10 Ridiculous Video Game Puzzles Everyone Cheated For
1. The Monolith - Fez
And now, we come to the puzzle that shames every other one on this list - even P.T.'s ludicrously obtuse baby laughs.
Smash hit indie platformer Fez stirred its fanbase into a frenzy when players found themselves stumped by the game's seemingly final challenge - The Black Monolith.
In order to obtain Fez's final collectable red cube, players had to figure out how to make a character-less black monolith - resembling the very same object from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - materialise.
Thousands of players consequently shared their ideas and notes online, eventually discovering that a torn map in the game could be deciphered into a cheat code of sorts, which would make the monolith appear.
But the monolith itself was just the beginning, and player agonised over what to do with the monolith - or whether the notoriously abrasive designer Phil Fish simply included the object as a final provocation for fans.
After the dev team gave players an olive branch by confirming that more button inputs in the room would indeed solve the puzzle, fans literally just brute-forced the hell out of it, spending 18 hours testing all 66,227 possible permutations (exacerbated by the inclusion of a first-person mode as part of Fez's New Game +).
Eventually the monolith gave way to reveal the final red cube with the code, Down Down LT RT RT A Up. But with no clear explanation for the puzzle's logic, players were still left baffled and unable to find true closure.
One fan offered up their own relatively convincing solution, while others have suggested that the fanbase coming together to figure things out was in fact the real solution.