bullshit puzzles

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>>4068506
I had completely missed the German poetry book from the upper bookshelf. I didn't even bother to click there before because I had clicked some other books in the store and Gabe had replied "I have already read all of those" every single time. I did try the ladders at one point, but Grace told Gabe to get the fuck down, so I thought the upper shelf books were out of question. There was also another book in the upper shelf about snakes, and reading that book aloud Grace would say some stupid shit about snakes and demons, which -I fucking kid you not- is a HINT to the clock puzzle! What the fuck?! Also, remember that painting you sold earlier? That pixel mess? Remember how many snakes it had? Oh you didn't even remember it having snakes? Well though fucking shit, because that's also a HINT to the fucking clock puzzle! You set the clock to show 3 o'clock, rotate the demon head as top symbol, and then you get the clock open!

TL;DR:
Fuck this game.

Just look at the drawing, look at it! It looks like the clock! The the "T" shaped forks could easily be the minute and hour arms, the (o o) symbol would represent angel (as in angel eyes), the O O would represent the demon (as in snake eyes) etc.
I was expecting the professor to make a call and tell Gabriel the veve is some sort of "code", but nope.
I was just over thinking this shit.

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I mean, I can appreciate the depth and complexity of this puzzle, this game is not fucking around. But c'mon now. How in earth could I know about the goddamn snakes and numbers and shit? Saint George's bookstore is full of red herring books that are there just for the atmosphere; books laying on the floor, books on the table etc. and you can't use any of them, so why the fuck would I even attempt to read any other books if the ones that are clearly visible are not usable?
This game doesn't even have that item indicator like LucasArts games have where you can just hover the cursor over item, and the little text would tell you what item it is. That is a good way to tell the player which items are actual items and not background. In this game most items are so well blended with the background without any indication that there even are usable items.

Thank god for the internet. If it wasn't for internet or walkthroughs, I would be stuck with this game forever.

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Well hello there, non-native English speakers.

Throwing the horse harness on the snake in King's Quest to turn it into a pegasus. It makes sense in hindsight (Snakes are associated with Medusa, and Pegasus sprang from her corpse) but there is no way in hell anyone would figure that out through deduction.

>>4069558
It was still Bullshit for english speakers 2bh

>>4069558
the troll bridge in 1 seemed so bizarre until years and years later

what's in the picture?

GK became so much easier for me once I realized Gabe is the biggest douche ever and should be played as such.

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if this is four

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That fucking thing.

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>>4070343
then what is this?

>>4070348
Five you faggot.

>>4069702
it's a water spigot/pump valve.
You need to shut it off to turn off a waterfall.

The solution is a pun based on a tool with an animal name.

>>4070345
>no clef
this triggers me

>>4068506
>>4068510
>>4068524
I always wanted so badly to get into Gabriel Knight, but puzzles like the one you described turned me off the game pretty quickly. It's pretty, it sounds great, but fuck going through without a walkthrough.

Ever play Return to Ringworld? It's the second in the series from Tsunami, all very closely adapted from Larry Niven's source material. And it's a really well done graphical adventure game, and very polished. But there is one puzzle early in the game that feels like it was put in just to generate calls to the tip line. You have to bring your engine out of stasis, but there's an automated laser protecting the stasis field. Knowing to use the laser dispersal gas to protect yourself going in is braindead simple. Knowing to put the clamp on the laser and walk out thus breaking the laser, isn't that hard to figure out. But can you figure out how to get rid of the gas so you can use your stasis gun on the field to free your engine? Go ahead, try to figure it out without a walkthrough, I'll wait. The clue to this puzzle is buried in the ship's encyclopedia. The one that is chock full of details about every race and planet in the universe, as well as various bits about the thousands of years of in-universe history. And that clue doesn't really stand out. That's right, you were supposed to grab your comms unit, turn it to a specific sound frequency, place it where the laser was, then try to shoot it with your laser gun. That makes the gas magically disappear. Naturally.

The entire Zork series is built on this concept.

The Journeyman Project 2 is so full of bullshit that I didn't play more than an hour or so, and I loved the first game.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is pretty damn clever and good for a graphical adventure. Pixel hunting to find the ONE spot you need to stand for the end-game's First Test puzzle is shit.

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>>4070343
>>4070348
>be kid playing monkey island 2
>get to the hand puzzle
>can't figure it out no matter what
>have this paper full of complex calculations like I'm about to build a particle accelerator or something
>mfw when I solved the puzzle and it was simple as fuck

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>>4070464
Gabriel Knight is great, I just wish someone had warned me to really REALLY keep my eyes and ears open when playing it. It's a Sierra game so it has a pretty inconsistent difficulty when it comes to puzzles.

I always preferred LucasArts games because even though the puzzles are bizarre they make sense in that same bizarre sense.

>>4068506
Haha, isn't Gabriel Knight the game where you have to rent a motorcycle by disguising yourself as a Frenchman, so you create a fake mustache by putting masking tape over a hole in a shed, then chasing a cat into the shed by spraying it with water, then sticking the cat fur on your face with maple syrup? (Yes, it is)

Those games are pants on head retarded. You should quit now, it's going to get worse.

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I hate it when you think some solution to a puzzle that would work in real life, but not in the game. Flight of the Amazon Queen had lots of these kind of puzzles ie. having to pick some item from a lake full of piranhas. In real life you could just take a stick and kinda poke the item out of the water, but not in Amazon Queen. You even have a baseball pat in your inventory, yet you can't use it to drag the item to ashore. I don't remember the solution to that puzzle, but it was something stupid.

>>4071605
Oh yeah, I heard that infamous "mustache puzzle" is in the third game. I both love and hate these adventure games. I consider myself a pretty sharp guy, but some of these puzzles make me feel like a potato.

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>use *pick up* on item
>"I can't pick that up"
>use *pull* on item
>character pulls the item up

IT'S THE SAME FUCKING THING

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>be non-english speaking little kid
>playing early version of monkey island 1 without inventory item icons, just text
>mfw trying to understand what the fuck is going on

>>4070343
WATCH IT FOUR

>use-everything-on-everything tactic
this is the only gameplay of these games. why even play them?

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Dark Seed

Late in the game, you get thrown in jail. To get out and actually be able to beat the game, there's three items you need from earlier: some money, a pair of gloves, and a bobby pin you were supposed to find on the floor of a library. Didn't find them all? Too bad! Game is now unwinnable.

Do you see the bobby pin in this picture?

Also this game has a time limit, fuck you.

>>4071643
maybe when people still had the illusion that there's some logic behind the puzzles so they tried to make their brain work. now we know it's useless

>>4071648
Why shouldn't I play a strategy game? Those are like puzzles, except they're intuitive, the rules are laid out plainly and there are multiple viable solutions, some of which the devs might not have intended
Hell, almost every game can be broken down like a puzzle. You try things and refine your solution until you win, just like a puzzle. The only difference is that it doesn't call itself one

I think the weird thing is how lauded most point and click adventures were back in the day, seen as the "mature" and respectable genre for the kind of people who were otherwise loathe to play games.

But the vast majority are objectively terrible games. All storyfags should be made to suffer through garbage like Operation Stealth without a guide to see how important narrative really is to enjoyment in videogames.

>>4070464
I played RTR when I was a kid. The only problem I had that held me up for weeks I think was needing to give the data pad to the girl so she could reprogram it to work for you. Not even a puzzle I just never made the connection.

I wish they made that 3rd game

>>4071605
Yeah the "moustache puzzle" I forgot about that.

I actually love the GK games but fuck they were hard. I think they're the only game trilogy where each game is done in a completely different style (2D, FMV & 3D).

The 3rd game is one of the only 3D adventure games of the late 90s which I felt actually had a point in being 3D and wasn't just a pointless upgrade like MI4 or what LSL8 would've been.

>>4070345
What the fuck? Are you retarded? Only issue I had with this was actually finding the hint after stumbling across the bridge

>>4071664
>I think the weird thing is how lauded most point and click adventures were back in the day, seen as the "mature" and respectable genre for the kind of people who were otherwise loathe to play games.

When the fuck did that happen?

I half think these games were so ridiculous because they were forcing people to use the call in help line or to buy the hint books they would advertise in the games themselves.

>>4071664

Compared to now, we had limited tools back then to tell a good story within the medium of videogames. Your choices were to make an adventure game or to make a turn based RPG.

>>4071691
This

>>4070345
So it's not 5-6-1?

>>4071609

Yeah that is always the thing that gets me about these games. I always think of stuff to try that you can't try, and then I start to lose interest. Often this involves communication among characters in the game: Suuure you could spend forever figuring out how to put together just the right Rube Goldberg device to draw the skeleton key out from the sewer grate so you can open the door, oooorrr you could just ask that military guy you met earlier whether he has access to a bomb that could break the door, or ask the sneaky character whether they can just pick the lock, or or or etc. There are so many things you could talk about if the situation were real that you're not allowed to talk about in these games.

Adventure games are too "gamey" for me. They don't want to be true to the fictions they present; instead they want you to keep yourself at a distance and view everything as a puzzle, not really as an adventure, and to have metagaming-related thoughts all the time about whether this or that was "supposed" to be a clue. I have more respect for something like Deus Ex that really tries (and nobly, enjoyably fails) to really just make every reasonable solution possible.

>>4071689

Maybe that happened too, but there is definitely a thread of elitism in this genre, and in the related genre of text adventures. I was a bit too young for it but if I remember right you can get a sense of that from the documentary Get Lamp... a reaction to it also appears in my one exposure to the Gabriel Knight series, Old Man Murray: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

That article goes into the apparently infamous mustache puzzle. I later read someplace that said puzzle was actually SUPPOSED to be stupidly obtuse, in part as a satire of the very thing these people are complaining about. To some extent that's a fair defense, but on the other hand it's kind of the "joke's on you I was only pretending to be retarded!" thing. At some point a satire does become the thing it's mocking.

I dunno though, I never played these stupid games anyhow. I like games where you're allowed to do things that it seems like your character should be able to do, and games where you can hardly do anything but the rules are so simple and clear that there's no ambiguity. (Like, Mario can't try to defeat Bowser by talking to him the way a hero might do in a BioWare RPG, but that's okay because the severe limitations of Mario's ability set are conveyed clearly and intuitively.)

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If you want an adventure game with logical puzzles with multiple solutions, and actual gameplay, try the Quest for Glory series.

It's a hybrid Adventure/RPG.

You start by picking a class (fighter/mage/thief).
Every puzzle in the game has a solution geared towards each class's strength, and all the puzzles are simple logic puzzles.
IE: "How do I get this colony of 6 giant flowers spitting a seed around to drop the seed?"

If you're a mage, you use one of your spells. Like the FETCH spell.
If you're a fighter, you can throw rocks at it (throwing skill check).
If you're a thief, just climb the cliff and stand next to the flower to grab the seed before the flower can catch it (climbing skill check).

You can export/import the same character through the entire series.

There's also monsters to fight (only semi-required [points awarded] for the fighter), and QFG 2 remake and QFG 4 have a great battle system.

>>4068506
>>4068510
Holy shit, OP, are you me?

I also tried this game recently and I also missed that you could solve the clock puzzle on day 1 and thus couldn't finish day 4 or 5 or whatever.

Also I never picked up the clay by the lake, so when I had to meet with the old lady and was stuck, I went around literally everywhere trying everything on everyone, going through all their dialogue again.

Didn't even know you needed books from the upper shelves.

It is a cool game in a lot of ways but fuckkk some of these puzzles.

>>4069558
>water spout is clearly an important object
>the item you need to use is also clearly important because you solve a puzzle to get it
No reason you shouldn't have tried the item on the water spout. Nowhere near as bad as Gabriel Knight's pixel hunts and obscure clock combination.

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FUCK THIS

>>4071647
>Do you see the bobby pin in this picture?
On the floor in front of the desk?

>>4072092
qfg really is the goat adventure series. why the series never gets its proper recognition is beyond me.

>>4073054
He's on a pulley, dude.

>>4073054
That thing was satire, its use in the game wasn't all that mysterious.

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>>4068506
I found everything really easy and straightforward in 7th Guest until I got to here and was stuck for like two hours before just looking up the solution.

Just play the game with a walkthrough in another tab, and look at it if you get stuck. The fun from solving a puzzle doesn't come if you're stuck on it for hours. If you don't figure it out after 20-30 minutes, just look it up.

And be honest it doesn't take longer than an hour or two to play these games if you know exactly what to do, so even if you get to an unwinnable state it won't take you *that* long to get back to where you were with the right items, especially if you skip all the cutscenes.

Worst case, play the game using the walkthrough for everything and get a chuckle out of how crazy the puzzle solutions are. There you go, you get your time and moeny's worth of entertainment from that alone.

>>4073054
Look like a chicken with gaping vagina.

>listen to myst soundtrack while playing this game
Game was pretty comfy, its too bad only one game came out

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>>4073402
Forgot pic

>>4070348
2^^

>>4073049
>Also I never picked up the clay by the lake

Aw shit, this. When I got to the snake bracelet part I was thinking to myself
>damn, I wish I had some clay with me, I could make a mold of this snake
But I had no idea there was clay at the beach. Now that I think about it, it's so fucking obvious. I even tried to use the hair gel on the snake, thinking that Gabe could sink the snake in the gel and have the gel work as mold.

>>4073403
there are like 15 games on PC of that series. Including MiaHM.
I always thought they were hidden items games but apparently they are adventures. Anyone knows if they are worth it? they are all on steam

>>4073318
>Just
>>>/tv/

>>4068506
In Super Mario RPG when you have to solve the riddle by spelling out "pearls" head pound blocks. I didnt have internet and the riddle was so bad I had no idea what the answer was. Set the game down for like two years because of it. Eventually decided to try every possible combo and spent a few hours solving it.

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>>4071605
>>4071612
>>4071682
you forgot the part where after making up the moustaches you also have to alter the passport picture to have them on it because there were no moustaches to begin with

>>4074820
They are surprisingly good

>>4073263
Me too. This was the only puzzle I looked up the solution to. It's pretty clever though, because it looks like it can't form a sentence because there are no regular vowels. Also, "tryst" is a hard word to think of, I guess if you solve all the other words maybe you can get it.

Also I had to use the "skip puzzle" butt on on the microbe puzzle, but that's only because I was playing it on a modern computer, and the opponent's AI is only beatable because it was based on computer speed. So with a modern computer it's literally unbeatable.

>>4070343
THIS was the only puzzle in MI2 that I remember giving me trouble.
I had that game pre-Gamefaqs too.

Adventure games tend to have have the best plotlines and dialogue, though. I hate puzzles myself, but I really think it's the only genre where narrative is important.

The marble puzzle in Riven. I figured out where they were supposed to go, but I never realized you weren't supposed to use the red marble.