No matter how difficult a puzzle you stumble upon in a video game, it's always sound advice to heed the words that a great professor once said: "Every puzzle has an answer." That doesn't necessarily stop us from hitting certain road blocks in video games, and while certain puzzles might seem entirely impossible, it's all the more frustrating to discover that a puzzle that was keeping you from progressing actually had the solution right in front of you the whole time. Even though some of these puzzles seem quite obvious in hindsight, many of them still got us fed up enough to rage quit in the process.
Not all puzzles are created equal, of course. While some puzzles will truly test your wits and brain power, there's no shame in admitting that certain puzzles stopped us dead in our tracks until we finally had that "Aha!" moment... or resorted to an online strategy guide turning it more into a "What? REALLY!?" moment. From trick questions, hidden items, or puzzles being a little too meta for us to figure out, these are some of the most simple puzzles that made us want to rage quit.
15 If You Lost The CD Case, This Would Be Impossible
Metal Gear Solid was one of those games that felt totally different than other games that came before it. From the clever mind of Hideo Kojima, this was no regular stealth and action game. Metal Gear Solid is a far cry away from being a puzzle game in the slightest, but you have to admit there were quite a few moments that had players scratching their heads.
Some of the more puzzle inducing moments come from the game breaking the fourth wall, something that wasn't all to common in games at the time, but would become a staple for Metal Gear Solid. At one point in the game, after trying to rescue a doomed Kenneth Baker, Snake is told to get in touch with Meryl, but the only problem is that Baker forgot her codec frequency. Luckily, he tells you that you can find it on the back of the CD case, confusing players for quite a while not knowing what CD case he meant. It turns out that he literally meant the back of the CD case that the game came packaged it. Despite him telling you exactly where her codec frequency was, the suggestion was quite meta for the time, leaving many players baffled.
14 We'd Rather Get Back To Killing Zombies
Resident Evil titles aren't necessarily known for their difficult puzzles. They are usually rather simplistic and self explanatory, although every so often a rage inducing puzzle makes its way into the series. Resident Evil 4 marked a completely new direction for the franchise, becoming more action oriented rather than focusing on puzzle solving to progress through the game. While you spend most of the game shooting your way toward the finale, there is a brief moment where you play as Ashley in a more puzzle-oriented section of the game.
I'll never understand why developers ever insist on putting in a 3x3 sliding tile puzzle in a game, as I find these to be the most infuriating puzzles to ever grace mankind. That being said, Resident Evil 4 just couldn't resist messing with its own pacing for a bit to put this in. While these puzzles are typically trial and error, the sliding of the tiles is actually fairly minimal, moving the middle left tile toward the center than moving the bottom left tile up. You simply rotate the tiles on the border counter clockwise until its solved. It's a surprisingly easy solution for a puzzle that made players just want to shut the game off.
13 We Never Want To Go To The Races Again
The Professor Layton titles naturally have a plethora of puzzles available, and as stated above by the titular professor, "Every puzzle has an answer." What makes the series so frustrating is that you can spend quite some time on puzzles, yet the majority of the time after solving it or spending picarats on clues, you're left wondering why the puzzle gave you so much grief in the first place.
The horse puzzle from Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a classic example of a solution that is so simple, but looks more difficult than it really is. Three horses run at different speeds, completing a certain amount of laps within a one minute period. The question asks that once the horses start running, how many minutes have passed before the horses all line up again. The amount of laps is more of a distraction, leading the player to think there's more arithmetic involved when in actuality, the answer is literally at the beginning of the question as it simply takes one minute for all the horses to become aligned again.
12 The Hint Keeper Can't Help You Here
Make no mistake. Phantasmagoria is one of the easiest point and click adventure games available, relying more on gore and its storytelling elements rather than in depth puzzle solving. This is heavily because the "Official Hint Keeper," a red skull who "watches your every move" is always at your disposal and pretty much tells you exactly what you need to do. Despite that, his role can be less than helpful in the game's final chapter.
Before completing the game and entering the point of no return, the player is required to obtain several items in order to destroy the demon possessing the lead character's husband. Yet the final chase sequence (and only point you can die in the game) takes place upon entering the dark room, a room which has been unavailable since the beginning of the second chapter. Walking by it, the player notices the door is slightly ajar, getting the best of the players curiosity. After entering, a chase scene ensues between Adrien and Don always ending in Adrien's death. You're given a prompt to either retry or quit after dying, implying that you just took a wrong action, but this scene can't actually be beaten with the items at hand. Instead, the chapter has to be restarted and you must acquire the items needed to beat the game before entering the dark room... something that isn't really obvious at the beginning of the chapter.
11 Sometimes The Answer's Been With You The Whole Time
It's probably no surprise that several point and click adventure games have made it onto this list, as many games of the genre were notorious for having puzzles that oftentimes required a lot of guess work. By guess work, I just mean pointing and clicking on every object while doing the same with every item in your inventory. Ripley's Believe It Or Not! The Riddle of Master Lu follows in other point and click games' footsteps with all too many vague puzzles.
In this adventure, a fictionalized version of Robert Ripley, now portrayed as an Indiana Jones-esque character, must get inside of a temple in the Himalayas, but is only allowed access by being in possession of a particular ring. While the game may suggest that you need to actually find said ring, the solution to the puzzle is already hidden in your inventory, though it isn't really obvious. Ripley can simply take the band off of a cigar he is carrying and use it as a fake ring, fooling the man guarding the entrance. Though it's far from obvious, it's frustrating knowing that you had the item needed in your inventory the whole time.
10 Grab The Goat By The Horns
The goat puzzle in Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is one of the most infamous puzzles in point and click adventure games, all while being one of the easiest. Playing as George Stobbart, you are trying to infiltrate a castle in Ireland. In one segment, a goat who is attached to a rope (which is long enough to give him free movement) blocks your path and will ram George, stopping him from going forward. This sequence implied that there had to be some other way to get around the goat when it actuality, you simply had to instantly click on a piece of machinery after being hit by the goat and you would make it to the device before the goat could charge at you again. The goat would then become entwined in his own rope, allowing you to traverse the area easily. This particular puzzle gave many players a hard time simply because it was time sensitive, but other puzzles in the game never implied that there were time sensitive puzzles, thus making players believe that there was no other way around the goat.
Due to the fame of this puzzle, the 2009 director's cut version of the game featured a diary that George writes in. Poking fun at its own history, after solving the goat puzzle his diary will read in regards to the goat "For a moment I thought it was going to be incredibly awkward to get past, but in the end it was surprisingly simple. Who would have known?" Apparently, quite a few people, George.
9 We Never Want To See Another Torch Again
Probably not the most rage inducing puzzle in previous console generations, something still needs to be said about the "light the torch" puzzles, which have become synonymous with The Legend of Zelda series. These puzzles have become so commonplace in the series that you might be thinking that if a torch is unlit, the solution is obviously going to be to light it. Though knowing to light the torches is the first crucial step, its a puzzle that has evolved over the years as the franchise has grown.
Whether it's lighting four torches to reveal a treasure chest, or lighting them to be able to inflict damage on a final boss, no torch shall go unlit. Yet later entries after A Link to the Past have switched up the formula quite a bit. Some torches may go unlit until you come in possession of the fire rod, but that may not be apparent at the time. Other torches might make you think outside the box, shooting an arrow through a flame into another torch. Either way you look at it, torch puzzles probably aren't leaving Hyrule anytime soon and more than likely, one of these puzzles hindered your progress at one point or another despite their general simplicity.
8 Music And Poetry And Puzzles, Oh My!
This puzzle certainly gave many gamers a headache. One of the first difficult puzzles in the Silent Hill franchise, the idea was to hit the piano's keys in the correct order in order to progress. Though it has nothing on Silent Hill 3's infamous Shakespeare puzzle (which pretty much required a masters degree in English literature), it's memorable for being the series first somewhat difficult puzzle.
The solution is pretty much written (in blood, I should mention) on a piece of sheet music with a poem titled "A Tale of Birds Without a Voice." The sheet music implies that the piano must come in to play and while trying to press some of the keys, you'll notice that some of them are broken and produce no sound. It may not be obvious right away, but each broken key represents one of the "birds without a voice" from the poem. What follows next is figuring out which broken keys to press in a particular order, following the prompts from the poem. While it may seem like something from an SAT prep course logistics question, the whole puzzle seems more complicated than it really is.
7 An Awful Puzzle You Have To Do More Than Once
Final Fantasy X probably ranks within my top three Final Fantasy games in the series, simply because of its wonderful story and its fun, quick paced battle system. While the majority of the game was quite enjoyable (yes, even including the notorious Tidus and Yuna laughing scene), I absolutely detest the Cloister of Trials, a segment that appears several times throughout the game with each temple solved opening up a new Aeon for Yuna.
My biggest gripe with these trials is that they kind of slow the pacing of the game down, making you solve a series of puzzles in order to progress. While Besaid's temple is quite simple earlier on in the game, these temples get downright tedious by the time you reach Zanarkand. By far, the worst offender is the Cloister of Trials in the city of Bevelle due to multiple pathways hindered by slow moving pedestals that you travel on. While it's mostly trial and error, placing certain spheres into their correct slots, the Cloister of Trials in Final Fantasy X were far from fun and though they weren't entirely difficult after some experimentation, I continuously dreaded the idea that another trial wasn't too far away around the corner.
6 You Actually Have To Shut Your Console Off?!
There were quite a few hits and quite a few misses when it came to adapting superhero franchises into video game format, yet the X-Men games, specifically for the Sega Genesis were among the best of the 16-bit era. While the first X-Men game to hit the Genesis was naturally more of an action based platformer, many who played it will remember a tricky puzzle that came up late in the game.
After reaching the penultimate level, you are supposed to destroy a computer screen and are afterwards told to "Reset the Computer." Most gamers in their right mind would assume they were talking about the in-game computer, but with no way to do so, they were denied access to the final stage. How anyone was supposed to figure this out in this day and age without internet forums being a big thing at the time is beyond my comprehension... but the game quite literally meant to reset the computer, otherwise known as your actual Sega Genesis console. Upon doing so, the game takes you to the final stage after hitting the reset button. It's something that seems so simple as the game tells you exactly what to do, yet gamers struggled with this for quite sometime. You have to give those tricky developers props, though, for creating such a unique puzzle.
5 Why Do These Games Keep Making You Do This Stuff??
The Nintendo DS was home to plenty of gimmicky features, many of which felt shoehorned into games yet at the same time were often cleverly used in ways that most people wouldn't imagine. While the DS line of Zelda games were sub-par due to required touch screen controls, they still retain the fantastic Zelda design and gameplay elements, along with bringing some new tricks to the portable games.
I was so infuriated by this particular puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass that rage quitting was actually what got me to solve the puzzle in the first place. In an attempt to copy a sea chart onto Link's sacred crest, an item used for solving many puzzles in the game, your friendly fairy Ciela tells Link to "press the sacred crest against the sea chart to transfer it." I spent quite some time trying to figure out what she meant by this, trying to scribble lines with the stylus on the touch screen or trying to figure out if there was some weird item I was missing. Eventually, I gave up and closed the DS. When I came back to it, the sea chart was registered to the sacred crest, as Ciela literally meant closing the DS to press the top screen which showed the sacred crest against the bottom screen which displayed the sea chart. It's one of the few times I've played a game that giving up was actually beneficial.
4 This Puzzle Is Literally Trash
Pokémon was never known to have difficult puzzles in regards to gameplay, other than the multiple confusing maze-like dungeons that litter the games without any sort of map feature. It isn't often you really see a puzzle in these games, yet the third gym in the original title was one of the first puzzles in the game that came off as more annoying rather than really clever.
To get to Vermilion city's gym leader, you must disable an electric barrier blocking his path. Two switches that must be pressed in order are hidden in trash cans and the player must flip two of them in the correct order. If you fail to hit the second switch correctly, the switches randomly reset. This can be frustrating at first if you don't know the method behind it, but this is a good lesson in talking to NPCs. After talking to a trainer who you've already beaten, he gives you the hint that after hitting the first switch, the second switch is in a trash can directly next to it. Although there is still some trial and error involved as the first switch may be surrounded by multiple trash cans, yet the hint still keeps you from wandering around the gym aimlessly hitting random buttons.
3 So Small, So Easy To Miss
P.T. was a demo for the now defunct title Silent Hills, showcasing a new direction that Konami was going to take its popular horror series. While Silent Hills will probably never see the light of day, the demo went viral as the internet worked together to discover the secrets that lied within, not even knowing that this was a demo for an upcoming Silent Hill title. The game was not meant to be completed easily, as the puzzles were obscure and offered little to no direction but rather relied on word of mouth through the internet on how to beat them.
One particular puzzle played more like an Easter egg hunt, trying to find scraps of a missing photo hidden throughout the never ending hallway that you play in. They were easy to miss and oftentimes so small that only the most keen eye could spot them. Even if you were able to find all of the picture pieces in the hallway, one was still cleverly hidden. You could find the final fragment by pushing the action button, zooming in on the final piece. Later playthroughs would often make this the easiest piece to find as it didn't actually require you find it again, yet simply just open the menu and collect it.
2 This Almost Feels Like Cheating (But We Like It)
The latest installment of The Legend of Zelda has taught me to think outside of the box rather than following the more typical structure of thought process from previous titles. The Breath of the Wild really does breathe new life into the series and has some of the most original and clever puzzles in a Zelda title that we've seen since the series made its jump to the third dimension. While puzzles may often times seem overwhelmingly difficult, the game often has a variety of solutions making puzzles often times possible to solve while not doing it the way it was intended.
Several labyrinths are scattered across the land of Hyrule and approaching these areas early in the game can be quite frustrating. Basically a giant maze with repetitive corridors, the labyrinths are usually hard to navigate and can be rather difficult to solve. It's not until later in the game after having developed Link's stamina meter that you realize you can pretty much just bypass the entire maze, climbing to the top and finding the best point of entry to jump down in order to make your way to the labyrinth's heart. Sure, this may not be how the maze was intended to be solved, yet Breath of the Wild still lets you feel clever for cheating the system.
1 This Entire Game Is Rage Quit Worthy
The Witness was one of the more surprising titles from 2016, bringing something new to the table as I haven't been so engrossed in a puzzle game in quite some time. While the game introduces you slowly to the mechanics of the mazes, it quickly evolves, creating new sets of rules that make the puzzles even more difficult to solve. Once you seem to become accustomed to a certain style of maze, you're shortly after forced to learn new ways to solve the mazes.
It's hard to pin one particular puzzle down in The Witness because I've felt forced to walk away from dozens of puzzles after hundreds of failed attempts to solve it. That's what is sort of so great about these puzzles, though. Every time I walk away from the game, I'll later get the nerve to boot it back up, standing in front of the last puzzle that gave me so much grief. The Witness is always fair, but can also be a very frustrating experience when you feel you've tried every possible solution and make little progress. It's a great example of a puzzle game that may make a gamer want to throw their controller at the television, but it's also a game so full of those amazing "Aha!" moments that you feel pressed to continuously come back to it.