzzle is delightfully insane. The Silent Hill 3 puzzle is exactly what I thought of when I saw this video title! A couple pther unsolvable puzzles I like: Talos Principle - the star puzzle where you need to press a specific 2 buttons among 24 pillars. For one thing, noticing the buttons isn't easy. Then, in the game, you can look at QR codes to read them. Except fpr one well hidden code in this area where you can only scan it with your real life cell phone. Then you need to figure out that the ##/##/#### date and QR code relate to the pillar puzzle. Then figure out which of the numbers of the date equate to which pillar buttons to press, not knowing beforehand that you need to press only 2 buttons. Also, check out the sliding block puzzle in the original Lufia 2. That game was full of delightful and interactive puzzles, something I'd love to see in more traditional RPGs. But to unlock the door to the sliding puzzle, I never saw the other side until the internet. Every other puzzle in the game felt solvable. But then the sliding block puzzle in that impossible to enter room... You could spend your life on that thing. It was really fun, but after a few hours and multiple attempts, I just looked online.

[@AlexSamaras]

Heh. I played Riven way back in the day, well before there were walk-throughs to look up. That puzzle wasn't so bad. You could work out the grid locations of the domes using the terrain generator device on one of the islands. Then you got 4 of the 5 colors as mentioned, and so the final one (which turned out to be violet, based on my old MYST/Riven notebook that, like all totally normal people, I still have) you could get by trial and error. . Those games were brilliant. The orignal MYST CD-ROM came with a notebook and the manual encouraged players to take notes and be observant. I carried that same notebook and attitude into Riven and was able to work out the puzzles from the clues given in the game by making notes, sketches, etc of anything that seemed important and then figuring out the connections. It was so much fun, and I don't think people get that kind of experience any more in these days of it being so easy to just google if you get stuck.

[@abydosianchulac2]

Yeah, the fact that you *could* get all the answers if you wanted them but it involved spending $19.99 USD on the official guide (or at least $5.99 USD on the unofficial guide from the same publisher, weirdly) really made you consider if spoiling things was worth it. And yes I still have those both at hand like a totally normal person.

[@lordofuzkulak8308]

1:06 - you sure they’re not just a Link that’s stumbled into another dimension again; I mean, one turned into a wolf when he went into the Twilight Realm and another became a pink bunny when he went to the Dark World, so it would be in character for yet another to become a fox somewhere else. 🤷🏻‍♂️ 😜

[@SolaScientia]

I'm honestly terrible at solving puzzles. I need a walk-through to play Legend of Zelda games, ffs. I'll probably finish Elden Ring at some point who knows when, but I already decided I wouldn't even try to get the Three Fingers because 1) I don't want the Frenzied Flame ending and 2) I'd heard just how aggravating it is to undo what you did to get a different ending. I had enough trouble making sure I didn't screw up with Siegward and Anri to make sure I kept Siegward alive for Yhorm and to make sure I kept Anri alive so I could get the Usurpation of Flame ending in DS3. Oh yeah, keeping Eileen alive and not angry in Bloodborne only to fight the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst as the "reward" for all that.

[@TheRemiCay]

I loved the throw-back to Kings Quest... that puzzle was and still is insanely hard particularly because of the typo!

[@sirflimflam]

The hardest puzzle in Tunic rewarding the most obvious page of the game, that teaches you literally nothing by being the title of the booklet... That is brilliant. Not gonna lie.

[@merepseu]

When you've beaten the toughest thing the game can you throw at you, there's no point in rewarding you with something useful - it'll just make easier stuff even easier still.

[@marhawkman303]

@@merepseu yeah like in FF5 beating Omega 2. The team setup I used for that OWNED the real final boss of the game so hard it wasn't funny. Why bother giving me anything other than a participation trophy?

[@warailawildrunner5300]

@@marhawkman303 Or the irony of doing all the hardest content in the game, to be rewarded with one of the best weapons in the game, which is pretty useless as you've just beaten all the hardest content before getting it. (FF12)

[@MarkDeSade100]

@@warailawildrunner5300 A lot of RPGs are guilty of that. "Congratulations, you beat the optional superboss who is way harder than the final boss of the main story! Now you can finally use the best weapon in the game!" Player: "What am I supposed to use it on?"

[@Riiick3]

Its not true though, its how you get the alternate ending

[@Robacus]

Mannn, I've missed outside x box. I'm so glad my algorithm picked it back up.

[@AnnKdc]

I like Andy - he really does make me laugh and cheer up my day!

[@DMBLaan]

I love that by misspelling his name, Sierra effectively made the puzzle unsolvable through normal means.