Another Top 10 Hardest VideoGame Puzzles

Gotta press em’ all! In the first entry of Nintendo’s earth-shatteringly popular franchise, your job is to become the very best (like no one ever was). Standing in your way are eight tough gym leaders, including the electricity based Lt. Surge. While Surge is no pushover, getting to him is a pain, as you have to press two buttons that are randomly located in one of the many trashcans around the room. If you get one wrong, the switches will relocate, turning the puzzle into tedious trial and error. Too bad you can’t get Pikachu to short out the gym’s power.

It’d take someone as wise as Yoda to get this one on the first try. While exploring the tomb of ancient Sith Lord Naga Sadow, the player character and their party face many dangers, like terrifying and violent beasts, and dastardly traps. But the tomb’s most diabolical secret is a ring puzzle. To open the tomb, you need to transfer four rings of power from one pillar to another, but only the rings highest on their respective pillars can be moved, and you can’t move one ring above a ring in a higher position. While the rules are simple, the solution requires the forethought and patience of a Jedi.

It’s real easy to get lost in these woods. The cult-classic adventure game, directed by Tim Schafer, contains plenty of his trademark humor. Unfortunately, it also contains his penchant for nonsensical solutions to what should be simple problems. Early on, protagonist Manny finds himself lost in the Petrified Forest. He’s carrying a road sign, and every time he puts it down it points in a new direction. Obviously, it’s pointing which direction you need to go, right? Nope. It’s actually pointing to where you need to place the sign itself, which then activates a secret passage. You’ll likely be as dead as Manny before you figure that out.

There’s no fate more terrible than having to solve a puzzle with janky motion controls. In one of the countless shrines in Nintendo’s massive open world adventure, Link is forced to take a break from exploring, fighting and horseback riding to solve what should be a fast and simple puzzle involving navigating a ball through a maze. But the forced motion controls turn the would-be exercise in precision into an exercise in frustration, as the slightest false move will send the ball into a bottomless pit. Luckily, there is an easier solution. All you have to do is think outside the box. Or in this case, outside the maze.

He may fight like a dairy farmer, but he solves puzzles like a pro. In the sequel to the original LucasArts cult-classic, affable pirate Guybrush Threepwood comes across a waterfall that can be turned off with a pump. To work the pump, Guybrush needs a wrench. Nothing a quick trip to the local hardware store can’t solve, right? Except instead, Guybrush needs to find a piano-playing monkey, stick a banana on the monkey’s time-keeping metronome, and then steal the hypnotised monkey and use the poor simian as a wrench. Get it? It’s a monkey wrench. Did we mention Tim Schafer also worked on this game?

For a salesman, former detective Kyle Hyde sure gets into a lot of trouble. In this noir-themed visual novel, the game’s last chapter also fittingly involves one of it’s toughest and most nerve wracking puzzles. Trapped in an airtight room and quickly running out of air, Kyle must boot up an old computer. Armed only with his wits, a pencil, a nail file, and the Nintendo DS’s extra features, Kyle uses the pencil’s graphite to give the PC the charge it needs to turn on. Add the life or death time limit, and this is one mystery that’s tough to forget, no matter how many times you get hit in the head.

A Hideo Kojima puzzle as confusing as his narratives… great. Before Snake went 3-d with “Metal Gear Solid”, he was giving guards the slip in two dimensions in the second instalment of the Metal Gear series. But when a top-secret facility is guarded by an impenetrable laser fence, there’s only one way to sneak in: find a random egg, walk up to the facility’s gate, wait for the egg to hatch into an owl, and release the owl, which will then hoot, convincing one of the guards that it’s night time, and thus time to turn off the laser grid. Get it? Got it? Good.

To get through this level, you’ll have to keep both your mind and your ears open. In this expansive point and click adventure game, it’s very easy to get lost, but the most notoriously difficult area is the maze-like island known as the Selenitic Age. The labyrinthine world is filled with dead-ends and wrong turns, making a pen and pencil a must to keep track of where you are. But while map-making is par for the course with Myst, the twist in the Selenitic Age is how you navigate: mainly, by listening to different sounds around the island. So walk softly, and carry a solid pair of headphones.

We wonder if Professor Layton’s homework is as hard as the brain-twisters he solves for a living. Case in point: A grocery store owner named Garland asks the good Professor to help him seal up a container of garlic to cut off the stinky smell. But while the container has three openings at the top, the Professor only has two corks to plug them with. While it may seem like you need to find the right combination of where to place the two corks on the container, the actual answer is almost maddeningly simple: you’re supposed to use the two corks to plug Garland’s nostrils. When in doubt, follow your nose.

“Challenge” is a bit of an understatement. In the beautiful and riddle-filled world of “The Witness”, the optional and secret Challenge features some of the toughest and most brain-melting puzzles of all. After discovering the secret area known as the Caves, the player must solve several line-drawing puzzles, using every previously introduced mechanic in the game to find the solutions. And while walkthroughs might help with the puzzles in the main game, they’re next to useless here, because every puzzle in the Challenge has randomly generated elements, meaning no amount of internet knowledge will save you… But when you solve it, you get an achievement. So, there’s that…