Moon Logic Puzzle / Adventure Games

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• Collecting a footprint clue in the 2006 adventure game Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express requires that you cast the thing in cake batter, then prevent the batter from falling apart by putting it in a big bowl of ice. Even your character's own dialogue admits how goofy the resulting "evidence" looks.
• Another Code: The original DS release had a few that revolved around manipulating the handheld itself.
  • There was one puzzle where you had to close the DS just enough so you could see the reflection of one of the screens on the other without closing it so much it went into standby mode. It also had no hints other then the fact that it was simply a photo frame that folded the same way. Should you be playing on an original DS without a backlight on, good luck seeing the reflection. To say noting of if you're playing it later hardware revisions of the system, or the 3DS and any of its revision, in which case the two halves of the clue will not line up properly. Fortunately, simple brute force also works for solving the puzzle.
  • There is one puzzle where you have to complete a picture using a pair of stamps; this is done by closing the DS twice.
• Armed & Delirious is a game infamous for being nearly entirely made of Moon Logic, with many puzzles involving using inventory items at random, clicking VERY specific pixels on the screen, and requiring strange/incredibly specific timing in order to proceed. A particularly infamous puzzle requires you to use the discs of the game itself to solve a colour matching puzzle, including the disc that is currently inside of your PC as you are playing it.
• Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard: At one point, you need to widen a gap in some rocks so Gwen can squeeze through. Sadly, Finn can't just widen the gap with his shovel; instead, the player must catch a piranha in the swamps, use the piranha's sharp teeth to cut a drill off the flailing tendrils of a trapped robot, then drill a hole through the rocks. At least the cables in the mines provide a clue as to what you'll need.
• The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble is a mind-bender of an adventure game in general, but one lateral-thinking puzzle that particularly stands out involves the hero being asked to fetch quest an item for a ridiculously nitpicky bureaucrat who keeps rejecting your attempts. The eventual solution is to give yourself magic strength and punch him in the face.
• Broken Sword has these in several games. At one point in the second games one of the players solves a puzzle and notes that it was done "Using the form of lateral thinking that can get you institutionalized."
• Douglas Adams's text adventure Bureaucracy is filled with this; in order to progress, you frequently have to use strange leaps of logic to deal with a world designed and run by demented Obstructive Bureaucrats. (For example, a creditor sends you a "bill" in the form of a check for negative three hundred dollars. Simple; deposit it in your account, but use a withdrawal slip instead of a deposit slip. Since the negative of a withdrawal is a deposit, the negative of negative three hundred dollars is three hundred dollars.)
• Chaos on Deponia has an especially awful puzzle that relies on Moon Logic AND Cruelty Is the Only Option to solve. You need to break into a house, which has a cat food bowl outside. So, you put some fish bait on a burning tire, which you put on the window of a kitchen with some baby dolphins in a pool just outside. They jump through the hoop and get turned into cans of tuna. Then you feed the cat so your character can 'discover' (and finally interact with) the cat flap which has been clearly visible to the player the entire time.
• Codename: ICEMAN was bad about this kind of puzzle. In one instance, you had to have the installation manual handy so you could manually type in the correct (according to the manual) procedure for giving CPR. In some cases, to get from one setting to the next, you might have to take an action that would result in getting stalled in the next scene.
• One of the first interactive-text games, Colossal Cave (aka Adventure) required you to state what weapon you were using to attack an enemy. If you just typed "attack monster", the game would reply, "With what? Your bare hands?" Normally, you'd have to enter "attack monster with sword". An exception to this rule was when you were faced with a fire-breathing dragon ...
  ATTACK DRAGON
  >With what? Your bare hands?
  YES
  >Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (hard to believe, isn't it?)
• An example of when this goes wrong can be found in an obscure adventure game called The Crystal Key. At one point, you're in an alien docking bay, trying to get a ship to take off before a Darth Vader Expy can find you and force-choke you. All the keys on the ship's control panel are labeled in an alien language. You're supposed to have written down the coordinates of the ship you docked at the very beginning, then you're supposed to enter in those same coordinates. Apparently, it's taken for granted not only that you remember the coordinates, but that you'll know the aliens use base-10, arrange their keys in the same order as on a telephone number pad, and use the same coordinate system as is found in your ship. Note in particular that the keys are arranged as on a telephone keypad, with 123 at the top. Which, of course, is different from the layout of the PC keypad that's likely to be closer at hand for someone playing the game.
• Curse of Enchantia is composed mostly of these puzzles; as a largely textless adventure game with little dialogue, everything is conveyed via thought balloons and similar image bubbles. This leads to very bizarre puzzles, but even that is no excuse once the game takes a turn for the completely surreal. For instance—at one point, your path will be blocked by an anthropomorphic nose. There is no reason given for why it's there or why it wants to stop you, you just have to get past it somehow. What you have to do is find a giant pile of cut hair on the ground a few screens back, grab a handful of hair, and shove it into the nose to make it sneeze itself out of the way.
• The Nancy Drew game Danger By Design requires purchasing an ancient decoder from a vendor and a book of ciphers from another vendor, then finding a message in the final room, then encoding that message with the date shift cipher from the book, then inputting the encoded message into the decoder to eventually get a message in French with the numbers to unlock the door.
• Death Gate had two infuriating puzzles of this type.
  • One was opening the treasure room in the tower of the Brotherhood. You have a code list, but all it says is "Buy their time to die" above a list of in-universe Arianus continents. You also can find a book that explains the codes change based on the time of month. To open the wall with lots of hands, you have to look at what continent currently obscures the sun from that place, then use that continent to figure out what word to use from the "Buy their time to die" phrase (it's the word above the name of the continent) then if it was for example "die", you have to press Diamond Iron Emerald hands. First letters for the materials they're made of. Aside from the Brotherhood book, and the code list itself, there are NO clues about this whatsoever. Good luck getting this without a walkthrough. They do show you the materials in the item descriptions at least.
  • The second is even more egregious, especially because it's the final puzzle. You have to continuously fend off Sang-Drax while figuring out the correct starting rune for the Interconnection spell. Fending off Sang-Drax is simple enough (figuring out which elemental storm to use against his current form, which isn't hard) but figuring out the starting rune without trial and error is nigh impossible. The character who could tell you the rune is dead so the logical option is to resurrect him. Problem: he only says "the heart, the heart" which is a very obscure reference to a back-then-didn't-seem-important conversation near the beginning of the game. Again, good luck. Fortunately this time there are only six options, logic whittles it down to five, and a possible in-universe logical trick diminishes it to four, so trial and error (along with save scumming) gets there FAST.
• Discworld. Most of the puzzles don't make sense even in retrospect. Terry Pratchett jokingly summed it up as follows:
  Pterry: To get the walkthrough, you have to take the sponge from Nanny Ogg's pantry and stick it in the ear of the troll with the tutu, then take the lumps and put them in the pouch with the zombie's razor.
• Here's the worst from Discworld II, which was somewhat saner, and where most puzzles made sense if you read the books. You need some sticks. That's easy — steal the mallets from croquet players by swapping them with something similar, so that they wouldn't notice. One is simple: a hammerhead shark, who does look like a mallet. Another is OK, if you remember Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: a flamingo. The third is a pelican. What leap of logic connects it with croquet is unclear. The Pelican Croquet Club?
• The Dig has places where you can't use certain items until you progress to the point where you need them. There is a patch of dirt that you can't interact with until you do several other things, and a rock that you can't interact with until you enter a particular code into a map room.
• EarthBound (1994) parodies these. Getting past a giant statue of a pencil, for example, requires you to obtain and use a Pencil Eraser. And to get past an eraser statue? Eraser Eraser.
• Due to Epiphany City's theme of thinking outside the box, several puzzles are solved in unintuitive ways, usually involving the shape of objects mimicking another—the Ocean Flower, for example, is discovered by placing 4 unrelated setpieces together in such a way that, when combined with a setting sun for the middle piece, they become a flower.
• Gabriel Knight 3 was accused by Old Man Murray of being an excellent example of what killed adventure games: themselves. It featured a very nonsensical puzzle that includes using honey on an old piece of tape to steal hair from a cat, to make a fake mustache, to impersonate someone, to get a motorcycle, because the hero refuses to drive a scooter. The guy you are impersonating doesn't have a mustache. You also need to steal his driver's license and find a pen, to draw a mustache on his picture. The last part makes some sense, as an eye-catching feature on a face draws attention away from a face's bone shape, and other characters hint at this; but it does nothing to explain how cat hair glued with maple syrup can make a convincing moustache. In addition, the article highlighted there was an Interface Screw aspect as well; several objects involved in the puzzle don't show up as interactive until you've reached the point in the plot where the puzzle must be solved, but at the same time they have nothing particular to do with the puzzle, so the only way to find them was to visit every previous location and mouse over everything to find if something had become available that wasn't before. It even has its own dedicated page On the other Wiki, with multiple sources to discuss the puzzle's legacy.
• Grim Fandango mostly plays fair with its hints (and changed the genre by trying to make it obvious what objects could and could not be interacted with), but it has a few of these, mostly late in the game:
  • At one point, you're trying to get into the lair of a psychotic florist without him shooting you. He's holed up, yes, a florist shop, where everything is covered with cloth and/or tape. How do you get him to calm down and stop taking potshots? Cut the tape off the bell above the door, go out, and come back in. The noise of it ringing makes him go into "florist mode," and talk to you normally.
  • At another, a bouncer is keeping you from meeting with the mob boss who runs the casino you're both standing in, unless you prove that you know said mob boss by answering a series of number-based questions about him ("How many Limos does Hector LeMans own?"). You know none of these things, but you will inexplicably succeed if you always answer the number that just won on the roulette wheel behind you.
    • Whenever he asks a question, he first looks up at the roulette board, lending credence to Manny's accusation of "You're just making up these questions."
  • And then there's the one you solve using something an NPC said to you in passing in an optional conversation 8-ish hours (or four in-world years) ago. You need to find something that can be used as fuel. You have a coffee mug filled with packing foam lining the coffin you retrieved it from. There is a room with a toaster that catches fire if you put an oily rag in it. The station employees will put out the fire using fire extinguishers if that happens. Placed the packing foam-stuffed mug on the mug rack next to the toaster, and put the oily rag in the toaster. The fire extinguisher spray will chemically react with the packing foam and make the mug jet around the room. If you missed the optional conversation or forgot about it, you have absolutely no way of knowing that the extinguishers and packing foam will react together like that.
  • Yet another illogical puzzle involves you trying to retrieve your car from a booby trapped garage. The villain has rigged a bomb that will be set off if you disturb the giant domino chain that runs all over the floor and the hero is not confident of his ability to step through the trap or disarm it by removing dominoes from the chain. The solution is to have Glottis drink a huge vat of liquid and then make him queasy so that he violently vomits all over the floor. The liquid can then be frozen with liquid nitrogen to prevent the dominoes from moving, although quite why uncontrollably puking over the dominoes is considered less risky than manually picking them up is not explained. Luckily you are stuck in quite a small area with few items so it isn't hard to find the solution.
• The text adventure version of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) is notorious for abusing the player with this kind of puzzle logic. In order to solve one particular puzzle, you are told that you need to show exceptional intelligence. A bit of research in the Guide reveals that in order to do so, you need to both have something and not have something at the same time. Given that "no tea" is listed as an inventory item -and has been since the beginning of the game- it's increasingly clear that this is what you need to find. However, there doesn't seem to be any source for it in the game. Even a machine that seems perfectly suited to dispense it will, maddeningly, produce a product that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike it. It's not a Stock Lateral Thinking Puzzle either—you can't simply DROP NO TEA to get it. Once you finally do get the tea, after acquiring a proper interface for the Nutrimat, you still have to deal with getting both the "tea" and the "no tea" at the same time, as "your common sense tells you you can't do that". You eventually have to go inside your own brain and remove said common sense, which finally allows you to possess the tea and the "no tea" at the same time. Oh, by the way, even after removing your common sense, you still can't DROP NO TEA if you don't have tea, though the message changes to reflect your newfound lack of common sense. Douglas Adams once described the game as moving beyond user-unfriendly, to user-hostile.
• King's Quest:
  • King's Quest I: Quest For The Crown contained one optional puzzle where the player had three attempts to guess a Rumplestiltskin character's name, with the sole hint in the game being a letter saying "sometimes it pays to think backwards". In the original edition, this implied spelling "Rumplestiltskin" using an alphabetic cipher where Z=A, Y=B, and so on (the answer was thus "Ifnkovhgroghprm"); this proved too difficult for most players even in its time, so for the game's Enhanced Remake the solution was simplified to just spelling "Rumplestiltskin" backwards. In a further bit of mercy, the game also accepts both Rumplestiltskin and Rumpelstiltskin.
  • King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne has a point where you're blocked by a pOIsonous snake. You can kill it with your sword (which even has a snake inscribed on it, inclining players to think that's what they're supposed to do), but the correct thing to do is to throw a bridle at it so it becomes a talking pegasus. Even the novelized walkthrough in The King's Quest Companion, which makes a point that Graham can be an eccentric and a daydreamer to explain how he just happens to blunder into the correct solutions to the games' more counter-intuitive puzzles, couldn't come up with a better explanation for this one than Graham threw the bridle completely by accident. The Fan Remake splits it into several puzzles, but using an opal necklace to stun the snake so you can get past, create an Anti-Magic item in the sorcerer's home, use it on the snake, and THEN get the bridle using a Solve the Soup Cans riddle is only marginally less out there.
  • King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! has the infamous puzzle in which you kill a yeti by throwing a pie in its face.
    • And chasing a snake away with a tambourine. And powering a piece of magical equipment with some moldy cheese.
    • You're lost in a cursed forest. How do you get out? Simple: Squeeze some honey onto a completely arbitrary spot on the road, and drop your emeralds into the puddle until an elf gets stuck in it. Incidentally, if you drop the emeralds without putting down the honey, the elf will just take them and run, and that's it for that playthrough.
  • King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow:
    • Casting the "Make Rain" spell might qualify. You need to combine three different liquids in a teapot. There are no teapots in the game, and the only hint (not explicitly mentioned in the game itself) is that the old hunter's lamp looks a bit like a teapot. Considering that in a previous game (King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human) spells had to be cast exactly according to the instructions (it doubled as the game's Copy Protection, so failure meant Have a Nice Death), it's easy for gamers playing the series in order to be Wrong Genre Savvy on this one.
    • Later on there's an even more unintuitive puzzle: Jollo informs Alexander that you can get the Big Bad's right hand genie out of the way by switching the genie's lamp with an identical one. Conveniently, there's a peddler selling lamps out on the street but you don't know which lamp to pick. What's the solution? Go to the pawn shop where the genie is there in disguise and make Alexander drink a fake death potion so that a cutscene appears where the genie goes to report this to his master and the player can get a look at the lamp and choose it when Alexander wakes up. What makes this completely out of left field is the fact that not only have the prior cutscenes between the genie and the Big Bad not shown the lamp meaning there would be no reason to believe this would work, but the puzzle itself breaks the fourth wall since the knowledge of the lamp's appearance is only shown to the player, meaning that from an in story perspective Alexander got the right lamp via a lucky guess (Alexander himself claims this when he is later asked how he chose the right lamp).^note The Fake Death potion is actually supposed to be used for a different in-story reason: Alexander knows that the Vizier knows of his plans to save Cassima, and he also knows (or at least suspects) that the guy following him with glowing gold eyes is the Vizier's genie. In order to throw off Al-Azahred, Alexander pretends to kill himself and thus get the Vizier to lower his guard. It doesn't actually have an in-story effect, but that's the justification presented. The fact that it also gives the player a glimpse of the genie's bottle is just a bonus.
  • In King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, this is taken literally. In one chapter, a hunk of green cheese falls into a fountain in the town of Falderal which Chicken Little claims to be the Moon. Despite it being clearly within her reach, Valanice claims she can't reach it. The idea is that, being cheese and in water, it is slippery and has to be retrieved a different way. You must instead obtain a book and trade it to Roo Rat for a shepherd's crook and then use the crook to get the Moon. After being then found guilty of "Moon theft" and ordered to put it back into the sky, you then have to use the rubber chicken and a tree branch resembling a slingshot to fling the Moon back into the sky.
  • Gets played for laughs in the 2015 reboot. At a certain point, Graham gets stuck in quicksand and the apparent solution is to grab a nearby bucket, umbrella and a wheel to build a sort of impromptu watermill and then use a nearby skeleton to hold it. Graham looks proudly for a few moments at his contraption, and then Vee throws him a vine which allows her to pull him out, throwing in a comment that she's amazed you really thought something like that would actually work.
    • Later, in the epilogue, Gwendolyn references the trope directly when the player attempts to use an item on an object it's not meant to be used on.
      Gwendolyn: Moon, meet logic.
• Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra has this. The player will be hinted toward two questions throughout the game "What room do you leave without entering?" and "What room do you enter without leaving?", twin riddles that will come to haunt you near the end of the game in the cult of Amon Ra's secret meeting room. The answers are given, but in a slab found in Olymia's office. In hieroglyphs. Even if you take the time to decipher the message, it is told in a long passage that still doesn't directly give you the answers and, to the ones that don't know the answers otherwise, will sound interesting but otherwise useless and will be very easy to overlook what the answers were. womb and tomb.
• Limbo of the Lost has the now-infamous Soul Vial puzzle, where the player has to obtain a green-tinted vial containing the also-green soul of a warrior. To do this, the player needs to find an empty green-tinted vial, fill it with water (which is rendered as thick blue instead of clear) and mix that with saffron to create a substitute to make the exchange with. This puzzle, of course, not only relies on the fact that the player assumes that the Water Is Blue instead of clear, but also assumes that the player knows what saffron is and what it does — and by extension, you would also know that putting saffron in water makes it yellow, not green!
• The Longest Journey:
  • At the beginning of the game you need to get a large piece of iron off an electrified metro track. How does one accomplish this feat? By combining a clamp, a clothesline and a rubber ducky. And to get the clamp you need to use the ring your father gave you to close an electrical circuit to fix the plumbing system of your apartment building so the clamp isn't needed to hold a pipe shut? And the duck requires the player to feed a pigeon outside their window, and it will fly down to the grate in the canal the duck is trapped under. The pigeon jars the grate, which both releases the duck, and the chain the clothesline is on. The worst part is that this action is prone to a bug in which April will act as though there's something missing from your Rube Goldberg contraption — so that even if you managed to figure it out, you still might be told that you're wrong (incidentally, this is one of several glitches which can only be got around by restoring a previous saved game). Also, there's a band-aid on the duck. April has to remove the band-aid, blow up the duck, and then remove it so it'll deflate and the clamp will close automatically. This puzzle stands in stark contrast to most of the other ones in the game, seeing as they are generally based on actual logic, instead of a college student, for no good reason, meddling with several pieces of machinery she has no business operating.
    Cracked.com: Now you're ready to get that key! Wait, what key? Oh, right — you were doing something at some point before you got high and started fucking with these birds.
  • Later on, you have to take some candy from the bar April works at. Problem is, if the player chooses to look at the bar instead of manipulating it, April specifically says her boss doesn't like the employees eating the candy. The player might reasonably assume that this is just for the characterization of April's boss, and they shouldn't or can't take the candy, and not even bother to try. The player, admittedly, might decide to go all the way back to the bar just to retrieve the candy when they need it, so they can roll it in stinky ooze and give it to a cop. The cop spits it out, and the guy he's watching thinks it was on purpose and chases him off. Yes, April will decide to, as far as she knows, poison a police officer to meet her admittedly-desperate goals.
  • How do you remove a police officer from an accident scene? Bribe him with a soda, which the game indicates is the right thing to use? Nah, that won't work. Ride the subway clear across town to put the soda in the paint shaker you may have noticed some time ago, then ride the subway all the way back, then walk to the cop and hand him the soda which has somehow not gone flat so that it sprays him in the face, forcing him to leave to change his armor? Correct! Please note that the solution is, in essence, intuitive, but the game forces the player to go about it in a really convoluted way. The game could've simply had April shaking up the soda behind her back before handing it to the cop. It would've been a bit of a Deus ex Machina, but given that the audience knows April is an intelligent and capable young woman, it would probably be a more logical solution than the one that made it into the game.
  • A powerful wizard can be defeated by handing him a calculator, causing him to be sucked inside when he starts messing with it. Why? Fan Wank has suggested that it is something to do with the calculator being an object of pure logic that conflicts with the wizard's magical nature but the game doesn't bother to explain this at any point.
• Machinarium is mostly straightforward in its puzzles, but a few of these fall squarely into Moon Logic territory. For instance: After powering up an electric fence so you can trick a cat into being shocked by it and stunned, you're then able to collect the cat. Why did you need a cat? Why, obviously to give to the didgeridoo player so it can chase the critter out of his didgeridoo!
• Monkey Island:
  • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge:
    • At a certain point you have to find something to turn off a pump to reveal a pathway behind a waterfall. The solution was to plug a hypnotized monkey into the pump and turning its tail. Yup, it's a monkey wrench. Bonus points to players of non-English versions (or, indeed, players who speak a non-American dialect of English), because that's not a puzzle that translates very well — the Spanish version of the game, for one, resorted to putting a book in the Phatt Library which flat-out tells you that monkeys can be used as "English wrenches", the Spanish equivalent of "monkey wrenches".
    • Near the end of the game you have to use an elevator, but the door won't close because the combined weight of Guybrush and a huge immovable crate exceed the weight limit. Guybrush has to be holding a balloon and two surgical gloves filled with helium in order to be light enough to ride the elevator.
  • The Curse of Monkey Island:
    • At one point you need to make a snake throw up. What's the answer? Put an ipecac flower into a carafe of pancake syrup! There is a hint where you get the flower stating that natives use it as a 'purgative', but if the player is unfamiliar with that word or if they read the hint hours earlier...
      "It's syrup of ipecac. That seems...logical..."
    • When you first climb aboard the The Sea Cucumber (which is commanded by the Pirates Of Danjer Cove), Mr. Fossey accuses you of trespassing and forces you to walk the plank. Well, that obviously didn't work, so now what? Well, while Mr. Fossey is talking to Captain LeChimp, you need to saw the plank off with the serrated bread knife, which will suddenly lead Mr. Fossey to decide to tar and feather you. By real world logic, a serrated bread knife is hardly strong enough to cut through wood. And Mr. Fossey could've just thrown you overboard instead of going through the trouble of tarring and feathering you after noticing the plank was missing. The remainder of this puzzle is pretty easy. But, unless you're familiar with the cartoonish logic that dominates the Monkey Island games, be prepared to be stumped by puzzles like this.
• 7th Level's Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail involved this throughout the whole game. A parody of point-and-click adventure games, this involved a really long registration process at the very beginning. Guess what? The registration is necessary to complete a later section. Fortunately, you get to go back if you didn't complete it the first time around.
• There are several of these in the game Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
  • For example on the last level you need to generate power by turning a wheel, and you have a Rude French Mouse and several types of cheese. Since the Rude French Mouse doesn't want any of the cheese you have to use the mouse on a giant man's head to get a small elephant, use the Chocolate Mousse recipe to make a peanut, and convince the elephant to run in the wheel by placing the peanut nearby. You use the cheese to build a tower that lets you get into the attic.
  • You also bring a dead parrot back to life using spam, lupins, and a gumby brain surgeon.
  • Another one, which many players could only solve by forcing themselves to Try Everything, has several ingredients being put through grinders and added to a bowl to make the infamous salmon mousse from the film. The trick is not to use the grinders - just put all the ingredients directly into the bowl.
• Mudlarks has several puzzles which combine moon logic with apparent psychosis. Early in the game, the player character gets trapped in a quarantine tent which they were supposed to be just visiting. The solution? Yank an electrical cable on the floor, causing the panel it's connected to to begin sparking, then throw water on it! The character does comment in internal dialog that they've broken the law several times later in the adventure, but never considers the potential consequences of starting an electrical fire in a tent where genuinely sick people are sleeping.
• A few parts of Myst games. Some are a bit closer to plain ol' soup cans but especially terrible bits include, in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, when you have to take aquaphobic one-jump fireflies into a cave behind a waterfall to have enough light to see. You're an explorer, and you don't have the sense to bring a flashlight? Or go back to Relto and grab a firemarble? And even if you do get through with some other light source or by feeling your way through, you can't activate the triggers until you come back with fireflies. The underground train where there are small noises at each intersection, each different noise indicating a different direction. This particular puzzle is easier if one has completed the Mechanical Age, or at least used the fortress-rotation simulator in another save, as it uses the exact same sound cues. The train puzzle still has a twist, though: at some points, the train needs to go in a secondary direction (southwest, northeast, etc.), and the cues for those consist of two sounds playing at once.
• The Mystery of the Druids opens with one of these. You need to contact someone by phone; your office phone in Scotland Yard doesn't let you make external calls. There's a pay phone available, but you don't have change. None of your co-workers will let you use their phone, and nobody will give you change or make change for you. The solution: talk to a hobo on the street, and have him ask you for a drink. Then go to the Scotland Yard lab, tease the lab technician about having alcohol in the lab, and have him dare you to drink medical alcohol. Drink it (which in reality would be potentially fatal), pass out, wake up, use fingerprinting powder on the bottles to see which one held the medical alcohol (even though it's labelled), tip it into a bottle with some apple juice, and feed it to the hobo - who falls unconscious letting you steal the change out of his hat. It is an important hint to how deranged and unscrupulous the player character is (your boss actually chews you out for doing such a ridiculous and dangerous thing), and the fact that the office doesn't give him the money to make external calls hints at how little they trust him; but it's also a very unintuitive puzzle with no hint but to try everything.
• The superhero adventure game, Noctropolis, is full of these. To enter a cathedral guarded by a lethal, flying gargoyle, the player must A) locate the couple pixels representative of the only loose bar in the iron-wrought fence, B) open utility panel of a nearby streetlight, C) attach fifty-pounds worth of cable to connect the fence post to an arbitrary lead, and d.) throw the bar, like a spear, some 20-yards so that it lands upon the fountain on which the beast occasionally perches so that it is electrocuted the following time it does. This puzzle was one of the first in the game and significantly simpler than later examples.
• Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It runs on a specific type of weird logic, dependent on wordplay, so some of the puzzles end up being quite obtuse if you aren't familiar with the terms. For example, one part in "Shake a Tower" has you save a shepherd from a rabid rat, and he drops a book of riddles. You also see a burning pile of soap suds, with an icicle hanging above them. The solution is to "riddle while foam burns", a play on the obscure expression "fiddle while Rome burns". This leads you to a well-boiled icicle, which you can turn into a well-oiled bicycle and use to get around. Other puzzles involve figuring out how to scare a portrait of Karl Marx and finding various ways to annoy a waitress.
• 3D adventure game Outcry invoked this on purpose in its latter half, where the landscape is shaped by your brother's subconscious. While the previous puzzles were mainly about studying abandoned/incomplete instructions to operating mysterious machinery, the puzzles in the so-called "Shimmering World" will have connections to psychotropic drugs, ancient monoliths and other things your brother knew very well but the player might struggle to figure out.
• Out of Order (2003) has a couple:
  • At one point, you need to obtain a device called a "MotorTroll" from a shopkeeper named Bob. It just happens that Bob has a bunch of cardboard boxes behind his shop, including one for the MotorTroll. If you look into it, you obtain an instruction manual, and if you look into it again you get a warranty. If you show Bob the warranty he'll say that he'll give you a new MotorTroll, but only if you bring him the old broken one. So what do you do? You're supposed to mess with an electrical transformer in the doctor's office to obtain a pile of burnt-out wires, and show them to Bob claiming that they're the broken MotorTroll. There's absolutely nothing connecting the wires and MotorTroll other than the fact that they're both electronic.
  • The puzzle required to obtain the bumper sticker. You need to prove to the doctor that you own a car so that he'll give it to you. How do you do that? How about going into the doctor's reception office, looking in the toy box to get a toy car, looking again to get a doll, going through more convoluted and unrelated steps to convince the doctor you're sick so you can steal his scalpel while he's looking up your symptoms, use the scalpel to remove the doll's head and cut out the photo from your ID card, stick the photo on the doll and then the doll on the toy car, then go through even more unrelated steps to get your celebrity neighbor to talk to you about her interest in photographing objects, then give her the car with doll, then wait until the photo is complete, then finally showing the photo of the doll in the car to the doctor so he'll give you the bumper sticker? For starters, there's no reason to think of using the scalpel on the doll unless you already knew the full solution beforehand.
• Paradigm, being a surrealist point-and-click adventure game that pays homage to obtuse point-and-click adventures from the 90s, is chock full of these. For example, the puzzle to obtain crack for the local drug addict so he'd let you have some backup disks needed for the power plant's computer so it doesn't melt down. This requires solving a three-layer nested puzzle that requires you to move around several locations and can take several hours to solve if you don't know what you're doing. Even if you know what you're doing, it takes about half an hour to move around and solve the puzzles. And no, it doesn't get easier once you gain access to the drug dealer's mansion.
• In Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, one of the first puzzles you must solve is getting your wallet out from under the couch. You can very clearly reach all the way under there with your hands (though the actor makes a valiant effort to pretend otherwise when you try), and could likewise move the couch itself without difficulty (this option doesn't present itself). The solution is to entice your pet rat to fetch it for you with a granola bar. If you listed the hundred most intuitive ways to retrieve a wallet from under a couch, this almost certainly wouldn't be on there.
• Police Quest 4: Open Season: The skeleton key you have to obtain from a mundane-looking soda can, and the lighter in the mouth of the severed head in the refrigerator, which you combine with a can of hairspray to make a flamethrower to neutralize the Big Bad (the lighter isn't there the first time you look in the fridge, Guide Dang It!).
• The Chinese adventure PRICE has a few bizarre puzzles involving a doll that looks like the protagonist's sister. Examining the doll while having a separate item - a Hanged Man tarot card with an upside-down depiction of said sister - equipped gives the protagonist the completely-out-of-nowhere idea to hold the doll upside down, which causes the head to pop off and reveal a key. You're also required to mutilate the doll with a knife for no particular reason to find another key item.
• The Quest for Glory games is generally more fair with its logic than most Sierra games, but still have a few moon logic puzzles. These mostly pop up for the Magic User, who tends to be a more cerebral class to begin with.
  • In particular, the WIT entrance exams require some particularly outside-the-box thinking.^note The best and most devilish is acknowledged by the game. You have to open a door to expose the fire beyond it, then deal with the fire, after which you have to figure out some way to cross the gap the fire has burned in the path ahead. Assuming you've figured out that you can turn the door into a bridge, you still have a problem in that the door is wide open, preventing you from using it as a bridge. While you have an Open spell, you have no such thing as a Close spell. The solution is to use your Fetch spell on the door, which pulls it towards you, swings it on the hinges, and closes it, at which point the game explicitly states "Hey, are you just guessing here, or do you actually know what you're doing?"
  • Another for Quest for Glory IV in theory is that you need to get Bonehad a hat to gain access to Baba Yaga's hut. But you can't just go and buy him one. Instead this requires completing a small and unrelated subquest by reuniting senile old Nikolai with his deceased wife, Anna. At which point his ghost gives you his hat...somehow. The "in theory" part comes in because Anna is located so close to the town^note and Baba Yaga's hut so far from it it's incredibly likely the player will run across her long before encountering Bonehead, so will already have the hat by the time he meets him and doesn't ''need' to puzzle out how to get it.
• From the Sam & Max series...
  • Sam & Max Hit the Road wouldn't be a '90s puzzle-adventure game without a few moments of this, such as:
    • Combining a severed hand, a broken golf ball retriever, and a fridge magnet to create a device to extract a mood ring from the world's largest ball of twine;
    • Using a wrench to loosen a giant ceramic fish so that you can crawl into it and be mistaken for a real fish by a fisherman literally five feet away from you who saw you do all of this, so that you can be stolen from his pile of caught fish by a helicopter pilot who ALSO mistakes your giant fake fish for a real fish, so that you can be dropped onto (sigh) the same goddamn giant ball of twine in order to snip 91 yards of twine off of it.
  • In Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space: Moai Better Blues, you have to travel between Stinky's Diner and Easter Island within a short time. Striking a magical red gong on Easter Island will open a portal to another red gong, and among the various trash in Stinky's is a nondescript gong. So what to do? Paint that gong red too! Humorously, Sam and Max comment on how gullible whatever mystical force controlling these gongs must be for that to work.
• Sanitarium has a few of these. Want to get to the other side of a creek spanned by a broken bridge? Just throw a broken children's rider pig on a spring into the creek, counting that it will land standing up with the spring extending down to the creek floor, and then bounce on it.
• Scooby-Doo Mystery, an adventure game for the Genesis.
  • The game involves a puzzle where you actually have to microwave a cowbell that's lodged inside a block of ice. Metal. In a microwave. Also, you can't enter a maze until you hang one of those little tree-shaped air fresheners on a tree branch. Then, in order to see once you're in the maze involves building a homemade flashlight, one piece of which is behind a refrigerator. Which you're supposed to just push out of the way. That wouldn't be such a leap if you played Fred, but you play Shaggy.
  • Another scenario example is, when having a motor without belt ("They often break"), and a new belt, you should use the belt as a rope in another place, and use toffee instead of belt.
• Silence of the Sleep generally averts this trope with logical puzzles like matching the rotating segments of a skeleton key to a painting of a city skyline (the arrangement of buildings and their reflections is identical to the required arrangement of grooves on a key). Some puzzles still require rather illogical thinking, though.
• Simon the Sorcerer 2:
  • The game features a puzzle that is relatively straightforward: Use a pair of fuzzy slippers to sneak past a monster. But the way of GETTING those slippers is absolutely bizarre, you have to use the "wear" command on a dog, which turns said dog into a pair of slippers via magic. Note that while Simon is a sorcerer that is the only point in the game where you can do magic just like that.
  • The game also features a magical sword that cannot be removed from its stone because the protagonist is not of royal birth. The solution? To get a tattoo of a crown. Huh?
• Polish adventure game Skaut Kwatermaster runs on this trope. The most egregious example, however, is how to make tinder necessary for the game's final puzzle. Namely, first you need a poster. Then you make the poster into an origami hammer, which you use to hit a piece of uranium ore and split the atom that way, making it radioactive. Then, you irradiate a piece of cheese using the uranium, lure a mouse out of a hole and feed her with the radioactive cheese. That causes the mouse to mutate into a mole, which you stretch over a bucket to make a drum. Then, you need to talk to a tree, nail a "high voltage" sign on it, put on a Native American war bonnet that you got from a bum earlier and use the mole drum to summon lightning. This knocks a piece of wood off the tree, which you combine with a bow that you got from a bum earlier in order to light a campfire.
• Starship Titanic can be like this at times. Even one of the developers admitted "These are not the thoughts of a normal person" when discussing a puzzle that involved a chicken and a suction tube. Specifically, you need to pick up a metal bowl. The metal bowl is fastened to the table it's on. The fastener is easily undone, but you can't reach it because the bowl is full of pistachio nuts. Rather than, say, eating some of the nuts or scooping them out of the bowl, you have to send the ship's parrot through the on-board vacuum-tube based mail system to the room where the bowl is, so it can eat them for you.
• Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People makes it clear that at a certain point, you need to steal an item from Bubs' concession stand and blame the theft on Coach Z to progress. Bubs is away and has a solid gold record sitting on his counter. There is nothing there to interact with aside from the record. However, the gold record is super-glued in place — it cannot be stolen, and if you try, a flashing alarm appears with a robot that summons Bubs. You have to steal the flashing alarm.
• At one point in Stupid Invaders you have to get down a hole in the middle of the desert. In order to do this, you have to use a garden hose as a rope. Fair enough. However, instead of throwing one end of the hose down the hole and climbing down, as any normal person would do, the character decides to hold onto the hose and jump down the hole. Since he held onto a point of the hose that was too low, he smashes on the ground and dies. So what do you do? The interface doesn't allow you to tell him to just climb down the hose or to hold onto a higher point of it. Turns out, you need to find a skull in the desert and use its teeth to cut the hose shorter. Yeah, that's right, the character simply refuses to hold onto the correct point of the hose until it has been shortened for no good reason at all! Guess they call the game Stupid Invaders for a reason...
• Temujin. Can't figure out how to fix the painting? Have you tried heading into that other museum room, throwing the ball to break off a bit of horn from that one goat head, and then adding that to the paint? What do you mean you didn't think of that?
• In Time, Gentlemen, Please! (the sequel to Ben There, Dan That!), there's a moment where you have to uncork a bottle, obtaining both the cork and the bottle's contents. The bottle is made of glass. However, Ben pointedly refuses to break the bottle with any of the heavy or sharp junk in his inventory, and refuses to open it with his bottle opener magnet, insisting on uncorking it. Turns out uncorking it requires a pig's corpse and a time machine.
• The Trapped Series (not The Trapped Trilogy, which is also very guilty of this trope but that'll come later; the Series games have entirely different subtitles of "The White Rabbit", "The Dark", and "The Labyrinth") employs many instances of "dream logic" to fit with the odd setting the main character finds himself in. Just one of many leaps in logic you need to make is what to do with the mutant pear you get in the first game; turns out you need to dip it in red paint to make it look like an apple and then place it on top of a frightened-looking boy statue so that the second statue(?) of a rabbit aiming an arrow can shoot it off his head a la William Tell. An even more unintuitive case in the second game involves a rabbit Statue of Liberty: you need to use an icepick and a dead frog on it, so that the icepick will catch a bolt of lightning and make the frog come back to life. Who'd have guessed that?
• The Trapped Trilogy consists near-entirely of unintuitive trial-and-error puzzles, but each game has its own That One Puzzle:
  • In Trapped, the player is stuck in a room with a locked door, and finds an amputated finger in a wallet, along with some matches. Turns out the finger is artificial, and the player has to use the matches to burn the flesh off the finger to reveal the metal bone, and use that to pick the lock.
  • In Pursuit, the player has to feed a fish to a storekeeper's cat. To do this, the player has to go down to the sewers, coat a banana and a piece of rope with glue, attach the two together, then stick a knife through the banana to make a fishing rod to catch the fish with. The storekeeper thanks you by giving you an empty blowtorch.
  • In Escape, one of the first puzzles involves putting a valuable silver coin in a sink to let the water pour on the floor, and then summoning a guard so that he can slip on it. But that's nothing compared to a later puzzle that involves busting a square-shaped hole in a wall with your bare hands, taking a photo with an inexplicable pinhole in it, hammering a nail over the hole with a toilet lid, putting a lit lamp in the hole then covering it by hanging the photo over it, then clicking where the light shines on the opposite wall to reveal an instant cache with "evidence" in it. There is nothing in the game that hints to this in the slightest.
• Urban Runner has a lot of these, but one in particular takes the cake. Late in the game, a corrupt cop catches up to Max and gets ready to stuff him in the trunk. Max needs to find a quick way to take the cop out, with only a bottle of ink, a bottle of whisky, a magnet, two keyrings, and a document. Smash the whisky bottle over his head? Throw the ink in his face to blind him? Put the keys between your fingers and punch him? Nope. Throw the ink into the cop's open trunk, at which point the cop dives in to grab it and Max then lightly and slowly closes the trunk on him, somehow knocking him out.
• A Vampyre Story has a lot of Moon Logic Puzzles. The solution to almost every puzzle is hidden either in dialog (when you look at a critical item, its ingredients will be described; you will later need to replenish this supply, and to complete a different puzzle you collect the source of these ingredients), in characterization (you need to distract a man; he's a bit of a womanizer, and if you're willing to stretch your imagination real hard, the courtesan outside could be considered mildly attractive), or in the expectation that you will possess some bit of knowledge which is fairly common, but easy to overlook because it's not brought up in conversation much (one puzzle requires you to know basic color theory and the attendant terminology).
• Early on in the 1986 game The Very Big Cave Adventure, you come across a small spring with a little fence by it. After this, you can expect to wander aimlessly until you realise that the whole point of the game is to find valuable objects and get paid for them by the fence, as the word was used in its "dealer of stolen goods" meaning.
• The MegaZeux adventure game Weirdness: Chapter I, by the engine's creator Alexis Janson, is weird not just in its sense of humor but also in some of its puzzle solutions, which the game admits upfront. The most obvious example is when you descend into the sewer and find a doorway into a first-person maze crawl leading to a key that you need. However, it's sealed off by running sewage and you must find a way through. The solution: turn on all the sinks in your house, which somehow causes the sewer to drain. In the fanmade Special Edition, you'll have to turn on both of your bathtubs as well.
• The Witness:
  • Usually averted. Even if a puzzle doesn't seem to make sense, there is a logical explanation for its mechanics. However, there's one particular puzzle in the jungle (specifically, the last puzzle in the first set) that's so excruciatingly hard and makes so little sense, that even the most hardcore fans who otherwise tell people not to use walkthroughs will make an exception with this puzzle, and often refer to it as "the one single puzzle I had to brute force". There have been many debates, after figuring out the solution, about exactly why it is right. The puzzle requires you to input a five-note chirp^note There's been a debate about whether it's composed of four or five. Word of God has said they're indeed five notes, and it has been confirmed through spectral analysis. into a panel that only has room for four notes. To complicate things further, there's another audio that is seemingly a distraction but does have four notes. The solution? Input the four-note distraction into the panel instead of the five-note chirp.
  • You progress by tracing the correct path through mazes presented on various electronic panels and other surfaces. Once you've played long enough, you may start to notice similar shapes in the surrounding environment. These can actually be interacted with and traced like any other maze.
• A puzzle in the "oddly-angled" room within Zork II required the player to traverse it in the traditional directions of a baseball field, starting from home plate: southeast, northeast, northwest, southwest. Though hinted with various baseball puns and equipment in the room, the concept seems out of place in the fantasy setting, not to mention kind of unfair for non-American players. And even for Americans who just don't know the compass directions of baseball fields. Not to mention the necessity of assuming (for no good reason) that home plate is on the west corner of the diamond.^{Here's why}Because before electric lighting, games were played in the afternoon. Home plate was placed in the west corner so batters would be facing east, away from the setting sun. This is also why a left-handed pitcher is called a "southpaw": with home plate in the west corner, a left-hander throws with his southernmost hand. In the hint book they even apologised for what a difficult puzzle it was, in particular for non-American Zorkers.
  • Zork Zero had a logic puzzle that became a Moon Logic Puzzle due to being badly framed. The puzzle: you are forced into a queue for execution. Each victim is allowed to make a last request. If they make a request that the executioner can grant, the victim is hanged. If the executioner can't grant their request, the victim is beheaded. The "solution": make the request BEHEAD ME. The supposed logic is that if the executioner beheads you, he has shown he can do so, and should have hanged you; but if he hangs you, he can't behead you, and so should have beheaded you. Unfortunately, this "paradox" makes zero sense. Not only would it be perfectly possible to behead your corpse after hanging, but experimenting with the puzzle reveals that he does not have to actually grant your last request (if you request a mundane action, he may say he can do it but not do it); by that principle, he ought to just say that he can behead you but doesn't have to actually do so, and then hang you.

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