so I think its safe to say we have all had one of those moments in a game, where the puzzle is somewhat obvious but it takes us forever to figure it out, and you sort of kick yourself afterwards for not figuring it out sooner



as such, I thought it might be fun to share the times we just went "how did I not figure this out sooner!", sorta so we can laugh at ourselves




heres a couple of mine:


Kings Quest Mask of Eternity:


a game that while it has its fair share of puzzles, most of them were pretty obvious to me.. until I reached the Castle in the Swamp area.. I got to the part where your trying to get on the roof, but the spiked ceiling will fall on you killing you if you walk near the stairs.. I had spent weeks checking around the castle and swamp to see if their was a secret passage, I back tracked through the Dimension of Death and the Kingdom of Daventry thinking something might be there that i missed thats somehow the solution..


after a couple of weeks of having my mind completely wrecked trying to figure out, me and a friend were watching Indiana Jones, and the part where indy swapped the Idol for the object and the boulder chase scene started I went "ohh my god, thats it!", ran to my PC and tried throwing a rock into the hall, triggering the trap without me getting hurt and allowing me to pass





Majoras Mask:


the snowhead temple.. i'd get to the point where I had the boss key, but I didn't realize the blue sections of that platform in the central spire you moved up and down were destroy-able.. so, I somehow came to the conclusion that to get the boss door, I would first have to destroy the snowballs with my fire arrows, and then try to jump off the uppermost path at a trajectory that would put me into the tunnel.. took me 4 of the games 3 day cycles to get it (by that point I could get through the parts of the dungeon prior to that fairly quickly), and I finally fired off at a trajectory just right to get me into that path..


so I felt fairly accomplished about it, and a few months later I was at a friends house, we were waiting for his brother to finish up on the N64 so we could play some smash Bros.. his brother was playing through that same portion, and when he just punched the blue sections of the lift to level it to the boss door I was stunned..


I said "wait, what did you just do?", my buddy said "he was going for the boss door, didn't you beat this game already?".. I went "yeah.. but not by doing that, I jumped off of the upper platform in goron roll at an angle and speed that narrowly put me in the tunnel".. I still remember their faces when they both turned around and went "wait.. you what?"

There's a puzzle in Knights of the old Republic that made me kick myself for hours. It's on the sith planet that starts with a k during the trials. Turns out all I needed to do was step on a lever and I didn't see it. I was over thinking it so much I spent hours in this one room.

Ugh, water temple in Ocarina of Time. It wasn't the raising and lowering of the water levels, it was .

Ah yes, the one with the 3 glowy pylons.

The hostage negotiations in Star Trek The next Generation: Echoes from the Past on the Genesis. Basically you have two chances to convince hostile aliens who captured a Federation Ship to release the hostages, then if you succeed you have infiltrate the ship and solve the puzzles and rescue the crew and you can't fail once, do and the mission's a fail no redos. Luckily the SNES version is more forgiving.

The Puzzle Canol in Morrowind gives many people a lot of trouble.

The answer just seems illogical for the type of game it is, and even when you realize what you're supposed to you are still doubting yourself until you see results.


I love that quest.

Is that the one where you ?

Yeah, when I first found that the idea came to me very quickly, but I thought "haha that would be funny", and dismissed it right away, spending another hour or two in there pounding my head onto the table.

Yes.

As a kid I was reading an article in "Mad Magazine" on gambling that was exposing tricks that cheats use to win.

They showed 2 pair of dice, a standard one pair and the cheat's pair and highlighted the corner edges of both.

They claimed that due to a subtle filing on the edge of the cheat's pair... the cheat was able to roll a 7 almost every time.

I stared at this image for hours... if not days.

I could see absolutely no difference between the edges whatsoever.

What were these people talking about? The difference was impercetible!

Some days later I realised the cheat's pair of dice had only "4"'s on one die and only "3"'s on the other.

I'm still holding my palm over my face even now.

That's weird, because the exact same thing happened to me, minus the other people. But my friend who's into Zelda did it the "right" way.


The blue ice was so random. There was no clue that it was anything other than decoration.


You know those annoying "how could I know this?!" moments from SNES or NES games? The blue ice was like one of those. Zelda II had a lot of them.

The last or second to last temple in Link′s Awakening. Took me forever to figure out how to smash all those pillars. It was pretty hard since you need to get that orb into several rooms and the obstacles are quite numerous.

In destiny: the taken king, the raid when first playing through was extremely difficult for me to figure out all the mechanics with my fire team. I think out of every puzzle it took me the longest amount of time in a video game.

Never really remember any hard puzzles... Well Myst Series which I forgot about

I think it was Space Quest 1. On a desert planet and there's a big monster blocking my way. I think it was even timed - you only had so much time before he attacked you.


This was pre-internet, so I had a save file just before that puzzle and that game just sat for a year until I ran into a distant relative who told me I just had to throw my bottle of dehydrated water into his mouth, making him explode.

Only reason that my first playthrough of Antichamber took more than 4 hours was one specific room where I missed the one little thing that would have allowed me to advance for almost an hour. It's a large room with stairs leading down to a large cube that's open at the top with two man-cannons on either side of it that'll launch you over it. When flying over the cube you can see it's a shaft leading to a previously inaccessible area. I tried for ages to land in the box, completely missing the small window in the ceiling directly above it that would have taken me elsewhere. Instead of trying to build walls and platforms so I could jump in the box all I needed to do was look straight up as I walked into one of the man-cannons. The whole puzzle could have been solved in less than 3 seconds.

Dehydrated 'water'? That's hilarious.

Korriban, or some such spelling. Mine is from KotOR too, the one in the room where PC gets trapped and needs to move energy beams from column to column.