10 Video Game Puzzles That Stopped EVERYONE
Silent Hill 3's Shakespeare puzzle can rot.
Alongside battling enemies and overcoming tough boss fights, solving puzzles is another huge part of how video games like to challenge players.
Sometimes these puzzles can be as simple as finding a key to unlock a door or searching through nearby documents to uncover the combination to a safe. Other times they're more demanding, and require players to decipher riddles or think outside of the box to solve a supposedly "logical" scenario.
No matter how tough some of these conundrums may seem, the best and most rewarding puzzles will always nudge players in the right direction and have a solution which makes sense within the rules of the game.
However, there are other puzzles out there which offer no such courtesies. To reach the answers to these brain-benders, players will need to wrestle with some of the most obtuse and abstract logic ever conceived, or possess an in-depth knowledge of a niche subject.
With no clear hints about what to do, it's possible to get stuck at these sections for hours without making any sort of progress. Thankfully, online walkthroughs now exist, which are the only way that most players will figure out what they were supposed to do.
10. Waiting For A Cloud To Move - Braid (2008)
Coming from the mind of Johnathan Blow (the same developer behind the brain-bending puzzle game The Witness), Braid is a fascinating title that used its central time rewinding mechanic to form the basis of ingenious platforming puzzles, alongside weaving a fairytale story that was just as perplexing as everything else in the game.
The hardest of the platforming conundrums, however, involved collecting hidden stars scattered throughout the game. Obtaining any of them was a fiendishly challenging task that demanded mastery of the game’s mechanics, alongside solving cryptic levels that were borderline cruel.
It would be easy to miss any of these stars without a guide pointing you in the right direction, but the most elusive was the one located in level 2-2.
All that needs to be done is to use a cloud to travel from one side of the screen to the other, then hop over the wall to find the star. When the cloud takes literal hours to get to its destination, though, most players won’t even realise the piece of scenery is moving.
Thankfully, it only takes finding seven of the eight stars to unlock Braid's secret ending.