Best/ most memorable puzzles

[madhair60]

Just read about a Shakespearean puzzle in the Silent Hill thread that got me thinking about some of the brilliantly hard but supremely satisfying puzzles in other games.

Mainly when I think of puzzles in games I think of Myst and Riven, the latter of which is effectively two major puzzles that the smaller conundrums simply grant you the knowledge to solve.  Especially memorable to me is the sequence in which you are taught the D'Ni numbering system, using the very same toys D'Ni children would learn it with.  It's terribly difficult for sure, but supremely satisfying once you crack it.

Any other examples you can think of?

[Zetetic]

I remember an awful lot of the form of the puzzles in Starship Titanic, but I suspect that's not really to do with the puzzles, but the context.

That's not really very helpful.

[eluc55]

The new Zelda has superb puzzle towards the end of the game. Spoilered, as its still fairly new.

Spoiler alert

The last dungeon is an enormous puzzle box, each room containing a different challenge along with a panel which allows you to slide the rooms of the dungeon around to match up different doors and gain access to different rooms - a bit like those toys where you have to slide the little panels around to make a picture, and only one is missing. Crucially, the room you are standing in cannot move, so you have to work out where to go, and what rooms to move in order to reach the three pieces of the Triforce spread throughout the dungeon.

[close]

[garbed_attic]

Day of the Tentacle: hamster in the freezer

age 12: 3 months to discover

[SetToStun]

Curse of Monkey Island, extracting Blondbeard's gold tooth. That took me an embarrasingly long time to crack (as it were).

The maze in Realms of the Haunting, too - that actually prompted me to give the game up completely. I found a walkthrough eventually, just to read that bit, and it was exceptionally helpful, saying what amounted to "the maze is randomly generated on each play. Good luck."

[Big Jack McBastard]

Rama, old point and click affair based on the Arthur C Clarke book(s), plays like Myst set on a weird spaceship, that gives you alien maths to do which is basically hex converted into symbols, simple enough once you know what you're doing but if you start like I did without the knowledge that hex even existed it became a bit[nb]lot[/nb] more of a head scratcher as the first few calculations come back as you'd expect them to but then the rules fall apart once the numbers get high enough, then it's time to crack out the pad and paper to suss it out, I can't remember for the life of me what it unlocked/opened but seeing the console finally ping and let me continue exploring was a <nerd>'Awww yeah'</nerd> moment.

[I accept the terms of the]

The best puzzling experience I ever had was working out how to do the full game time trial on Braid with no outside influences. Improving on existing puzzle times with clever tricks really exposed what a brilliantly designed game Braid is. A really amazing experience, the game/brain interface was thin that day.

[alan nagsworth]

Pokémon Red/Blue. The switches in the bins in Serge's gym. Took me an absolute fucking age to work that shit out after some smart arse little shit at school told me it was completely random. Gnnhhh!!