5 Ridiculously Hard To Solve Video Game Puzzles

Despite the fact that King's Quest V proudly continued Sierra's player-hating policy, it became the best-selling PC game from 1990 to 1995 (it was dethroned by Myst). The developers knew most players used frequent game saves to avoid death, so they came up with a sinister way to kill gamers -- they hid goals and items in locations you couldn't return to, but were necessary to win. Here's an example:

Early in the game, you might notice a rat being menaced by a cat outside an inn. You need to, for no clear reason, help the rat escape. If you don't, the game doesn't care, and that's where the treachery lies. In most games, failing a puzzle means you are killed and go back to a checkpoint. King's Quest V will let you play for hours before you discover that innocuous fucking decision to let a cat win a fight cost you your entire adventure.

Sierra Entertainment
Quick! You have three seconds to use the boot from your inventory on those pixels
in the middle of the screen or you will die two years from now!

Say you, like every player on their first playthrough, let the rat die. Later in the story, you are tied up and left in a basement. If the rat is dead, your choices are waiting while you die or struggling while you die. If you saved its life, your rat friend will appear and chew you loose. It sort of makes sense after you know it, but picture solving this without the Internet 20 years ago and you'll start to realize why gamers often seem so cranky.

Sierra Entertainment
"I always die at this part! If only I had more rat friends! W-wait a minute,
that's it! Cheese-scented pants!"

And that shitty rat puzzle wasn't the only time you could unknowingly mess up and make the game impossible. Early on you can get a pie from a bakery, which the game lets you eat. Yum, that seems like the right thing to do with pie! Well, if you eat it, then you have nothing comical to throw during the sudden yeti attack that happens later.

Sierra Entertainment
Once again, eating a pie is not the solution to your problems.

The cruelty of tricking the player into saving their game after creating an unwinnable situation never lets up. Did you let your useless owl friend die on an island? Did you forget to stuff a cat into a sack? Did you neglect to be caught by a monster so you could stick a fish hook in the dungeon wall to retrieve moldy cheese? You idiot! All three of those decisions will make it impossible to beat this game!

Sierra Entertainment
Welcome to your doom, King Graham! Unless you brought your moldy cheeses and sacks of cats!

To make things more complicated, you don't just go try to untie the thing yourself. Oh, no -- you instead have to describe the random knot to other characters in the game, to get tips. It almost stops being a game and starts becoming a psychological test.

Double Fine Productions
"I guess I'd describe the knot like grandmother's knitting needles wrestling with two fathers' penises."

Once you have the knot memorized (something your brain probably isn't used to doing), you walk to another location and describe it to a knot expert for instructions on untying it. Of course, if you mistook a "lazy pole vaulter" knot for a "headache wearing a belt" knot, the instructions will be useless and you'll be one more confused person tugging on a lazy pole vaulter and wondering why nothing is happening.

Double Fine Productions
It's kinda like an inkblot test, in that it'll make you instantly recognize how crazy you are.

This all may seem doable, but the instructions from the knot expert for the untying sequence are not A, then B, then C. They are written in a bizarre string of non sequiturs. For instance, do you poke the clown's nose after tickling the foot, or before? The puzzle is like lying in a field with a crazy person and trying to figure out which cloud is shaped like a cat driving a hot dog.

Double Fine Productions
It looks like the cartoon adaptation of True Detective.

If you botch these byzantine blueprints, you of course have to reset the puzzle. That means trudging back to get another set of "instructions" to follow. The reliance on weird descriptions makes the solutions feel frustratingly subjective, and when you combine that with the long walks needed to retry it, you may decide to solve this knot Alexander The Great-style and just hack your computer in half with a sword.

But where the game really shows its hate for its players is when you wander below deck to play poker with a drunken old crewman. Because nothing says "important covert mission" like hours and hours of booze-fueled card games.

Sierra
"What mission? Some asshole handed me an ID card that gave me
nuclear submarine clearance, so I walked on and started drinking."

The drunken old man has an important device that neutralizes magnetic fields but won't give it to you unless you beat him at Boss Dice, a variation on poker played with dice. It's a pretty absurd obstacle for a spy to run into. It'd be like Q refusing to give James Bond his laser watch until he comes to his improv show and brings five friends.

So you need to play dice to get your mission-critical equipment. Fine. It's not like you got into playing video games for your love of sensible logic. Anyway, the nice thing about gambling in a game is you can always save. If randomness doesn't go your way, you simply rewind time and try again. Well, remember, this is a Sierra adventure game, so your obvious solution can suck it.

If you lose at this game, and since it's random dice you might, you can only reload your game once. If you do so a second time, the old man breaks the fourth wall and declares you a cheat. Which is true outside of video games, but he seems to know he's in one, which means we've uncovered a paradox that surely threatens all existence as we know it.

Sierra
"Now lad, ye can be fuckin' yerself."

In this old coot's code of morality, it's fine to withhold stolen, important equipment from a superior officer, but if you cheat at a game he made up you can go straight to Hell. And he doesn't just force you to replay some of the poker -- he nukes your entire save file. The developers decided that if you can't roll dice well enough, that ambassador doesn't deserve to live. Be thankful for the games you have today, world, because 20 years ago they were designed entirely around nyah and nyah.

The nice thing about the key in the music box is that, while impossible to intuit, you can still try again if you land on any of the equally unlikely random solutions. The same isn't true when you are trying to save a girl named Marie from leaping off a roof.

Nintendo
"She must be upset about all the time I spent complaining about that
GODDAMN KEY IN THAT GODDAMN MUSIC BOX!"

After you walk close to Marie you need to employ the police negotiation tactic of quickly lunging at the upset person, which is simulated by closing your DS. It's times like this where the word "huh!?" seems so inadequate. And figuring out that isn't enough; you have to wait for the brief moment when she turns her back completely to you and then rapidly snap your DS closed. If you time it right, you'll reopen it to a daring rescue. If you miss, her last moments are you impotently lunging at her.

Nintendo
Another relationship saved by closing a Nintendo.

Gavin saw a Transformer today. A bicycle changed from a vehicle into a pedestrian, instead of waiting for the red light. He has a Twitter: @GavinJamieson

Video games are the spawns of evil. Anyone who disagrees has never dealt with the characters in The 10 Most Terrifying Video Game Enemies Of All Time and 13 Dick Moves We Never Forgave Video Game Characters For.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see what life is like for our pixelated friends in Why Shopping In A Video Game Universe Sucks, as well as watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook because we're cheaper than replacing broken controllers.