1 + 1 = -7.43763FΩ%!U The Asinine Puzzle Thread

[Keyrock]

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:  

Shy Gypsy Slyly Spryly Tryst By My Crypt

 

 

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:

Bashful nomad, craftily, agilely, meet secretly near my underground vault

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.

Edited February 15, 2017 by Keyrock

[melkathi]

I owned the 7th Guest back then. But for some reason it wouldn't run on my computer so I lend it to a friend. He played it quite a bit, but never mentioned this puzzle. I am glad I never had to put up with it and spend my time playing Eric the Unready - a truly great adventure game, with some silly puzzles, yes, but mostly ones that made sense if you accepted the game's logic.

[Keyrock]

I owned the 7th Guest back then. But for some reason it wouldn't run on my computer so I lend it to a friend. He played it quite a bit, but never mentioned this puzzle. I am glad I never had to put up with it and spend my time playing Eric the Unready - a truly great adventure game, with some silly puzzles, yes, but mostly ones that made sense if you accepted the game's logic.

I loved The 7th Guest.  Not all the puzzles were bad, some of them even made sense and were somewhat clever.  There was quite a bit of variety to the puzzles, which was nice, but the quality was all over the place.  A few of them you pretty much had to fall back to trial and error to "solve" them, which is never a good thing, but there were quite a few that made sense too.  Mainly, though, I loved that game for the exquisitely cheesy FMV scenes.  They were...

 

/kisses tips of fingers

 

Magnifique!

 

I've never played Eric the Unready.  Is it a point & click?  Do they sell it on GOG?

[Bartimaeus]

...Do you have to get all the words in that exact order?

[Keyrock]

...Do you have to get all the words in that exact order?

Of course.

[the_dog_days]

As soon as I saw the title of this thread I immediately thought of 7th Guest.

[Gorth]

I bought this old Infocom Adventure game once upon a time. Can't remember the exact name but I think it was Starcross or something similar. I never beat it (that was before the internet). I think you needed a chemical engineering degree to get some of the puzzles

[Tale]

I love the phrase "Moon Logic Puzzle." It's so evocative of just how nonsensical it all is. But this specific example named a trope entry that I'm not sure how it's different. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SolveTheSoupCans

 

Anyway, I don't think there's a lot to say. Someone either thought they were being witty or they rushed something together with the only criteria being that it should be hard. I imagine the early days of playtesting played no little part in the whole affair. Get stuck, ask Jim, and if you think it's a real problem, well, they can always call the tip line.

[Agiel]

The Longest Journey has a bunch that are particularly egregious. The big one in my mind was the one in which you had to get into the alleyway of a movie theater, but the proprietor of the theater was outside sweeping the sidewalk and would catch April if she tried to steal into there. The solution was to dip some mints into a random puddle of toxic goo, then give it to an undercover cop loitering nearby who would then gag and inadvertently spit it onto the owner of the cinema. He would then be angered by this act and chase away the undercover cop, clearing the way into the alley.

 

Were there any that were worse? Could be. I only managed to get through half-way through the game before I said "**** this" and uninstalled it. My brother had to standby with his computer reading off the solutions to the puzzles he got off of a FAQ, and even he was doubly baffled by the solutions in written form.

[Zoraptor]

I seem to remember some of the Discworld (game) puzzles being... rather esoteric. I never really liked adventure games due to their 'randomly combine everything you find and use on everything you can think of. Hope you picked up that old newspaper in the first room you need twenty hours later too' nature.

 

As soon as I saw the title of this thread I immediately thought of 7th Guest.

 

I thought of the Pentium Floating Point Error bug. For some reason, since 1+1 ought not to use floating point.

 

Though it does now make me wonder if some puzzle games that relied on maths couldn't be completed on old Pentiums. And reminds me of "I am Pentium of Borg: division is futile you will be approximated" which is good, since someone recently told me memes didn't exist until the 2000s.

[kirottu]

I haven't played many adventure games so I haven't encounter these types of illogical puzzles. My pet peeve with adventure games is that you have to have the exact thing to solve the puzzle. I think it was in Dreamweb where I had to break an electric wire thingy to open a door. First I tried my trusty axe on it. Didn't work. Then I tried pouring my trusty beer on it. Didn't work. Turns out I had to use a knife to open the wires and then pour water on them.

 

I still think axe and beer should have worked.

[melkathi]

I've never played Eric the Unready.  Is it a point & click?  Do they sell it on GOG?

Sadly it is not on GOG. It is on Abandonia. It's a Legend adventure, so not exactly point and click, though since at least Spellcasting 101 they had started adding a menu for those who prefer point and click to writing out their actions.

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/192/Eric+the+Unready.html

[HoonDing]

Nibiru: tying a stick of dynamite to a rat in order to open a door.

[melkathi]

Second Runaway game which had you change room and come back several times, to do the exact same thing until the result changed. But as good as the first game in the series was, anything after that was garbage.

[HoonDing]

I never even finished the first Runaway.

[Tale]

That's because you're a quitter. I played them all and they were all imminently forgettable.

[majestic]

There are two for me that stand out, the usual suspects aside.

 

Dragonsphere's Ratsickle riddle.

 

 

Basically you need to pass a door that is actually a portal into another room where the floor burns you to a cinder if you walk through. To solve this you need to put a dead rat you find into a freezer to turn it into a ratsickle. With the ratsickle you could cool the doorframe enough to loosen the portal - which isn't the *door* but just a tacked on portal you then need to remove with the sucking cups of tentacle you found earlier.

 

Then you walk through the door and die again, because the door just leads to the same room with the burning floor. To solve that one just needs to put the portable portal beneath a trickle of water. FFS. I only solved it by randomly trying things when I was stuck.

 

 

And Final Fantasy Adventure's Figure 8. I eventually solved it. It just took a while. In fact, I played so long that the rest of the game got extremely boring because I massively grinded levels and money by running through every freaking screen trying to figure out what to do.

 

 

Obviously, run in a figure 8 between two palm trees for two or more rounds on a random screen to open a cave... riiiiight.

 

[Enoch]

I refer you all to the best "Let's Play" narrative on the web:  CrookedB on Wizardry IV

 

Virtually everything in that game was an asinine puzzle.

[Keyrock]

Next up I present one of the most well known utterly bonkers puzzles in point & click gaming history, the Moustache Puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.  The Gabriel Knight series revolves around the titular main character, a struggling New Orleans based novelist who, unwittingly, becomes an investigator of sorts as his research for a novel gets him mixed up in all kinds of voodoo shenanigans.  It's a very well known series from Jane Jensen, renown for its stories and charactes, with the first game in particular being considered a true classic of the genre.

 

The puzzle in question has you trying to impersonate a a police officer so that you can get his scooter because the scooter Gabriel already has isn't as cool (I'm not kidding).  To do so first

Gabriel needs to steal the police officer's passport so that he can pretend to be him.

 Nothing ridiculous so far, right.  Well, here's where we take a sharp left turn into bat****crazyville.  See if you can follow along with the logic here.

Gabriel needs to make a fake moustache for his disguise.  To make the fake moustache Gabriel needs to put some tape on a hole then scare a cat to run past it so that a bit of fur would stick to the tape which would make the moustache.

 I couldn't make this up if I tried, but the kicker is that we haven't even gotten to the truly insane part of the puzzle yet.

The truly crazy thing is that the police officer in the passport photo doesn't even have a moustache and you have to draw a moustache on the passport photo to make it mach the ridiculous cat hair moustache you have stuck to your lip.  I **** you not!  You make a fake moustache out of cat hair to disguise yourself as a man who doesn't even have a moustache to begin with.

Here's a picture of the solution:

 

 

 

 

As an aside, don't hate on Jane Jensen for that utter trainwreck of a puzzle, she didn't design it.  The story is that it was put in the game last minute by someone from publishing to replace a puzzle Jane had there originally.  I don't know what Jane's original puzzle was, but I have a hard time believing it was worse that what the game shipped with.

Edited February 16, 2017 by Keyrock

[the_dog_days]

 

 

 

 

That guy looks like the guy in the 'adult shop' in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

[Hurlshort]

Not a puzzle that stumped me, but this was one of my favorites from back in the day...

 

Edited February 16, 2017 by Hurlshot

[Malcador]

That damn skeleton puzzle in The Dig. Had trouble with the reactor puzzle but that was just me being (more) stupid back then.

[Malcador]

That's because you're a quitter. I played them all and they were all imminently forgettable.

I still remember how the third game acts as if the second never existed

[Tale]

The third game's the one with the crossdressers, right? That's all I remember.

[Malcador]

That's the first. I think.