Search the Community

There have been a lot of really stupid and illogical puzzles in video games over the years. Obviously, point & click adventure games jump to mind immediately when discussing illogical puzzles, particularly those from the late 80s and early 90s, but other genres of games have had their share of really ridiculous puzzles as well. I thought it would be fun to share and discuss some of those here. SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY. (I'll spoiler tag them for double safety) I'll start off with the infamous Cans Puzzle from Trilobyte's The 7th Guest from 1993. For those not familiar with the game, The 7th Guest was one of the main CD-ROM seller games. It was one of the very first games released on CD-ROM shortly after CD-ROMs became available to the general public and it garnered a lot of buzz and sold a lot of CD-ROMs in its day. The game was a horror mystery game. Henry Stauf was a drifter who committed a bunch of atrocities as he meandered through life then one night had a vision and immediately after started creating really amazing toys that would lead him to become rich and build his mansion. The children that received the toys, though, had a tendency to get ill and die sometime afterward. One night, Henry Stauf invited 6 guests over to his mansion for a dinner party. They all died mysteriously. You play the game from first person perspective and are searching through that mansion trying to piece together what happened on that night. There is a lot of wandering back and forth throughout this mansion where you encounter FMV scenes giving you (hilariously poorly acted, as is the case with most FMV games) bits of what happened on that night and puzzles to solve. The puzzles vary wildly, both in design and quality. Perhaps the most infamous puzzle in the game is the cans puzzle. You look in a cabinet and see a bunch of cans with letters on them. No real instructions are given to you, but it doesn't take much of a leap of logic to figure out that you need to rearrange them to make a sentence. So far so good. The problem is that there are no vowels except a bunch of "Y"s and no real direction given as to what you are trying to write here. In essence, the developers thought it would be fun to flip through a dictionary and find a bunch of words that use "Y" as a vowel and create a rather nonsensical "sentence" out of it. The solution to the puzzle is: Here's a picture of the solved puzzle: How the **** are you expected to deduce that bunch of nonsense? Now, you can go into a certain room in the mansion and get hints for puzzles, an action which costs you game score. If you do that you get the following hint: That does at least give you some direction and if you match it up backwards from the solution it works, but even with the hint it's an utterly ridiculous "sentence" to try to construct and without the hint there's literally nothing to give you the slightest bit of guidance toward a bunch of gibberish. What are your thoughts on the cans puzzle, or perhaps you have an asinine puzzle you'd like to share? I'll add more ridiculous puzzles in the future, there are tons of them from Sierra alone.