History Main / ThatOnePuzzle

** The [[http://forums.kingdomofloathing.com/vb/showthread.php?t=226910 invisible string puzzle]] took five months to solve, primarily because [[FakeDifficulty every step in the solution had a very short time limit]].[[note]]fight a certain enemy until a special item is (without notification) added to your inventory. While under the effects of that item (which only lasts 5 turns), fight a different enemy until another item is added to your inventory (again without notification). Repeat the process with a ''third'' enemy to get your reward. [[/note]]

** When ''VideoGame/UruAgesBeyondMyst'' was reworked from an MMO into ''Uru: Complete Chronicles'', several of the puzzles originally intended to be solved by ''multiple players cooperating'' did not transition well into single-player form, none more so than the hourglass-shaped Bahro cave in ''Path of the Shell''. The lower chamber is completely dark, but has a pool of water in the middle; fortunately, you've previously developed a recipe for algae pellets that make water briefly luminesce, but because the player avatar is incapable of carrying anything you can only bring them to the ''upper'' chamber from which it's impossible to see anything in the room below. For lack of the ability to call a friend for help, the intended solution is to realise from the esoteric wall markings that [[spoiler:the lower chamber is [[SanDimasTime running fifteen minutes behind the upper chamber]], allowing you to [[HelpYourselfInTheFuture drop the pellet above, make your way below... and then do nothing for fifteen minutes waiting for your past self to catch up]].]] Oh, and hopefully [[spoiler:you enjoy doing nothing, because [[FakeLongevity every batch of pellets takes fifteen minutes to make]], and the clue you find in the lower chamber will tell you to [[WaitingPuzzles stand absolutely still under a spotlight in a third place for another fifteen minutes]] to open a secret passage]]. Thankfully, the open-source fan project was able to greatly reduce the headache.

** The Fire Marble Puzzle om ''Riven''. You are given a grid with colored marbles corresponding to the typical ROY G. BIV mnemonic. You are expected to put the marbles in specific spots on the grid, and these spots correspond to the Fire Marble Domes on the five islands in the game, and the domes each correspond to a certain color given in a completely different in-game language than your native tongue, and to find the spots you need to go to a topography map on one of the islands and then figure out the location of the domes, [[TrialAndErrorGameplay then pinpoint those on the grid when the locations are extremely specific]], and argh, GuideDangIt! It's not illogical, just rather unintuitive, and if you're not good at topography, it doesn't help. Oh, and [[RedHerring one of the marbles isn't even necessary to completing the puzzle]].

** There's also the puzzle in ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork4RedSunAndBlueMoon''. In this section you end up entering codes consisting on three numbers to pass through each gate, each one has the hint in there. You get your usual math problems so far... but then you get one whose only hint is "HI = HE???". So, how is this supposed to yield a three-number answer? [[spoiler: Well, the question marks are supposed to be blank spaces and you're supposed to fill in those spaces by thinking in ''LeetLingo'' of all things. The hint is supposed to lead you to think "HI = HELLO". The answer you're looking of is 770]]. [[SarcasmMode Makes perfect sense, right?]]

*** The final puzzle with numbered balls in the Study can be this if you take one rule for granted: that you have to fill in both areas. You have been doing this in the previous three puzzles, so why should it be different in this one? It's impossible to complete the last one with this mentality. The game never tells you this, but you've probably assumed it. You'd be surprised how many people fall into this trap and look for an impossible solution for ages.

* ''VideoGame/{{Superman 64}}'' is a very puzzle-oriented game. Many of the puzzles are simple, but there is a puzzle in the final level of the game that is maddeningly hard. Brainiac sends you to a room with several portals (Word of God is that it's a time machine) with a number in the center of the screen. Players must go through portals until the number in the center of the screen equals 2000, causing Brainiac's computers to go haywire. The puzzle itself is self explanatory, but immeasurably difficult because this portion of the level is heavily glitched so that the player dies ''at complete random''. Yes, this will happen ''even if you're using a Gameshark and have infinite health.'' The glitches make the final puzzle nearly un-solvable. One of the many reasons why this game is considered among the worst in the history of video games isn't just because of the convoluted gameplay and rushed release, but because this very puzzle screwed up an already bad enough game.

* ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonAndTheCuriousVillage'': The infamous "Chocolate Code" puzzle proved so troublesome that the European edition of the game replaced it with an entirely different puzzle revolving around probability[[note]]In all fairness, it was more likely removed because of the fact that the QWERTY keyboard layout isn't consistently used throughout Europe, and was therefore changed in order to prevent CreatorProvincialism from making this puzzle become more of a MoonLogicPuzzle than was originally intended[[/note]]. The player has to decode a message written on a chocolate bar with seven squares (one blank to represent a space), and there are small bites taken out of some of the squares. The bites indicate the position of decrypted letters relative to the encoded letters on [[spoiler:a computer keyboard (so for example a bite on the left would mean "d" gets decoded to "f")]] but since the in-game hints never mention the bites, most players simply assumed they were just eye candy (no pun intended).

** ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil3Nemesis'' has the Water Treatment puzzle. Even with a guide you're going to have trouble with this, and it's randomized to make it harder for a guide to give solutions. You have to rotate 3 meters with lighted blocks and line them into place to form a specific pattern. Problem is that the lights are actually upside down, and you had to get it right when it's inverted.[[labelnote:PROTIP]]There's no way to give an actual solution to the puzzle since it's random, but mentally picturing the blocks from each meter combining to match the pattern displayed on the bottom is the only way to reliably figure it out.[[/labelnote]]

* ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedValhalla'': The puzzle to get into the sacred well in Asgard is next to impossible to figure out. There are no hints, and the trick to beating the puzzle is actually sneakily hidden. The majority of players admit they had to look up how to do it, after spending close to an hour trying to figure it out.

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaALinkToThePast'': The Ice Palace has the infamous block-and-backtracking puzzle. You need to find a way to keep a switch held down so that you can advance, but there's no objects in the room you can use to do that. The solution is to push one of the blocks upstairs into a hole and then use that to hold down the switch. The reason this is hard to figure out is because this is the only time you're required to use a movable block to hold down a switch and said movable blocks can only be moved for a single tile by default, as opposed to a statue that always stand out and can be moved around freely. There's also the fact that none of the other puzzles in the game require you to move puzzle elements between floors, and any other time you can throw or push something into a hole that isn't a {{Bottomless Pit|s}} and jump after it, it's guaranteed to disappear by the time you reach the bottom. [[spoiler:Or you could just do some SequenceBreaking and use the Cane of Somaria, which generates blocks for you.]] Even if you do figure it out, half of the room the blocks are in is blocked by colored pillars which you might need to lower to access the right block, making for annoying backtracking. The puzzle was made easier for the GBA port.

* ''VideoGame/SilentHill''

* ''VideoGame/{{Repton}}'': The PC remake has one on Avalanche Level 15. Six rocks block the passage to the key, and you can't shunt them aside, because to get in position to ''start'' shunting, you have to take the diamond holding them up. If you do that, they will fall in a heap and can't be moved. The solution... push an egg above the first rock, so that the falling of the others is delayed while it hatches. No previous level has used this trick. There isn't an egg anywhere nearby -- you have to think of the idea and then fetch an egg from the opposite side of the level.

-->"Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a mustache, is '''not to construct a fake mustache'''."

** The keep. [[spoiler:The garden mazes themselves aren't too hard, but you have to remember the solution to ''all four'' puzzles in order to activate the beacon, two of the four at different angles from the original puzzle. The other side of the keep, with the pads you have to step on to activate, requires a similar mechanic to the garden mazes, but while the garden beacon at least follows the layout, the mechanical beacon does not, which means you have to follow the solution while remaining dead-on.]] [[AntiFrustrationFeatures Thankfully]], [[spoiler:only one of the puzzles, garden-beacon or mechanical-beacon, is needed to activate it.]]

* In a game that was not too difficult for the time, especially if one was up on their Western fairy tales, ''VideoGame/KingsQuestIQuestForTheCrown'' had a notorious example that got programmer Roberta Williams flooded with letters. To get a special item a character obviously reminiscent of Rumpelstiltskin would give you three chances to guess his name. But the correct answer was to actually use an alphabetic cipher (Z=A, etc.) and come up with the name "Ifnkovhgroghprm." The only clue was a note in a completely unrelated part of the game that said "It's good to think backwards." Tellingly, you could still win the game, just not score full points, if you used up all three guesses, and the remake just required players to spell "Rumpelstiltskin" backwards (although it didn't help that the programmers misspelled the name...). This puzzle was completely omitted in the fan remake ''VideoGame/KingsQuest2015'', although there is an in-game reference to it.

* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil

* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil3Nemesis'' had the Water Treatment puzzle and boy, it was bad. Even with a guide you're going to have trouble with this, and it's randomized to make it harder for a guide to give solutions. You had to rotate 3 meters with lighted blocks and line them into place to form a specific pattern. Problem was that the lights were actually upside down, and you had to get it right when it was inverted. It was tantamount to a Rubik's Cube, which is a sadistic thing to subject a gamer to. Probably the worst puzzle in the RE series.[[labelnote:PROTIP]]There's no way to give an actual solution to the puzzle since it's random, but mentally picturing the blocks from each meter combining to match the pattern displayed on the bottom is the only way to reliably figure it out.[[/labelnote]]
* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' features a very annoying sliding puzzle when playing as Ashley. Thankfully, the solution's easy to remember for future playthroughs once you've figured it out[[labelnote:PROTIP]]Move one piece into the center, then just keep rotating the other pieces counterclockwise around it.[[/labelnote]], and unlike most puzzles [[FifteenPuzzle of its nature]], you can slide two blocks at a time.
* ''VideoGame/SilentHill1'' has the infamous piano puzzle at Midwich Elementary. The poem offering clues lists five different birds whose black/white plumage matches the colors of the dead piano keys you need to hit, but the specific arrangement of keys you'll need to press is a matter of trial and error for those that don't understand much about music to make the "high or low = pitch = key position" correlation.
* ''VideoGame/SilentHill3'':
** [[http://everything2.com/title/Silent+Hill+3 This hideous puzzle]], involving a keypad, and a poem about mutilating a face from which you are supposed to deduce the code. Even if you manage to figure out that the face corresponds to the keypad, you also need to figure out what parts of the face correspond to which buttons, and even then you end up with five numbers instead of the four needed. If you want to know exactly how much effort it asks of you to solve it, see [[http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/914765/54297 here (search for "IV-b-3")]] for the solution. It doesn't help that a note from [[StalkerWithACrush Stanley]] about the puzzle mentions "4 numbers would've been good enough, but he kept on going", even though the code ''is'' only four numbers. Even worse, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWo_aivgxrs&t=9m53s it turns out the puzzle was made much, much harder due to a miscommunication during development.]] The writers assumed the first row of the keypad would be "7-8-9", and the artists assumed the first row would be "1-2-3", and then when someone tried to fix the puzzle to match the new keypad layout, they switched two of the numbers.
** Even worse is the Crematorium puzzle on Hard, where you are required to know the habits of a bird most people have never heard of, and the hint also contains a false pointer. [[https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3577729&userid=162441#post428452588 Like the keypad puzzle, this was made harder due to a developer error.]] The dev notes say you're supposed to rank the birds in order from Heaven to Hell once you've figured out which stanza matches which bird. [[GuideDangIt This is never mentioned anywhere in game.]]
** Hard Mode has the Shakespeare puzzle, which requires intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's plays to decipher a numeric code. Failing that, you had other subtle clues in most of them to decipher if you don't. The first two stanzas aren't too hard to match up, but the other three are trickier (it doesn't help that [[https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3577729&userid=162441#post421411171 even the developer notes are vague about which stanzas match which play, or even if the "one stanza = one play" rule still applies]].) Even if you figure that out, you still have to figure out that the last stanza doesn't refer to a play at all, but means that you need to multiply two of the numbers corresponding to the plays and remove another one.
* ''VideoGame/SilentHillHomecoming'' has a slide puzzle in the attic that has caused much rage and controller-breakage for many. The reason this slide puzzle is so difficult is because you can't reset it by exiting and reentering the room. You have to die or reset the game. The other problem? The tiles are random every time. There is no one solution to the puzzle.

* ''VideoGame/FatalFrameI'' had two kinds of regular puzzles: slide puzzles and numerical puzzles. Normally numerical puzzles of remembering a date mentioned in a scroll somewhere in the mansion would not be a problem...if they weren't in Japanese on the [=PS2=] original...and if the developers had made a bigger clue of telling you that the translation for the Kanji numbers were in your files. The later Xbox port replaced the kanji with Arabic numerals, simplifying these puzzles considerably.

** During the bonus case in the original game, you're up against FinalBoss and BigBad [[spoiler: Damon Gant]]. You have the evidence you need to prove their guilt, and can present it at the right moment, which leads to the game progressing...only for said Big Bad to pull a RulesLawyer on Phoenix and point out that, since the crucial evidence hasn't been officially approved by the Chief of Police ([[spoiler: Gant himself]]), it's illegal to present it in this particular trial, which leads to a NonStandardGameOver. Instead, players have to [[spoiler: trick Gant into bringing up the evidence ''himself'', activating an ExactWords clause that classifies the clue as relevant to the case and thus able to be presented.]] This is the ''only'' time the game makes you follow this procedure--keep in mind that the world of Phoenix Wright practically runs on ArtisticLicenseLaw--and while it's hinted at by characters giving Phoenix a book on evidence law before the trial, it still comes out of nowhere and is incredibly counterintuitive.

* The VideoGame/SecretFiles games have been known to have very unorthodox solutions to inventory puzzles that reviewers even call ridiculous, leading players to guess all combinations of items and environment until they get the right one for reasons they don't even realize. But the most notorious example of this is when you have to [[spoiler: tape a cell phone to a cat and guide it into a man's kitchen to record his conversation.]]

** There's also the Temple of Light from Mourning's End: Part 2. It involves changing the path and color of a light beam using crystals in pillars, in a ''huge'' multilevel dungeon, filled with [[DemonicSpiders Shadows]] that frequently knock off 100+ health in one hit and will constantly mob you. In addition, there's also several Agility obstacles scattered around the dungeon, which you can (and will, frequently) fail, dropping you into pits filled with shadows and forcing you to run all around the dungeon. Words cannot describe the incredible frustration of this quest.

* ''VideoGame/ShadowOfTheBeast 3'' has the slab puzzle in Caves of Bidhur; every other puzzle can be solved consistently, but this essentially involves approximating a physics puzzle in a game without physics. You have to get a large slab across a long (but shallow) pit by placing (and moving them as you shift the slab along) three balls in said pit correctly so they evenly balance the slab; one mistake and it falls in the pit and you have to go back to the last checkpoint. In itself this would only be kind of irritating, but the last checkpoint is at least a few minutes back and requires you to enter a cave full of respawning GoddamnedBats that you need to kill a certain amount of to get the hammer you need to do the slab puzzle, so you end up getting drained each time you screw up. Finally, there's a boss fight straight after solving the puzzle; while not too difficult it's another way to get sent back if you mess up and die.
* ''VideoGame/StarTropics'' has an infamous puzzle that is not that difficult, but left players confused since it breaks the fourth wall. Attached to the game's instruction booklet is a letter from the main character's Uncle; you learn late in the game that your Uncle has a transceiver in his shoe. You must enter a three digit combination to track the transceiver. Your only clue is "dip my note in water." If you dip the letter attached to the manual in water, invisible ink appears to tell you the combination. It's a simple puzzle, since the game outright tells you what to do, but even people who owned the manual and had the letter were confused, since actually dipping the physical letter in water makes no freakin' sense and many assumed the letter in question was an in-game item. Nintendo got so many questions about it that they published the solution in ''Magazine/NintendoPower''. [[spoiler: The code is 747]]
* ''VideoGame/{{Superman 64}}'' is a very puzzle-oriented game. Many of the puzzles are simple, but there is a puzzle in the final level of the game that is maddeningly hard. Brainiac sends you to a room with several portals (Word of God is that it's a time machine) with a number in the center of the screen. Players must go through portals until the number in the center of the screen equals 2000, causing Brainiac's computers to go haywire. The puzzle itself is self explanatory, but immeasurably difficult because this portion of the level is heavily glitched so that the player dies ''at complete random''. Yes, this will happen ''even if you're using a Gameshark and have infinite health.'' The glitches make the final puzzle nearly un-solvable. One of the many reasons why this game is considered among the worst in the history of video games isn't just because of the convoluted gameplay and rushed release, but because this very puzzle screwed up an already bad enough game.

* One puzzle in ''VideoGame/BrainLord'' presents you with two floor switches and a plaque that tells you that the answer is "right in front of you". The solution? Press the Y button in front of the door.

* ''VisualNovel/YuNo'': In Mio's route, [[spoiler:while underneath Triangle Mountain, you get trapped in a room with two skeletons and a dead body (which is a whole other story), and the only way out appears to be through a crazy-difficult puzzle in the center of the room. You are able to use an in-game laptop that translates the symbols in the grid puzzle to numbers, which doesn't make it any easier at all. Thus, GuideDangIt fits here well.]]
* ''VideoGame/GabrielKnight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned'' has a ridiculously infuriating first puzzle, involving Gabriel trying to rent himself a moped by pretending to be Moseley, who can rent one. To do this, Gabriel must distract Moseley with a piece of candy and swipe his passport from his pocket, steal his hat and jacket, draw a mustache on the face of the passport photo with a marker to hide the face, and then construct a fake mustache by putting some masking tape on a small hole and chasing the cat past that hole, leaving some of its fur on the tape, and then using the fur to create a fake mustache by gluing it to Gabriel's face with a packet of syrup. According to the programmers in a Game Informer interview, ''nobody'' at Sierra liked that puzzle. However, Roberta Williams had left the project by then without telling anyone what she'd ''planned'' for that sequence, and this was the first replacement puzzle anyone could think of. Under time and budget pressure, they had to go with it. As [[http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html Old Man Murray]] put it:
-->"Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a mustache, is '''not to construct a fake mustache'''."
* Another literal puzzle in ''[[VideoGame/TexMurphy Under a Killing Moon]]'', where a note has been torn into tiny pieces. The pieces have to be reassembled, and Tex will not be able to read it until each one is in exactly the right place- a single pixel off, and it's illegible as far as he's concerned. To top it off, the pieces don't snap into place or give any other hint that they've been correctly aligned. The end result is that it's easy to have a puzzle that looks completed but isn't recognized as so by the game, forcing the player to randomly move pieces around one pixel at a time to trigger the next cutscene.
* Then there's the 'cubes in the vault' puzzle in Infocom's ''[[VideoGame/{{Enchanter}} Spellbreaker]]''. (It's a variant of the TwelveCoinsPuzzle.) There are a dozen or so magical cubes, but only ''one'' is the true cube you need. In order to determine the actual cube, you'll need to resort them a number of times, and cast the 'detect magic' spell. Problem is, you can only do this three times before being caught by security -- and if you haven't truly narrowed it down to one cube, it will use SchrodingersGun to move it away from the one you pick to another one that fits all clues so far -- '''and''' you're not allowed to save the game while in the vault (to prevent solving the puzzle with trial and error, and hide the fact that it's cheating). One of the toughest puzzles ever in InteractiveFiction, if you're not familiar with the StockPuzzle beforehand.
* ''VideoGame/FullThrottle'' features a puzzle late in the game where the player has to find a secret passageway to Malcom Corley's office in an alley behind Corley Motors' headquarters. As a hint, Maureen mentions that she used the passageway to get into the office by lining her eyes up with a crack on the wall, then kicking the wall at that spot when a nearby set of switches were all green. Also, she was six years old at the time. This had many players stumped, because the spot itself was already difficult to find, but the timing had to be precise as well, so it wasn't easy to tell whether they had the wrong spot or their timing was off. The spot made a different sound when thumped- not that it helps if you think you've got the right spot with the wrong timing.
* ''VideoGame/SpaceQuestIIIThePiratesOfPestulon'' has a puzzle near the beginning where the player has to repair a spaceship to escape from the garbage scow on which Roger awakens after drifting through space. One of the items required is a fusion reactor, found deep in the scow's depths; a reactor that the game steadfastly refuses to even acknowledge unless you specifically ask about it, and which is hidden behind a chunk of scenery. In other words, the only way you're going to find it without [[GuideDangIt buying the hint book]] is if you possess the gift of second sight, or you happen to be one of the designers.

* In ''VideoGame/SpaceQuestVIRogerWilcoInTheSpinalFrontier'', the player has to reprogram a tricorder-like device by rearranging various chips and switches inside it. The solution is to decipher a series of clues in the game manual--"the red chip does not go next to the blue chip," that sort of thing--which, while not impossible, brings the game to a dead stop for anyone unskilled in such puzzles. (Amusingly, the puzzle hints were originally supposed to be in the game itself, not the documentation; because something got screwed up along the way, the puzzle was treated as copy protection on the Sierra message boards, meaning that posting an entire solution was a ban-worthy offense.)
* An infamous example occurs in ''VideoGame/MonkeyIsland2LeChucksRevenge''. The player must open a pipe with no hint as to how to do so. The solution? [[spoiler:Stick a banana on the spike of a ticking metronome, causing a piano playing monkey to become frozen and usable as a "monkey wrench".]] Even worse is that this solution often got LostInTranslation and overseas; [[spoiler:"monkey wrench"]] is a term often only used in America, which confused the living heck out of those living in other English countries. Translators had no fun working a way to make this puzzle sensible in other languages. Creator/RonGilbert made very dang sure after this fiasco not to use puns for a puzzle solution in future games. The Spanish version of the game went around this by adding a book to the Phatt library titled [[spoiler:"101 uses for monkeys"]], which explains [[spoiler:how monkeys can be used as ''llaves inglesas'' (Spanish for "monkey wrenches")]]. True, there's a chance that people might not take the book and miss the clue, but in general, the humor of the game made it more likely that people would read all the books in the library at least once, so there was a big chance to get it. The book [[TakeOurWordForIt doesn't explain WHY]] [[spoiler:a monkey can be used as a wrench]], though, which of course will confuse players.
* In a game that was not too difficult for the time, especially if one was up on their Western fairy tales, ''VideoGame/KingsQuestIQuestForTheCrown'' had a notorious example that got programmer Roberta Williams flooded with letters. To get a special item a character obviously reminiscent of Rumpelstiltskin would give you three chances to guess his name. But the correct answer was to actually use an alphabetic cipher (Z=A, etc.) and come up with the name "Ifnkovhgroghprm." The only clue was a note in a completely unrelated part of the game that said "It's good to think backwards." Tellingly, you could still win the game, just not score full points, if you used up all three guesses, and the remake just required players to spell "Rumpelstiltskin" backwards (although it didn't help that the programmers misspelled the name...). This puzzle was completely omitted in the fan remake ''VideoGame/KingsQuest2015'', although there is an in-game reference to it.
* The first game in the ''VideoGame/BlackMirrorVideoGames'' trilogy has a few difficult sliding puzzles that cannot be skipped (unlike in the later games), but the one you find in the crypt in Wales during the third chapter is a doozy. On top of being a tricky 4 x 4 tile sliding puzzle with which you only have one empty tile to work with, just knowing what you need to do requires you to have a deeper knowledge of Western astrology than many people would likely have, specifically knowing the exact order the twelve astrological signs come in a year.
* There's a puzzle in ''VideoGame/DarkFall: The Journal'' which, while not difficult to figure out, can be ''incredibly frustrating'' to actually complete: placing four alchemical symbols on a table in '''exactly''' the right places. All four of which need to be lined up ''perfectly'' with some chalk lines and the wood-grain of the tabletop. With your only guidance being two halves of a black-and-white photo, which depicts their proper positions from ''a tilted angle'', so it's extra-hard to see exactly where the symbols' edges are supposed to lie. Did I mention that one of the scraps of photo isn't even on the same ''floor of the building'' as the puzzle, and neither clue can be removed from its location?
* ''VideoGame/DayOfTheTentacle''. Use Squeaky Mattress with the other bed. You would think it's simple, but the game will frequently mistake you for trying to make noise with the mattress or Hoagie will say, "Where'm I gonna put it?" when you just try to use the mattress.
* ''VideoGame/TheLongestJourney'''s infamous rubber ducky puzzle. It isn't considered a bad puzzle by some, but it's very poorly placed. Within the first chapter (Wherein April has almost no reason to try and pick up everything that's not nailed down or go out of her way to obtain things that have no apparent use), April must obtain a key from a track that is not only out of her reach, but is electrified. How does April get this? Jerry-rig a grappling hook using an inflatable rubber ducky, a rope, and a clamp tool. It makes sense and is clever, but the problem comes more from the fact that April must gather a rubber ducky (that she has to chase for several screens) and ''examine'' the rubber ducky so that it will deflate in time to operate the clamp. This is also one of the only [[UnderusedGameMechanic two times in the game]] you have to examine an item and interact with it up close.
* The Goat Puzzle from ''VideoGame/BrokenSwordTheShadowOfTheTemplars'' is so notorious in its difficulty that it has its own [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle Wikipedia page]]. George must allow the goat to butt him, then click on the machinery as the goat returns to its position to move it, then let the goat charge again and get tangled in the machinery. This puzzle runs counter to every other puzzle in the game and has UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay to boot, and its legacy lives on in the minds of gamers.
* ''VideoGame/LifeIsStrange'''s second episode features a section where the player is required to find five glass bottles in a junkyard. The only hint given for one of the bottles is that it's near a bonfire, so the logical conclusion is that it's near the old bonfire on the edge of the junkyard. Except there's also a ''second'' bonfire, which is completely hidden between two cars and the only way to find it is through the light smoke it puts out. The game creators realized how difficult this was and as such during the final episode, [[spoiler: during the nightmare sequence]], Max will get annoyed at the prospect of having to find bottles again.
* ''VideoGame/SecretsOfDaVinciTheForbiddenManuscript'' has the Mona Lisa puzzle. The player character is Valdo, who has a lot of talent as an art forger; near the end of the game, he has to make an exact duplicate of the ''Mona Lisa'' as part of his efforts to thwart a treasonous plot. First, the picture must be drawn using an Albarti's grid, which by itself is a bit annoying but not too hard. But then the different squares of the picture must be painstakingly rearranged so that they're in the correct positions, and clicking on each square also rotates the squares adjacent to it. This puzzle is so baffling that most online walkthroughs don't even bother trying to explain how it's actually solved. There's a [[GoodBadBugs seriously helpful glitch]] which basically gets the game to solve it ''for'' you, and the majority of walkthroughs just include the instructions for triggering the glitch instead.

* Multiple minigames in ''VideoGame/TheCluefinders'':
** The Rings of Fire in [[VideoGame/TheClueFinders3rdGradeAdventuresTheMysteryOfMathra 3rd grade]]. You are given a grid, but instead of coordinates, it’s all a bunch of seemingly random numbers. You are given two numbers, and you must add, subtract, multiply, or divide them to find out if the answer is on the board. The problem is, the numbers are not truly random and you can find multiple "correct" answers, making it into trial and error. This is especially true on Challenge difficulty where you can find all four potential answers.
*** There is, however, a pretty big loophole: If you get a successful hit or had any tiles revealed at the start, you can actually just start aiming at adjacent tiles even if none of them are the sum, difference, product, or quotient of the two numbers you are given. [[DevelopersForesight The game will acknowledge this as “Correct”]] anyway.
** The last challenge of [[VideoGame/TheClueFindersReadingAdventuresAges912MysteryOfTheMissingAmulet Reading]], the Gates of Mount Valdrok, is TrialAndErrorGameplay. You must guess the password, and are told if you have any correct letters in the right place, or correct letters in the wrong place. You are not SHOWN - only told - meaning you must guess, much like Mastermind. It’s much harder than it looks, and it’s very hard to complete all four without having run out of guesses and needing to start over at least once. On higher levels? It will give you ''five'' letters.
** One puzzle in Search and Solve is a simple coordinate puzzle. The player must figure out which colour and shape match which lines on the X and Y Axis. Unfortunately, it’s possible for the player to lose simply because of poor luck. Every initial ‘guess’ may be clustered to one side, while all the required spaces to hit are on another. Higher levels also give you fewer guesses.

* Several in ''VideoGame/{{Descent}} II'', notably the secret to getting the Helix Cannon in level 2, and the Omega Cannon in level 13. The former requires you to use the Phoenix Cannon to bounce shots off a wall to hit a switch you can't see, then find two secret doors, drop a smart mine near the first one, and rush back to the other one and hope the blast from the smart mine unlocks it in time for you to get inside. The latter is even more complicated, requiring using markers to hold open doors and multiple guided missile tricks to access.

* ''VideoGame/KingdomOfLoathing'''s co-developer Riff ''loves'' these puzzles. Almost every puzzle on this list is one of his creations.
** The Nemesis sidequest gives you a puzzle involving rising and falling stepping-stones in a volcano, which can easily be locked into an unsolvable position, and the PuzzleReset deals a ton of hot damage. The game itself {{lampshade}}s this before you start the puzzle. It's easily scripted (and most long-time players will do just that), but if you're trying to solve it yourself, you're going to burn through a lot of HP.
** Figuring out Ak'gyxoth's TrueName. 43 islands, when visited for the first time ever, would yield a "strange tiki idol". Someone at some point probably figured out that you were supposed to play connect-the-dots with them, but the absurd number of combinations meant that they were getting nowhere, until Riff released a "[[http://forums.kingdomofloathing.com/vb/showthread.php?t=156645 hint]]" which was ''itself'' That One Puzzle -- but, when solved, listed the number of islands in each group, from left to right.
** The mysterious cartouches of Ed the Undying. When adventuring with the Crown of Ed the Undying equipped (a bind-on-equip [[BribingYourWayToVictory donation item]]), a cartouche would occasionally appear. Assembling these cartouches in the correct way would allow them to be decrypted into a message, which contained ''another'' hidden message inside of it. This puzzle took the playerbase seven months to solve.
** The [[http://forums.kingdomofloathing.com/vb/showthread.php?t=226910 invisible string puzzle]] took five months to solve, primarily because [[FakeDifficulty every step in the solution had a very short time limit]].[[note]]fight a certain enemy until a special item is (without notification) added to your inventory. While under the effects of that item (which only lasts 5 turns), fight a different enemy until another item is added to your inventory (again without notification). Repeat the process with a ''third'' enemy to get your reward. [[/note]]
** Riff's penchant for extremely difficult puzzles was parodied with the [[http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Intriguing_puzzle_box intriguing puzzle box]], dropped by [[ItMakesSenseInContext his butt]] on AprilFoolsDay. As far as anyone knows, it has no solution whatsoever.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has the infamous Kugane Tower jumping puzzle in ''Stormblood''. It has a ton of extremely tight, tricky, and precise jumps where you ''have'' to be near damn perfect in executing it or risk falling off the tower completely. Due to realistic JumpPhysics (i.e. no mid-jump adjustments) and the collision boxes on the platforms and walls being very wonky, you can find yourself either overshooting your jumps and falling down, falling short, or hitting a wall as you leap forward. The reward for making it to the very top? A [[SceneryPorn cool bit of scenery in which to take/pose pictures]], and [[OneHundredPercentCompletion a vista for your sightseeing log]]. And you know that one sight seeing marker that's on top of a lamp post right next to Kugane Tower? Take everything from the above point, and add on a precise jump all the way back down. If you miss, you have to climb the entire tower all over again.

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2006'' The Billiard Ball puzzle in Silver's version of Dusty Desert. Basically, it's a section where you guide your telekinetic hedgehog around a corridor, all the while pushing a giant billiard ball as you go around. The hall has several obstacles and pitfalls littered around it, and it's only possible to hit the ball around nine times per run. Also, there's a time limit. This is already challenging enough, but combining it with the game's physics makes it very frustrating - and the worst part is that there was no "trick" to solving it, apart from [[GoodBadBugs glitching the game and walking through a wall to skip it]]. In order to understand how bad this is, the [[NintendoHard Very Hard]] DLC mission for that stage replaces the section with a difficult gauntlet of enemies and traps that makes the rest of the mission seem banal in comparison, but even this is easier that the billiard ball puzzle.

* ''VideoGame/TheLionKing'' on UsefulNotes/SuperNintendo and UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis has the infamous monkey puzzle in "Can't Wait To Be King", the '''second''' level: To advance, the player has to roar at a selection of monkeys to get them to change their position, after which the player has to jump into them to let the monkeys toss them around - and if they're lucky, all the monkeys will have been organized in such a way that they can move on to the next section. It's especially aggravating in the second section, where the player will have to organize one set of monkeys perfectly to even get to roar at a specific monkey, who needs to be turned to finish the level. The fact that these puzzles sandwich an infuriatingly difficult ostrich-riding section doesn't help, and rumor has it that the game's chief designer had never once passed the second level.

* ''VideoGame/WarioLand3'': The blue chest in E3 Castle of Illusions and green chest in S4 The Steep Canyon, which require you to fly through large spike mazes with the owl.
* ''VideoGame/{{Fez}}'' has many inside its arsenal of [[MoonLogicPuzzle brain-melting puzzles]], but one in particular is known throughout all of the people who played this game: the infamous Black Monolith Puzzle. It required the player to decode an [[ConLang entire language]] where some characters have multiple different meanings, and an entirely new [[MindScrew numeral system]] where multiple symbols could have the same meaning. After that, you had to translate a tome which only looks like gibberish unless you read it in ''3 dimensions'', where you read from the first character in each page systematically, which gives you ''8 entirely new'' riddles to solve! But that's not all, you have to use the page numbering in the tome to rearrange the numbering of the game's release date, and you translate THAT into Fez's language ''again'', stack it into a 3 dimensional object and cast a shadow onto it at a certain angle to get the code. Fun fact: [[RageQuit nobody did that.]] They brute-forced their way through by systematically going through ''82,000 combinations of button inputs'' in order to get the correct code to complete the puzzle.

* ''VideoGame/TheSeventhGuest'':
** Aside from the bizarre and arbitrary GuideDangIt {{Trope Namer|s}} for SolveTheSoupCans, it has The Microscope Puzzle, which is a game of Infection against the AI. Unfortunately, rather than designing the AI to determine the best move with a limited amount of lookahead, the programmer wrote the AI to look ahead as far as it could - without limit - until a predetermined amount of time passed. It was probably possible to beat back in the days of Windows 3.1, but now it's borderline impossible without locking the available processor speed using an emulator such as DOSBOX.
** The Soup Cans puzzle is also infamous because it demands the player to spell out a coherent sentence using a handful of letters... and the only available vowel is Y. The solution provides foreshadowing for later events in the game ([[spoiler:"Shy gypsy, slyly, spryly tryst by my crypt"]]), but there's no way the player would know about it at that point. Fortunately, this puzzle is a lot easier if you check the in-game hint book ([[spoiler:"Bashful nomad, craftily, agilely, meet secretly near my underground vault"]]) and have a thesaurus on hand.
** There's also the attic puzzle, which also happens to be the very last puzzle in the game, and to an untrained eye will seem completely illogical and solvable only through trial and error: It's a model of a tower, with its walls laden with windows, and clicking on some makes lights appear in the windows, until the game seemingly takes over for you. There's a method to the madness, however: [[spoiler:The puzzle is essentially a programming puzzle, where the game remembers what kind of move was made for each shape of window, and will repeat that move for each window encountered. The challenge is to choose your moves so that you can advance to the top of the tower without bumping into the walls or going over previously-lit windows, but it gets even worse when you can make the puzzle {{unwinnable}} even if you get all the way up to the last part.]]
** The Bishop puzzle is another notorious one. The objective is to switch the places of four white bishops and four black bishops on a 4x5 chessboard using standard diagonal moves without ever putting a bishop under attack by the opposing color. The small playing field makes movement very restricted, and because you can't ever put a bishop in harm's way, it's very easy to get turned around.
** ''The 11th Hour'':
*** There's the infamous Beehive puzzle, also known as the Honeycomb puzzle or "Blood and Honey" officially, which is essentially another version of the aforementioned Microscope puzzle from the last game, but played on a six-sided grid made of hexagons. The shape of the grid makes it just a bit easier to trap the AI and capture new cells, and the AI itself isn't quite as ruthless as before, but the game is still hard enough to be generally recognized as the point where most players quit the game.
*** The final puzzle of the game is difficult, as befits being the equivalent of the FinalBoss. However, the problem is that it's another AI game -- in this case, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pente Pente]] -- which must be completed three times in order to unlock all the MultipleEndings in a single save file; and each time you replay the game, the AI is given a bigger advantage over you[[note]]The first time, you have the first move; next, the AI has the first move; and finally, that advantage is retained ''and'' it looks at least five moves ahead[[/note]].
*** All of the AI games in ''The 11th Hour'' were designed on the basis that the AI should be as strong as possible, not that it should be fun to play against - which is not usual for [=AIs=] in computer games, except for serious games such as Chess. Unsurprisingly, players in general found them to be frustrating and not fun.
* ''VideoGame/ChipsChallenge'': Many levels in the game feature difficult puzzles, but by far the most cruel is that of Level 131, ''Totally Unfair''. To solve it, it is necessary to first play and memorize Level 122, ''Totally Fair'', which has the same layout and concept but all of it can be seen and studied by the player. In 131, the large room where you have to carefully guide the monster to make it press a trap-disabling button without falling into water is sealed off, meaning that you have the replicate the puzzle of 122 ''blindly''; one single misstep and you'll have to restart. Also, whereas 122 gives you a time limit of 300 seconds, 131 only gives you ''60''.

* ''VideoGame/LighthouseTheDarkBeing'' is filled with these puzzles, but two stands out:
** In the temple you come across some kind of plant like shaped thing with two bell-arrangements on the outside and three levers on the inside. You get NO hints to operate the thing, there is no explanation anywhere, you don't even know what you are supposed to achieve and if you are making any progress at all. You can waste hours on that thing, just ringing the bells and pulling the levers.
** The puzzle box in the House of the Inventor. It combines 4 or 5 puzzles in one box. A 6×6 sliding puzzle is under it, some arbitrary clicking is involved and then some. You get a code from the box from one of the puzzles that you have to enter in a different side of the box. It is styled with squares, triangles, circles and rectangles. Now now, easy enough, right? There are four rotating disks, stacked on top of each other, each containing all 4 symbols. The obvious solution would be to try the 4 piece code you got forward and backward. Nope, does not work. [[spoiler:You have to turn all the disks to the first symbol, then all the disks to the second symbol and then enter the full code from top to bottom.]]

* Axis Mundi in ''VideoGame/{{Catherine}}''. As if the stage itself wasn't ridiculously difficult, add in the [[LuckBasedMission Mystery Blocks]]. They have no problem spawning black holes, which spell instant death.
* ''VideoGame/GhostTrick'' has two. The first, [[spoiler:breaking Detective Jowd out of prison]], is a combination StealthBasedMission and EscortMission done in mostly-complete darkness (you can see by switching to Ghost mode, but then you can't slide the screen), with the worst part being that you have to get your escort-ee to [[spoiler:climb inside the ceiling]]. The second, [[spoiler:saving the justice minister]], isn't nearly as bad... except that it's the one time in the game that it's possible to have a checkpoint put in place after the situation has become {{unwinnable}}, and gives you no indication you screwed up except that you can't get anything done from your position and have to start over from the previous part.
* On one of the last levels in the Web game ''4 Elements'', the arrows start firing as soon as the level begins. Even if you do get the energy to flow past the arrows, you need to connect enough red gems to charge the bomb powerup twice, or you'll never make a path through the boulders.
* ''VideoGame/TheSecretIslandOfDrQuandary'' has the Tax Factor minigame. The target audience for the game was grade school kids in the nineties. Tax Factor is basically an exercise in high-school algebra (especially on D. Feecult mode), and can stop adult players in their tracks if they're bad at math.

* ''VideoGame/TheFoolsErrand''
** The word formula puzzles in which you need to click a series of buttons in the right order to produce a coherent sentence. This might not sound hard - and one of these puzzles ''is'' pretty straightforward with the buttons simply adding letters to the beginning and end of the current phrase - but many of these puzzles give you buttons that don't just add letters, but change a certain letter to another one or reverse the entire current phrase, which can fast lead to headaches trying to figure out just what kind of sentence you're supposed to create. The one from "The Dream" scroll, in particular, is so fiendishly difficult that it took ''weeks'' when the game first came out ([[GuideDangIt back when GameFAQs didn't exist, mind you]]) for someone to solve it - and the computer program they used to find the solution back then took ''sixty hours'' to do so!
** The High Priestess. You have 99 numbered buttons scattered across the screen, and need to click them in descending order. Sounds easy? [[SensoryAbuse The buttons are flashing, and so is the background, and clicking the mouse causes the entire screen flash]]. And once you click enough buttons, [[TurnsRed they start jumping around the screen]], meaning the only thing you can do is look at a specific area of the screen and hope you're fast enough if the button appears there.
%%* Then there's ''VideoGame/TheFoolAndHisMoney'', in which it would be easier to list the puzzles that ''aren't'' That One Puzzle. Guides to the game advise that writing your own program to solve each single puzzle may be the most practical approach.
* The ''VideoGame/NancyDrew'' series has plenty of these--and given that they're up to thirty-one games, they've had plenty of practice in making them diabolical.
** ''Treasure in the Royal Tower'' has a gold leaf jigsaw puzzle. The problem? The leaves all look ''exactly the same.'' And you can rotate the pieces, too. Not fun.
** ''Curse of Blackmoor Manor'' has the moving rooms puzzle. And there is no hint before you go in that the rooms move. Take two clicks into that room without a walkthrough and you ''will'' end up screaming at the computer. Thankfully, once you've solved it once, there's an in-game hint that provides a much easier route.
** ''The Secret of the Old Clock'' has a sewing machine puzzle. Basically, you have to slowly run your mouse along a seam on a dress--but the problem is that you get even ''slightly'' off, you have to start all over.
** To complete ''The White Wolf of Icicle Creek'', you have to win a Chinese Checkers-like game against the computer... three times. And you can't just beat it--you have to get your pieces into each of the four sides of the table once. This requires you to constantly change your strategy.
** ''Ransom of the Seven Ships'' has a puzzle that requires you to flip a series of different-sized hourglasses so they all run out of sand at the same time. As always, extreme precision is necessary--if you click on one of them even a second too late, you're starting over.
** ''Shadow at the Water's Edge'' has no less than three. The first requires you to arrange some wires in such a way that none of them are crossing. There are eighteen nodes with everything from three to eight wires on them. Good luck. The second is a recurring puzzle which has you arranging "bento boxes" for hungry customers (how bad is this one? There's a post on the game's message board ''solely dedicated to these''). And finally, there's a puzzle which makes you cut a series of ropes to create a solid line of breaks. But there are about forty ropes to choose from, and there's a timer counting down: you have just enough time to make your cuts if you begin cutting the moment the timer does, so you'll probably end up restarting ten times just to get a grasp of the puzzle's layout.
* ''VideoGame/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy1984'' has the notorious Babel Fish puzzle, which only allows you a limited number of tries before you figure out the non-intuitive solution involving an item that [[UnwinnableByDesign may already be lost]].

* ''VideoGame/CubeEscape'''s puzzles are [[MoonLogicPuzzle not particularly easy]] at even the best of times, but the fourth chapter of the ''Case 23'' installment takes the cake. It's the only point in the series where you have to complete a puzzle (in this case, fixing an elevator) [[TimedMission within a time limit]] and the time limit is ''extremely'' unforgiving, slapping you with a NonStandardGameOver if you don't find all the hidden elevator parts quickly enough.
* ''Small Radios Big Televisions'' has the "Waterfall Puzzle" in the third level, requiring the player to turn four large wheels such that the symbols on their edges align in a particular way. Next to the wheels is a diagram which seems to lay out the rules for the correct alignment. [[RedHerring This diagram has absolutely no relation to this nor any other puzzle,]] and is so useless and misleading that one might wonder whether it's a hapless leftover from a beta version where the rules were different. The correct rules are actually given in the other puzzles on the same level -- the same rules apply to ''all'' the "wheel" puzzles, and there are only two: [[spoiler: #1: The solid yellow block must align with ''either'' a solid yellow or hashed yellow block. #2: The two yellow lines must align with an empty space, including the borders where there are no adjacent wheels.]] Many a player has completed this puzzle with pure trial and error, never really understanding why the solution is what it is.
* ''VideoGame/TheTuringTest'': The very last room before the epilogue is ''insanely'' involved, not least of all because [[spoiler:unlike just about every single previous puzzle, you're not actually supposed to use all the components in the room - some of them are [[RedHerring just there to distract you from the real solution]].]]
* ''VideoGame/DarkTales: The Devil in the Belfry'' has one of these, very late in the game, when the player finds a diary belonging to the BigBad. [[spoiler:The player must then click on items which correspond to the highlighted words in the diary's narration. The diary has multiple pages, so the player can flip back and forth to find the items needed - but they're not all ''in'' the diary. Some are in the trunk where the diary is located, meaning that the player must close the diary to find the items. Absolutely nothing in the game hints that this is required, because normally, closing the diary would mean backing out of the puzzle.]] The frustration factor is multiplied because unlike most others in the game, the puzzle cannot be skipped; not only that, but using the hint button merely has the player observe that "I should move on" or a similarly worded sentiment; and the in-game strategy guide (included in the collector's edition) ''omits the puzzle entirely''. Best of all, because the reward for solving it is a necessary PlotCoupon, the game cannot proceed until this puzzle is completed.
* ''VideoGame/TheCabinetsOfDoctorArcana'' has the infamous scarab puzzle, in which the player must use a scarab to push golden balls around on the playing field. It's so difficult that one wrong move may require the entire thing to be reset, and actually solving it can take literal hours. Some players who otherwise won't touch the Skip button will break down and use it for this puzzle just because it's so frustrating.
* In the iOS game ''Mystery Match'', this applies to any level with countdown gems, which can be matched with ordinary gems of their color. If even one of them counts down to zero, it's a NonstandardGameOver, regardless of how many moves remain.
* The final segment in ''Mickey's Ultimate Challenge'' is a slider puzzle that, when complete, displays a picture of an alarm clock that wakes a sleeping giant. Cake and Medium are somewhat manageable on grids of 3x3 and 4x4, respectively. On Challenging, the grid is ''6x6'' which easily makes it the hardest part of the game and a headache for anyone in the target demographic.

* In the mobile game ''Toy Blast'', level 336 requires you to rescue an elephant and a rhino. The animal toys start at the top of the left side of the playfield, a 2×9 column with warps at the bottom. The warps lead to the center of a 6×9 area on the right side. Unfortunately, those warp exits are blocked by two columns of white bricks, each of which starts with two smaller black bricks attached; to clear just one brick on this level requires that three matches be made next to it. And both animal toys have to be rescued within only 36 moves.

* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic'': The Pillar Puzzle that can be found in the Tomb of Naga Sadow on the planet of Korriban that takes the form of TowersOfHanoi can be absolutely '''mind-numbing''' to those that don't know how said puzzle is usually handled in the aforementioned fashion. And to top it off, not only does the puzzle seal you in the room until it's solved, it warns the player that, if too many mistakes are made, it'll kill them with the misplaced electrical energy that encircle the pillars in the room, fail in transferring the power to each pillar twice will earn you a NonStandardGameOver. Hope you like this type of puzzle, because if you don't have any saves before entering the room the puzzle is in, you're literally left with no choice but to solve it in order to exit the room in which the puzzle lies in.
* ''VideoGame/TalesOfSymphonia'' features a puzzle in the Ymir Forest that is infamous for causing even the most casual player of [=RPGs=] to notice the FridgeLogic and GameplayAndStorySegregation required to make the puzzle work, on top of being both long and frustrating. Put simply, you have to get a piece of fruit out of a high tree, which is solved by knocking it into the water. From there, it's a very long, very drawn out puzzle of using musical cues to have animals act in such a way that the fruit moves closer to you. All the while, you have to get into RandomEncounters, trek through the dungeon, and avoid using the wrong command that could potentially force you to start completely over. The FridgeLogic comes in from at least half your party having magic and skills that should allow them to get the fruit with ease, including one character that can call upon the Summon Spirit of Water, and another character that can ''fly''. The option to have them help never comes up.
* In ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheAbyss'', there are four puzzles in the [[ThatOneLevel Meggiora Highlands]], the first of these being a BlockPuzzle that makes the infamous [[VideoGame/BatenKaitos Tower of Zosma]] feel like a pushover in comparison. You have to push four blocks onto four particular 1×1 spaces on a 12×12 grid. They all start unlit, and to push them, you must light them, rather like torches. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Forgot to mention that when you push one, the other blocks that are lit go in the same direction as the one you're pushing. And that the blocks that are unlit also go in the opposite direction. And that there are barricades around two of the spaces you're supposed to be pushing them onto, facing in different directions. AND the spaces you're pushing these blocks onto are very much spread out. To add insult to injury, the three other puzzles are insultingly easy. To add more insult to injury, your reward for doing this is to remove one spell from the boss' repertoire, causing it to just cast the ones it'll still have; this is the case with the other puzzles as well, but at least their difficulty justifies that. To add [[OverlyLongGag MORE]] insult to injury, when you do three of the puzzles, the other one's reward becomes... nothing. The good news is that that last bit makes this one skippable, but [[GuideDangIt good luck finding that out on your own]].

* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'' has plenty of puzzles, but the GameMod called ''Breezehome Fully Upgradable'' introduces That One Puzzle to many who install it. There is a shelf at the head of the bed that can be filled with shrines to the Nine Divines. Finding some of those shrines (Arkay and Zenithar come to mind), however, can be rip-your-hair-out madness inducing. Thankfully, this is totally optional. [[note]]The shrines of Kynareth, Talos, Mara, and Dibella are in their respective temples. Julianos, being the god of wisdom and logic, can be found at the Atronach Forge in the College of Winterhold. Stendarr doesn't have a priesthood to call his own, but he has the Vigilants: check at the Hall of the Vigilant. At the entrance to High Hrothgar is the shrine of the dragon god Akatosh. As for the aforementioned Arkay and Zenithar? Find them in the wreckage of dead traders' carts on the road between Rorikstead and Dragon Bridge, and just east of of the giant camp south of Windhelm, respectively.[[/note]]

* In ''VideoGame/IcewindDale'' your party comes across a dilapidated bridge. When you approach you are presented with text stating that it doesn't look safe enough to cross. Unfortunately the game never actually hints that getting to the other side would be desirable, and given the large maps and the game's nature of forcing you to hunt through the FogOfWar for hidden doors and barely visible corridors it is extremely easy to turn your attentions elsewhere. Even if you did know that you were supposed to cross the bridge the solution to this 'puzzle' is far from straightforward. The intended solution is to find a book on bridge engineering from a different part of the map, possession of which apparently gives your party the architectural confidence to proceed. Unfortunately the game is full of useless and worthless books, and by this late stage is it highly likely that the player will dismiss any books they find out of hand without even bothering to read the title.
* ''Franchise/DragonAge'':
** In a DLC for ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'', ''Mark of the Assassin'', there is a very sophisticated puzzle. 25 tiles form a 5x5 square portrait of a man, or rather you need to flip them all to make them form the portrait. In the beginning, all tiles are face down. When you flip one, all tiles adjacent to it flip as well. Sounds easy? Well, good luck solving this puzzle without looking up how to do it.
*** There are two more of the same type of puzzle in the ''Jaws of Hakkon'' DLC for ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition''. Instead of flipping all of the tiles, however, you need to flip them to create a certain pattern, as hinted by [[spoiler:nearby mats in front of locked doors. Creating the patterns will unlock the doors in question]]. Thankfully, unlike the DAII example, these are optional.
** In the base game for ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' are the floor puzzles at the Temple of Mythal, during the big push in the Arbor Wilds near the end of the main campaign. The player must walk over a series of floor tiles, changing them from blue to gold, without stepping on the same tile more than once. The first such puzzle (which acts as a tutorial for them) is simple, and one of the other three is relatively straightforward. The other two? One has a pair of gates which have to be opened using switches in order to access all of the tiles, and both gates cannot be open at the same time. The other takes the player across three separate sections of the floor, including stairs. It's unusual to meet someone who completed the floor puzzles without consulting a walkthrough or video guide. They ''are'' optional, in the sense that the game can be finished without completing any of them (except the tutorial one, which is needed to unlock a door); however, not doing them makes going through the temple that much harder.[[note]]By completing the floor puzzles, you are regarded as having shown respect to the goddess Mythal, and therefore her priests will aid you in hunting your enemies. If you skip the puzzles, the priests do not trust you or your companions, and you will have to kill them all.[[/note]]
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTacticsA2'' has one mission where you have to interview several people in town about their New Year's Resolutions and then tell the question petitioner what the most popular resolution was. Sound easy enough? It would be except that some people either give no proper answer at all or give resolutions that could cover multiple answers, making it difficult to determine what the most popular resolution is. To make the situation worse, the entire quest takes place on a battlefield screen, which means you're forced to have your party go door to door and person to person to conduct the interviews, which can take awhile to cover the entire town unless you cast Haste on everyone and/or use units that have a high Move stat. If you fail the quest, then you get to have fun repeating the quest again and running all over the map listening to everyone yet again.
* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII,'' in order to get the huge materia out of the rocket, you need to insert a four-button code. The problem? You're on a strict time limit, the code is randomized for each playthrough, and Cid knows some of the code but his hints are unbelievably vague, in some cases listing 2 different buttons and saying what the button is ''not''. Unlike other games this doesn't tell you which buttons you got right and which you got wrong. This can lead to you losing out on the Bahamut ZERO materia which requires each piece of huge materia to claim.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII2'' has The Hands of Time, one of the three [[OnlySmartPeopleMayPass Temporal Rift puzzles]]. You are presented with a clock face that looks like [[http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111209014938/finalfantasy/images/3/3f/TemporalRift-StartTheClock.jpg this]]. When you start the clock on a crystal number, the hands move to the number you pick, and then spread apart, i.e. if you pick a 1, then the hands move to the 1 space and they each move over one space, and then the 1 disappears. If both hands land on empty spaces, then you have to reset the clock. The objective is to clear all the crystal numbers, of which there can be up to thirteen. For extra fun, most of the clock puzzles have a short time limit.
* ''Videogame/{{Undertale}}'':
** [[MinionWithAnFInEvil Papyrus]] gives you a series of unrelated puzzles after you leave the first area. The only one of these that is likely to give players trouble is one where Papyrus decided to redesign it to look more like his face but in doing so messed up the solution. There's also the puzzle that requires you to slide across ice to reach switches, and if you're not fast enough you can fall down and then you'll have to go back up and start again.
** PlayedForLaughs by Mettaton's tile puzzle. [[LoadsAndLoadsOfRules Each tile has a different function]], Mettaton skips the explanation because Papyrus presented you with the rules earlier (about ''a hundred screens'' earlier, as part of a scene where [[ChekhovsGag the whole setup of the puzzle was treated as a joke]], and if you asked him to repeat himself, he totally screwed up the second explanation), and the [[TimedMission time limit]] is so strict you can fail even if you have the solution written down in front of you. You're clearly not expected to solve it, and all possible outcomes[[note]]Try to solve but fail, successfully solve, or don't even try[[/note]] result in slightly different dialogue, but lead to the same conclusion -- Mettaton fights you.
** The optional piano puzzle requires you to replay a short melody by ear. To some players, the version you hear [[spoiler:from the music box]] and the version you actually play sound substantially different. Even if you don't have that issue, the controls are pointlessly unwieldy, so it might take you several tries because you keep playing a note you ''know'' isn't the one you wanted. [[AntiFrustrationFeatures Newer versions of the game have the melody appear on the wall where/when you activate the melody, in control form]], so the hearing impaired, tone-deaf, and tone-sensitive can solve the puzzle more easily.
* ''VideoGame/ShiningTheHolyArk'' has the puzzle to enter the Tower of Illusion. The Tower starts off as an unenterable illusion, in front of which is a series of tiles. Each tile has a clue in the form of "Face the illusion, hold (your left hand/your right hand/both hands) aloft, enter from the (North/South/East/West, and offer it to me". The first immediate problem is that there are no maps, no compasses, and no one tells you which direction anything is, so you have to guess what the directions are. Then, you need to figure out that to "hold your right hand aloft" means to strafe onto that particular tile from the left, "hold your left hand aloft" means to strafe onto it from the right, and "hold both hands aloft" means to step onto the tile head-on. ''Then'' you need to figure out that "Face the illusion" refers only to your starting position, a point of orientation for the rest of the puzzle. Once you've somehow gotten all that figured out, you just need to find a way to use the game's limited movement system to actually step onto each of the tiles from the right direction, while ''facing'' the right direction, in the right order, hoping that your guess as to which way was North is correct, before you can finally enter the dungeon.
* ''VideoGame/DungeonEncounters'' has Math Riddles, which are puzzles where you must solve for the location of a tile somewhere in the 99-floor dungeon (with 88,000+ tiles) given a hint card. Problem: [[MoonLogicPuzzle many of these puzzles are downright insane]] and appear specifically designed by whatever cruel employee at Square Enix or Cattle Call to make the player scream at the game in frustration after racking their brain for an hour before [[GuideDangIt going on the internet and looking up the answer.]] Many of these puzzles require acquired knowledge of mathematical concepts that the average player would most likely not have memorized ("What do you mean I need to know [[spoiler:the digits in the square root of 2]]?" or "What's a [[spoiler:cyclic number]]?" or "What's a [[spoiler:perfect number]]?"), and some of them aren't even related to math and expect you to recognize a relationship between the given numbers that is not only not hinted within the game itself, but ''isn't even related to video games'' ("What the fuck do I need to know [[spoiler:Super Bowl scores]] for?!" is a fun one).

* ''VideoGame/FatalFrameI'' had two kinds of regular puzzles: slide puzzles and numerical puzzles. Normally numerical puzzles of remembering a date mentioned in a scroll somewhere in the mansion would not be a problem...if they weren't in Japanese on the [=PS2=] original...and if the developers had made a bigger clue of telling you that the translation for the Kanji numbers were in your files. The later Xbox port replaced the kanji with Arabic numerals, simplifying these puzzles considerably.
* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil3Nemesis'' had the Water Treatment puzzle and boy, it was bad. Even with a guide you're going to have trouble with this, and it's randomized to make it harder for a guide to give solutions. You had to rotate 3 meters with lighted blocks and line them into place to form a specific pattern. Problem was that the lights were actually upside down, and you had to get it right when it was inverted. It was tantamount to a Rubik's Cube, which is a sadistic thing to subject a gamer to. Probably the worst puzzle in the RE series.[[labelnote:PROTIP]]There's no way to give an actual solution to the puzzle since it's random, but mentally picturing the blocks from each meter combining to match the pattern displayed on the bottom is the only way to reliably figure it out.[[/labelnote]]
* ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' features a very annoying sliding puzzle when playing as Ashley. Thankfully, the solution's easy to remember for future playthroughs once you've figured it out[[labelnote:PROTIP]]Move one piece into the center, then just keep rotating the other pieces counterclockwise around it.[[/labelnote]], and unlike most puzzles [[FifteenPuzzle of its nature]], you can slide two blocks at a time.
* ''VideoGame/AoOni'': Version 5.2 includes the 'Cipher Puzzle', which involves decoding a series of dots on a page. The solution itself is actually extremely simple once you know what you're doing, but getting to that point requires knowledge of how a Japanese abacus - a Soroban - works, meaning most western players are understandably stumped. Even the game's English/German translator advises looking up a solution in the [=ReadMe=] file.
* ''VideoGame/HauntingGround'': The creation of the Godstone during Riccardo's chapter: you have to go around the mansion several times to find the correct sequence of machines to use, there's a lengthy section where you have to make Hewie sit in one spot and wait (which he ''will'' refuse to do [[RelationshipValues unless your relationship is golden]]) while you run a lengthy gauntlet to the other side of the door he's meant to unlock for you, and if you accidentally put the Godstone in the wrong machine at ''any'' point during synthesis, you get to ''start it all again''. Oh, and Riccardo can run in at any point and interrupt your puzzle-solving, potentially sending you on a 10-30 minute detour of trying to lose him.
* ''VideoGame/AloneInTheDarkTheNewNightmare'': The flashlight puzzle in the Morton family crypt. It's as simple as moving your flashlight to draw a M. However, the controls in the UsefulNotes/PlayStation versions, while good elsewhere, are horrible for moving the flashlight, which means you'll likely mess up the drawing and spend a long time there having to restart over and over.

* ''VisualNovel/Danganronpa2GoodbyeDespair'' has the infamous "Othello" puzzle, where you have to decode a sequence of flashing lights into a four digit code using a key provided by the game. Since the sequence of lights flash four different patterns, almost everyone assumes that each pattern of lights corresponds to a number, but according to the key, several of the patterns don't ''have'' a corresponding number. What the game actually expects you to do is [[spoiler: memorize each pattern of lights, stack them vertically, and then decode each column from left to right.]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Superman 64}}'' is a very puzzle-oriented game. Many of the puzzles are simple, but there is a puzzle in the final level of the game that is maddeningly hard. Brainiac sends you to a room with several portals (Word of God is that it's a time machine) with a number in the center of the screen. Players must go through portals until the number in the center of the screen equals 2000, causing Brainiac's computers to go haywire. The puzzle itself is self explanatory, but immeasurably difficult because this portion of the level is heavily glitched so that the player dies ''at complete random''- ''(even if you're using a Gameshark and have infinite health).'' The glitches make the final puzzle nearly un-solvable. One of the many reasons why this game is considered among the worst in the history of video games isn't just because of the convoluted gameplay and rushed release but this very puzzle screwed up an already bad enough game.

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild:'' A few puzzles in the game, including at least one shrine and one chest on divine beast, require you to freeze a metallic object with Stasis, move another object blocking it with Magnesis, and then use Magnesis again to quickly catch the frozen object before it falls once Stasis wears off. While Stasis is basically a HitScan ability which hits instantly, Magnesis has a slight delay between activation and when it actually affects the object, with the distance between you and the object making the delay longer. ''Perfect'' timing is required in these puzzles, which the delay in Magnesis can make very frustrating to accomplish. Further, because shrines and divine beasts send you back to the beginning if you reload a save while inside, you cannot simply [[SaveScumming Save Scum]] in front of the puzzle in question to keep trying without having to go all the way back through the shrine/beast.

* Then there's the 'cubes in the vault' puzzle in Infocom's ''[[VideoGame/{{Enchanter}} Spellbreaker]]''. (A variant of the TwelveCoinsPuzzle) There are a dozen or so magical cubes, but only ''one'' is the true cube you need. In order to determine the actual cube, you'll need to resort them a number of times, and cast the 'detect magic' spell. Problem is, you can only do this three times before being caught by security -- and if you haven't truly narrowed it down to one cube, it will use SchrodingersGun to move it away from the one you pick to another one that fits all clues so far -- '''and''' you're not allowed to save the game while in the vault (to prevent solving the puzzle with trial and error, and hide the fact that it's cheating). One of the toughest puzzles ever in InteractiveFiction, if you're not familiar with the StockPuzzle beforehand.

* An infamous example occurs in ''VideoGame/MonkeyIsland2LeChucksRevenge''. The player must open a pipe with no hint as to how to do so. The solution? [[spoiler:Stick a banana on the spike of a ticking metronome, causing a piano playing monkey to become frozen and usable as a "monkey wrench".]] Even worse is that this solution often got LostInTranslation and overseas; [[spoiler:"monkey wrench"]] is a term often only used in America, which confused the living heck out of those living in other English countries. Translators had no fun working a way to make this puzzle sensible in other languages. Creator/RonGilbert made very dang sure after this fiasco not to use puns for a puzzle solution in future games. The Spanish version of the game went around this by adding a book to the Phatt library titled [[spoiler:"101 uses for monkeys"]], which explains [[spoiler:how monkeys can be used as "llaves inglesas" (spanish for "monkey wrenches")]]. True, there's a chance that people might not take the book and miss the clue, but in general, the humor of the game made it more likely that people would read all the books in the library at least once, so there was a big chance to get it. The book [[TakeOurWordForIt doesn't explain WHY]] [[spoiler:a monkey can be used as a wrench]], though, which, of course will confuse players.
* In a game that was not too difficult for the time, especially if one was up on their Western fairy tales, ''VideoGame/KingsQuestIQuestForTheCrown'' had a notorious example that got programmer Roberta Williams flooded with letters. To get a special item a character obviously reminiscent of Rumpelstiltskin would give you three chances to guess his name. But the correct answer was to actually use an alphabetic cipher (Z=A, etc.) and come up with the name "Ifnkovhgroghprm." The only clue was a note in a completely unrelated part of the game that said "It's good to think backwards." Tellingly, you could still win the game, just not score full points, if you used up all three guesses, and the remake just required players to spell "Rumpelstiltskin" backwards (although it didn't help that the programmers misspelled the name...).

* The Goat Puzzle from ''VideoGame/BrokenSwordTheShadowOfTheTemplars'' is so notorious in its difficulty it has its own [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle Wikipedia page]]. George must allow the goat to butt him, then click on the machinery as the goat returns to its position to move it, then let the goat charge again and get tangled in the machinery. This puzzle runs counter to every other puzzle in the game and has UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay to boot, and its legacy lives on in the minds of gamers.

* ''VideoGame/JumpStartAdventures3rdGradeMysteryMountain'''s constellation at the Observatory minigame is disliked. You’re supposed to listen to the hint to figure out which constellation it is referring to. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them to wade through - and a few are very hard to find (Crux, for example, is a PixelHunt) in the mass of constellations. Most people just double-click until the game just gives you the answer.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has the infamous Kugane Tower jumping puzzle in ''Stormblood''. It has a ton of extremely tight, tricky, and precise jumps where you ''have'' to be near damn perfect in executing it or risk falling off the tower completely. Due to realistic JumpPhysics (i.e. no mid-jump adjustments) and the collision boxes on the platforms and walls being very wonky, you can find yourself either overshooting your jumps and falling down, falling short, or hitting a wall as you leap forward. The reward for making it to the very top? A [[SceneryPorn cool bit of scenery to take /gpose pics in]], and [[OneHundredPercentCompletion a vista for your sightseeing log]]. And you know that one sight seeing marker thats on top of a lamp post right next to Kugane Tower? Take everything from the above point, and add on a precise jump all the way back down. If you miss, you have to climb the entire tower all over again.

* ''VideoGame/DarkTales: The Devil in the Belfry'' has one of these, very late in the game, when the player finds a diary belonging to the BigBad. [[spoiler:The player must then click on items which correspond to the highlighted words in the diary's narration. The diary has multiple pages, so the player can flip back and forth to find the items needed - but they're not all ''in'' the diary. Some are in the trunk where the diary is located, meaning that the player must close the diary to find the items, where normally closing the diary would mean backing out of the puzzle.]] Absolutely nothing in the game hints that this is required. Not only that, but unlike most others in the game, the puzzle cannot be skipped; using the hint button merely has the player observe that "I should move on" or a similarly worded sentiment; and the in-game strategy guide (included in the collector's edition) ''omits the puzzle entirely''. Best of all, because the reward for solving it is a necessary PlotCoupon, the game cannot proceed until this puzzle is completed.

* In ''VideoGame/IcewindDale'' your party comes across a dilapidated bridge. When you approach you are presented with text stating that it doesn't look safe enough to cross. Unfortunately the game never actually hints that getting to the other side would be desirable, and given the large maps and the game's nature of forcing you to hunt through the [[FogOfWar fog of war]] for hidden doors and barely visible corridors it is extremely easy to turn your attentions elsewhere. Even if you did know that you were supposed to cross the bridge the solution to this 'puzzle' is far from straightforward. The intended solution is to find a book on bridge engineering from a different part of the map, possesion of which apparently gives your party the architectural confidence to proceed. Unfortunately the game is full of useless and worthless books, and by this late stage is it highly likely that the player will dismiss any books they find out of hand without even bothering to read the title.

** In a DLC for ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'', ''Mark of the Assassin'', there is a very sophisticated puzzle. 25 tiles form a 5x5 square portrait of a man, or rather you need to flip them all to make them form the portrait. In the beginning, all tiles are face down. When you flip one, all tiles adjacent to it flip as well. Sounds easy? Well, good luck solving this puzzle without looking up how to do it. There are two more of the same type of puzzle in the ''Jaws of Hakkon'' DLC for ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition''. Instead of flipping all of the tiles, however, you need to flip them to create a certain pattern, as hinted by [[spoiler:nearby mats in front of locked doors. Creating the patterns will unlock the doors in question]]. Thankfully, unlike the DAII example, these are optional.

** The "Wiggle" puzzle on Night 4 ''very'' quickly became infamous for its high level of difficulty. The player is stuck in a springlock suit for three minutes, with eight springlocks quickly coming loose that they constantly need to tighten back up. There are also loads of Minireenas climbing the sides of the suit, and if they reach the top of the mask, you will die instantly. The only way to get them off? Wiggle. Which causes the springlocks to come loose even faster. There are also Minireenas that climb the front of the suit and get inside with no way to stop them... except that they're harmless, so trying to wiggle them off will only result in the springlocks coming more loose. [[GuideDangIt And the game doesn't inform you of any of this]]. A patch released shortly after the game's launch made the puzzle easier after complaints about how unfairly hard it was.

** Like the goat from Broken Sword, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle this also has a Wikipedia article.]]

* ''VideoGame/DarkTales: The Devil in the Belfry'' has one of these, very late in the game, when the player finds a {{diary}} belonging to the BigBad. [[spoiler:The player must then click on items which correspond to the highlighted words in the diary's narration. The diary has multiple pages, so the player can flip back and forth to find the items needed - but they're not all ''in'' the diary. Some are in the trunk where the diary is located, meaning that the player must close the diary to find the items, where normally closing the diary would mean backing out of the puzzle.]] Absolutely nothing in the game hints that this is required. Not only that, but unlike most others in the game, the puzzle cannot be skipped; using the hint button merely has the player observe that "I should move on" or a similarly worded sentiment; and the in-game strategy guide (included in the collector's edition) ''omits the puzzle entirely''. Best of all, because the reward for solving it is a necessary PlotCoupon, the game cannot proceed until this puzzle is completed.