"'Ninja star + Chess + Watermelon + Sand = Swimsuit. I need to bring a banana with me 'cause... it makes me immortal if I get shot. My teddy bear can find pieces of a screwdriver, but it is useless without fish.' I know that this game took a lot of work, but you can't make people think they'll need to take the cat and cover it with gasoline if they want to proceed..."
— 0EndlessNameless0, Pursuit user review
"Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Moseley in order to fool a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop's only motorcycle. In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake moustache. Utilizing the style of logic adventure game creators share with morons, Knight must do this even though Moseley does not have a moustache."
"So yeah, the only way to ditch the Harpies is with a harp. I'd call that obtuse, but in the realm of Sierra logic, a solution that's a play on words is actually pretty transparent."
"But after a certain point you have so many elements that the combinations that actually do anything are so rare and obtuse that all you can do is wait for the hints to come up. Fish plus knowledge equals octopus? That's not logic, that's fucking batshit on a sandwich. And I'm a little disappointed that cat plus internet doesn't equal YouTube."
—Zero Punctuation, iPhone games review on Doodle God
"Although this poem is about eating a face, it is still referring to the keypad next to the door, which, as you might have noticed, doesn't look a god damned thing like a face."
—Colin Lee's Silent Hill 3 FAQ
"As we continue work on the jobs, it's time to find the last of the mysterious tomes. However, their true purpose isn't quite so evident at first... and requires knowledge of how to read Japanese... Great fun! Thank gods for GameFAQs..."
Narrator: What Lilli now did was void of all logic, and she could already hear the uproar of the online reviewers. But she did it anyway.
(Lilli unscrews the bolt on a chandelier with a wrench-shaped balloon. The clown sitting below screams as it falls on him.)
Narrator: The online reviewers sounded a bit hoarse today. Maybe they shouldn't smoke so much.
(Lilli unscrews the bolt on a chandelier with a wrench-shaped balloon. The clown sitting below screams as it falls on him.)
Narrator: The online reviewers sounded a bit hoarse today. Maybe they shouldn't smoke so much.
Before you can even get into the sawmill, you have to find two parts of a mirror, arrange them on a wall, stick a pinecone to the front and then light it on fire because this in some way unlocks the front door. That's not a logic puzzle, that's something Hunter S. Thompson might attempt after he lost his front door key at a mushroom-enfueled wilderness retreat!
I do not believe out of all the things I could have done to this snake. I mean, I could have lassoed it, I could have bashed it, I could have lulled it to sleep with a harp - no. I play my tambourine and it skitters off like a frightened rabbit.
You mean I don't need the lead weights from the gift vouchers to weigh down the scales and get the handcuffs so I can get the lockpick from the police station to open the doctor's box and get the final ingredient for the espresso? But it all made so much sense in my head.
— Something Awful poster discussing Deponia
"There unfortunately is a very valid reason as to why Graphic Adventure games are niche status nowadays. I'm talking about the completely nonsensical puzzle-solving. This is sadly a long tradition within the Graphic Adventure genre, and Eternam is no exception. Now, I'm not talking about a really good logic puzzle, to open a door or something like that. I like those. I'm talking about ones where you need to slap a fish with a cricket bat, so it will sing a tune and put the robot to sleep, so you can sneak past it. Puzzles like that are not about good logic or deduction skills, but rather about trying to figure out what blend of weed the developers were smoking that particular day to get into the same state of mind as them."
— Ross's Game Dungeon on Eternam
W-wait. The fire extinguisher freezes, somehow, the sea of super-heated magma so you can walk over it, shoot the bouncing globes that restore your health, and... this makes no sense. It makes less sense than fucking blitzball, man.
Something funny happens to the mind of a video game developer when they've designed too many puzzles. They lose all contact with reality and begin operating on some sort of deranged logic barely recognizable as the product of a human mind. How else would you explain some of the more infuriatingly intricate puzzles out there?
"What!?" you're exclaiming. Yes, this was really how the game ended. I don't have any idea what I was thinking at the time. Freeze a pool of liquid on Mercury with an egg and bones in it: get gold!
— Present-day commentary for "Space-Man", The Early Years
Someone said 'juice puzzle is obscure' and immediately my mind goes 'I have to pour it down the trash'. (...) I'm going to pour the juice down the trash. Listen. Hear me out, hear me out. One, you know I would immediately think that because that's my thing! Two, 'obscure puzzle', I'm thinking back to the trash like 'why can't I interact with the trash'? And then I thought 'well, something has to go in here, something has to be done with the trash and I don't have any other items'! So we're pouring juice down the trash, and I don't know what the fuck that even means, but we're gonna do it and it's gonna be great.
Wait. Did you just use a letter from an onomatopoeia to fix a rail? But that doesn't make any sense! You might as well use, I don't know, a monkey to work a hydraulic pump! It's dumb! But what really gets me is... that it works...
This is the point where a lot of internet games media veterans will bring up Old Man Murray's classic article about what killed adventure games. In which writer Erik Wolpaw – who incidentally would go on to work on Psychonauts and the Portal games, trivia fans – describes a puzzle from the adventure game Gabriel Knight 3. In which the protagonist must go through a very roundabout process to acquire some cat hair to use as a false moustache in order to pass as someone in a photograph, but also the photograph doesn't have a moustache, so he has to draw one on with a pen. The article concludes with the wonderful line "Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide." Fair enough, it's a terrible puzzle. But it's not the intricacy of the process that makes it bad, it's the fact that it's fucking mental. No reasonable person would intuit that they needed a false moustache to pass as someone who doesn't have a moustache. And even if they did, most sane people would then maybe cut off a bit of their own hair to use, not torment a passing blameless moggy. The key word here is intuit. The end goal of any puzzle game is to make the player feel clever for figuring it out. It can't be IMPOSSIBLE to figure out, neither can it be so obvious we don't feel clever. You have to walk a fine line.
—Yahtzee Croshaw, Extra Punctuation, "Monkey Island and the Complicated Art of Puzzles"
" You just know that the guy who made this game thought up that "skeleton key" joke first and the puzzle second.
