10 Brain Bending Video Game Puzzles That Will Drive You Insane

Perhaps a puzzle game trips you up because it seems so simple, and yet refuses to yield. Like searching for lost keys by returning to the same place over and over again, the obvious strategy you repeatedly employ simply does not work. Only after the tenth failed attempt do you stop cursing yourself, and turn your ire on the developers.

Some puzzle games seem insurmountable because of the sheer complexity of the task they present. The pitiful controller in your hand seems inadequate for a puzzle that surely requires a supercomputer and a team of NASA scientists. And some puzzles are just plain nasty. Any pretensions to skills in logic and deduction are ruthlessly torn away, and you find yourself pounding the floor and screaming 'Why, God, why?'

These are the puzzles that were designed to screw with your mind. And boy did they succeed.

Sometimes knowing the answer isn't what is required of you in a puzzle. Sometimes it's knowing the question. The Witness teaches you this over the course of 700 (although it feels like about 100,000) puzzles. Some of which you'll be equipped to solve immediately, many of which require understanding you only acquire at other locations on the island.

The witness is an incredibly slow reveal. The significance of things you've seen only start to become clear later on. The effect is magnificent. The Witness represented an extraordinary break through in gaming when it came it in 2006, taking puzzle gaming to a whole new level. But make no mistake about it, stepping on to the island is like Neo taking the red pill in The Matrix, it represents the search for truth. But it can easily break you.

The lights you shoot up to the mysterious mountain at the heart of the island can illumine, but they can also blind. The Witness is an argument which requires you to simulatanously perceive the microscopic details and the big picture. And that, as any optician worth his salt would tell you, will hurt your head.