Top 10 Hardest Video Game Puzzles

This game, based on the famous Ripley's books and attractions, sees you as Ripley himself as he travels the world. In this specific puzzle, a guard to a temple asks you for a ring in order to gain entrance. After looking around forever and not finding one, you have to figure out to take the cigar from your inventory and pop off the cigar band, and then use THAT as ring. It's both challenging and frustrating due to the the fact that the game never hints at the possibility that you could just…fake it.

The Silent Hill series are a bunch of terrifying games. But this puzzle in the 3rd swapped our fear for frustration, just like the piano puzzle from the original. The player must organize Shakespeare books in order from a given clue. On the hardest difficulty, the clues are written in Shakespearian language and reference the plays, and the player has to figure out which play the clue is referring to. Not only that, but specific clues reference the need to change numbers from the completed order. It's a confusing mess.

As an American tourist unraveling a conspiracy in Paris, you come across a goat blocking the entrance to a castle. Attempts to walk past him only end in head butting. The solution is simple: allow him to butt you, ... no really, then get up quicker than usual, run to a piece of farm machinery, and have him attempt to butt you again, only to get tangled in the machinery, allowing you to pass. Technically it’s easy, but its also not very intuitive because you’re left to assume that having him hit you is a failure.

We're going way back for this one. Based on the book series of the same name, this text adventure game has you traveling the universe, and getting stuck on a puzzle. Usually, the fish dispenses but slips away under a drain. No worries! All you need to do is put a towel over the drain, (Hope you remembered to bring one). Then steal a character's satchel to put in front of the panel. After that, you put some junk mail on the satchel and press the dispenser. This was so notoriously hard, Infocom sold t-shirts that read, "I got the Babel Fish!"

"Portal", a game about solving puzzles using a gun that create two portals to travel through, is rife with challenging puzzles, but Chamber 18 is the worst. It's an overall challenging chamber, full of sections not fit to shoot, turrets you have to dispose of, ledge jumping, and platform riding. Basically, everything which goes into puzzle games has gone into this chamber. What makes it even worse are the timed switch sections that keep you on your toes.

The third titles in the classic game series finds Jill Valentine wandering Raccoon City attempting to avoid the Nemesis, but her greatest challenge might be this brain teaser. This puzzle is like a reverse Tetris, in which the player has to rearrange the colored cubes in order to complete a specific combination of wave ranges. It’s difficult due to the constant back and forth between wave ranges and the fact that the result is different for each play through. The annoying beeping sound throughout the puzzle doesn’t help, either.

In this puzzle in the cult classic point and click adventure, you need to recover a dropped key from a subway rail. So what do you do? Scatter crumbs from an apartment window so a seagull will peck a rubber duck in the canal below, and as a result flows down the canal. Then locate the duck, tie a line to a clamp, put it through the hole, re-inflate the duck, then position it like a fishing line over the key so the duck deflates and traps the key. Quite insane when you think about it.

This platforming/puzzle game brought about a community of players that has rarely been seen in any other video game. First, you have to stand in a specific area of a level and input a set of buttons to make the monolith appear. Then the player has to input another specific set of buttons again in order to complete the puzzle. The buttons are so obscure and complex that many players simply believed it unsolvable, and it was only figured out with a massive coordinated effort from the community.

This game, about an infant kidnapped from a Scottish family of nobles, has one of the most frustrating and nonsensical puzzles in all of gaming. In order to take a reserved motorcycle, the player has to impersonate the man with the reservation by resembling the picture in his passport. This leads to finding clothes, and the infamous part where you have to put tape on a hole in a door, spray a cat, have it run into the tape, and steal the hair off said tape to make a moustache. Why you couldn’t just use a sharpie is beyond me.

Before we unveil our top pick, let's take a look at a few honorable mentions.

Lt. Surge Power Switch Puzzle
"Pokemon Red/Blue" (1998)

Silver's Ball Puzzle
"Sonic the Hedgehog" (2006)

Puzzle 135 Royal Escape
"Professor Layton and the Curious Village" (2008)

The Knight Grahame is stopped by a gnome and forced to guess its name. Some people figured the gnome was Rumpelstiltskin, but a clue urge players to "think backwards" so naturally the spelling it backwards means his name should be whatever the hell that is backwards, right? Well actually no. The alphabet has to be reversed not the letters, meaning A is Z, B is Y, etc., making his name a horrible vomitus concoction of letters. Mind you in the 2001 remake you can actually use Rumplestiltskin backwards to guess his name, probably because no one else could figure out that you had to reverse the alphabet.
Do you agree with our list? What hard video game puzzle made you want to rage quit? For more top tens that don’t require you to do something absurd every day, be sure to subscribe to Watchmojo.com.