Welcome to the latest instalment in our new-ish column, Memory Pak, where we're going to be doing a deep-dive into some of the most memorable moments in gaming – good and bad. This time, Kate discusses her puzzle tantrums...
The first time I played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, it was under the supervision of my partner. It was also potentially responsible for our first... disagreement.
(Spoilers for Brothers abound here, be warned!)
Although I'm not proud of it, I can sometimes be the kind of person who gets a little temper-tantrumy when I can't figure something out, like a child who can't work out how to open a bag of crisps — which may be an exceptionally apt comparison, since it probably also involves me being hangry, too. It's not like I go full terrible-twos-tantrum, sitting on the floor, banging my fists and screaming, but it's the closest I get to rage-quitting. I'll insist that a puzzle is stupid, or impossible, or that the developers didn't offer enough hints, until finally the puzzle (or more precisely, the twist of the puzzle) clicks, and I feel like a numpty for having thrown a little sulk about it.
And this is precisely what happened with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
The entire game is played with two halves of the controller: One controls the elder brother, the other, the younger brother. It's a neat mechanic that allows for a lot of interesting puzzles, but I honestly don't remember any of them. The bit I remember is towards the end, where your poor older bro gets seduced and then stabbed by a spider, and you're left to mourn, bury, and leave him on your own.
Without your older, wiser sibling to guide you, encourage you, and teach you how to navigate the world, everything is harder. Rocks are twice as heavy. Cliffs are twice as high. Doors take twice as long to open.
But it's all possible. It's just hard. Until, that is, you're faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: a body of water. You see, the younger brother cannot swim. This is told to you earlier in the story, I think, as yet another reason why the young boy needs his brother to help him, but now his brother is gone, and he stands, desolate and paralysed with fear, on the shore.
The younger brother alone cannot muster up the strength to go on, and having been taught for the entire game that you can only use half the controller to move this boy, you are caught in exactly the same situation. You cannot fathom crossing the water. The controls don't do anything. He's never learned to swim, and neither have you.
Anyway, I threw a bit of a tantrum here. My partner kept saying (encouragingly, like the dead brother) that I could do it, that I was smart, that I just had to think. But I thinked all the thinks! There were no thinks left to think! The game must have been broken! And somehow it was my partner's fault, because he knew the solution and wouldn't tell me, because he believed in me, like a bastard.
The trick, you see, is a monumentally clever one, even if it seems simple and obvious: You use the other side of the controller. It's an absolute masterwork of narrative and mechanical synergy: The moment you lose your brother, everything becomes harder, and you have literally "lost" half of the controller as a representation of the loss the boy feels. When you finally realise that you have to use the left trigger to swim, it is as if the older brother is providing the power and the necessary push to brave the waters, and the younger brother is channelling the courage and strength of his lost sibling to do something he's never been able to do.
The moment is supposed to catch you out. It wouldn't have hit hard if it was easy to figure out, after all. The entire game, the very idea of splitting the controller, is all in a build up to this one scene.
Still, it's bloody frustrating, and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that way — especially if any of you reading have ever played a point-and-click adventure game. Although, their solutions don't always make you feel better once you've found them. In fact, they may
(Now there are spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass incoming!)
There's one other puzzle that made me feel much the same way, and you'll instantly know which one I'm talking about if I say it's from Phantom Hourglass.
Listen, sometimes the cleverest puzzles are the ones that are most off-the-wall and innovative, and I certainly don't want to give the impression that I want less of them. But I can't be the only person who accidentally solved the Phantom Hourglass map puzzle by accident!
"Press the sacred crest against the sea chart to transfer it." Those are the only instructions you're given in this particular puzzle, and most people who have ever played a DS game probably made the same conclusion I did: It must be something to do with tapping the screen. Everything is to do with tapping the screen in a DS game (or yelling into the mic, occasionally)! The map with the crest is on the top screen, and your map — the crestless one — is on the bottom tappable screen, so I tapped frantically all over the darned thing trying to figure out what it meant by press.
In this moment, my frustration worked in my favour, though. After fruitless attempts to solve the puzzle with the very few verbs available to me (tap, rub, yell, press button, throw DS), I gave up and closed the DS, putting into sleep mode so I could ponder the problem.
Apparently that was the solution.
It's exceedingly clever, when you think about it — or when you figure out how to solve the puzzle as God intended — but I felt like I'd stolen all the glory, undeservedly. I was part of a club, but I cheated to get in.
Luckily, there are plenty of games that I didn't accidentally solve by giving up. There's one particular puzzle in Fez that still eludes me, although I've finished the game; I stopped playing The Witness because I couldn't figure out what the wordless, vague tutorials were trying to teach me; and I'm currently playing through Portal on the Switch, roughly 15 years after I first tried it and gave up because some of the turret-based puzzles are beyond me. And the less said about Outer Wilds... the better.
And although I have made it sound like I'm a grumpy little baby who can't handle clever, fourth-wall breaking meta-puzzles, the truth is... I love them. I love the way that little click in my brain feels when I get it. When I get grumpy, I am grumpy at myself more than anything — I feel as though I am too stupid, too limited by my own lack of imagination, swindled by the genius game designers who are probably laughing at me from behind a one-way mirror.
Well, laugh all you want, imaginary game designers! For in the end, I am the winner who gets to enjoy your really cool puzzles. Nyahaha!
Tell me about your favourite game puzzles in the comments, as well as the ones that made you have a little baby tantrum!
Comments 40
Incorrect….anything that gains that level of frustration isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. Look at all the rage quit videos on YouTube, people behaving like that over games.
I hate puzzles in games that are not dedicated puzzle games, Lufia 2 is a total pain in the arse to play because of how chock full of them that game is (that one mountrain grass puzzle being the worst of it). And then there's the Puzzle Boy minigame in SMT: Nocturne, which is hiding one of the games' valuable magatamas behind it, it is one of the worst, most miserable experiences I have had to go through in any game.
It depends. Oftentimes I enjoy puzzle solving. But some variants such as slide-piece puzzles and/or memory puzzles vex me. Jenga, yes. Simon and/or Square Up, no thank you.
ElecHead just did this to me towards the very very end
@Orokosaki I agree. When I have to spend time looking on GameFaqs or YouTube while playing it's not a fun experience. Puzzles should not be too obtuse.
Oh, brothers! I didn’t like the game. It was alright, my daughter and I played to the end. The video documentary at the end was interesting. But overall I just couldn’t get into the story of the game. And the ending: talk about sad. Okay, now I want to throw a controller…..
Juiced! had many puzzles that were extremely frustrating but also utterly brilliant
The Blue Badger says otherwise.
When it comes to puzzles myself, I find the best ones aren't necessarily the ones that make you want to keel over, but rather the ones that hold you on a train of thought that eventually culminates in an 'ah HA!' moment. Ace Attorney is obviously the series that comes to mind for me in that regard, but another that implies it to a lesser extent that I adore would be Mario's Picross. I adore puzzles in all senses of the word (I have a literal stack of crosswords/wordsearches sitting in my room), but there has to be a line drawn between 'ohhhhhhh I get it' and 'UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH'.
Brothers was a free game on xbox live (xbox 360).
And for me it was a boring, easy and kind of silly game...I honestly have no emotional attachment to any character in the gaming universe. I only care about the gameplay, not the story or the characters. I found the gameplay of this game to be very weak. There is almost no game within this game. It's walking back and forth doing the obvious, from point A to B, without a challenge... just as a pretext to follow a plot, which I don't care about.
But...this is me. I'm happy with those who care about plot and nothing about gameplay. There's a game for all audiences.
The best puzzles are the ones that make you really think, but don't make you foam at the mouth. Yes, I have thrown a tantrum. Particularly some of the puzzles in The 7th Guest.
I got through the burned bridge in Twilight Princess by ragequitting.
I thought I had to climb on the box and jump on the flame wall.
I then told Link to jump off the bridge and hope he breaks his dumb head!
And that was the solution (even though I might argue the water is too shallow that my prediction is more likely to realistically happen. )
The original Legend of Zelda had a dungeon with a "dead end" room. (I use the quotations because it wasn't really a dead end room, it just looked like one.) I remember being frustrated beyond belief by that dungeon. I had to turn off the game and go climb a tree by myself for a while.
Sometimes leaving a game for a while is the best way to figure it out.
I think that the most frustrated that I have ever been with a puzzle was the water puzzle in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (the original... I'm not sure if it is in the remake or not). Eventually figured it out without tantruming, though...
Brothers never frustrated me; however, it does hold the honor of being the only video game to make me full-on cry. That ending tho… yeesh… 😢
That Phantom Hourglass puzzle is Legendary. It always comes into the conversation when the theme is memorable puzzles. You just either feel stupid or amazed when you understand the clever solution.
“ where your poor older bro gets seduced and then stabbed by a spider, and you're left to mourn, bury, and leave him on your own.” that was really shocking. I remember that I couldn’t believe that nice lady was actually so horrible in the end. Great story telling.
If you thought that Phantom Hourglass puzzle was ingenious, give Cing's early DS adventure Another Code (Trace Memory) a go. Essentially the same puzzle crops up amongst its many clever uses of the (then novel) hardware, as well as one which requires you to tilt the DS lid to reflect an image onto the other screen. It's absolutely inspired. Oh, and there's a ghost called D who follows you around.
I mean we have this thing called the internet now, so there's no reason to get too upset at puzzles when the answers are right there.
Not so much 20 years ago though.
@SteamEngenius I was just thinking the same thing. And a different story could be told of the crazy ways preinternet that we solved puzzles and beat bosses.
What Ace Attorney games do exceedingly well is keep you riiight about where Phoenix/Appolo/Ryunosuke are. The best Ace Attorney moments are the ones where both you and your attorney avatar have been banging their head against the wall for an hour, and maybe this one really IS guilty, but then someone says something and both you and the Ace Attorney light up, and then the techno music starts to play.
The WORST moments are when you're out of sync. When you have it figured out, but you have to sit through half a trial of everyone ignoring that vital clue that you have figured out. OR when everyone's figured it out, but you're still scratching your head and feeling like an idiot.
There's an art to making the puzzle exactly as hard as it needs to be, is what I'm getting at.
I never felt that any of the puzzles in Brothers were difficult. I found that aspect to be rather underwhelming. It felt like I spent the entire game waiting for the tutorial to end. But the burial scene was truly unsettling in a way that no other game has ever been before.
If it's a puzzle where I was supposed to know to use an ostrich brain with a puddle of water, then yes, I'll want to throw something at the TV, but no, it's not the best puzzle. The best puzzles make perfect sense after you solve them.
@SteamEngenius As long as it makes sense after you solve it, even by "cheating." It's the ones that made zero sense after you saw the correct answer, that make me want to throw something at the TV, or start huffing bug spray...
The monkey wrench in Secret of Monkey Island 2 can go do one, frankly. Grrr…
There’s also a puzzle in Broken Age where the answer is to just not do anything. Didn’t like that one either - it was the only solution I had to look up in the entire game. Grrr…
Baba Is You, otoh, didn’t cause any tantrums. There just came a point where I knew I was beaten. Brilliant game up to that point, though. And the fact I could just walk away, as there’s no plot to stress about, was a bonus.
I’m with @rykdrew on Brothers, though. The whole game felt like a tutorial, with clunky controls. There was no real friction from beginning to end, and the story totally failed to land for me.
@Krull There's also a puzzle (possibly two) in Broken Age which requires knowledge that can only be learned in the parallel protagonist's scenario. It's only strictly logical to the player, and not the character. It's breaks a cardinal sin of adventure game puzzle design, and I was flabbergasted Tim Schafer overlooked it.
Maybe I'm just negative when it comes to this stuff, but I hate gimmick puzzles/solutions. That includes the map thing in Phantom Hourglass. It's clever in one way, but dumb in another. I always felt the same about the Psycho Mantis fight in Metal Gear Solid(which I also hate). Sure, the solution is clever on one level, but I wouldn't call that good game design, especially when you have to break immersion to do it. Same can be said about resetting the "computer" in X-Men on the Genesis. Developers get too cute for their own good sometimes.
As more more traditional puzzles, I remember being less than impressed with the puzzles in Syberia 2. The puzzles seemed less logical than in the first game which I had played right before. With that said, I do like some games. One might consider Cuphead a type of puzzle(of pattern recognition) and I like that a lot, despite its difficulty. And I do yell at that game sometimes.
Limbo had those frustrating moments. After a guide or two, it helped me understand how to think differently. That's what the puzzles make you do, and should carry over to real life, look at things from multiple angles; just because you fail, don't give up; and if all else fails, cheat!
Nah, hard disagree.
There's a difference between frustrating and aggravating, and the letter isn't "the best" regardless of what we're talking about.
I really don't miss doing the uncharted 4 puzzles for the first time, I got way to confused. Also make uncharted 5 naughty dog.
Just because you rage at something doesn't mean it's good. Just means you don't like feeling stupid.
Puzzles or not, if a game is too frustrating to play it is not worthy of my time in the first place.
Portal/Portal 2 gets the balance perfect. Tricky enough to stump you but the mechanics are so simple that you know you’ll get the solution with enough experimenting and it feels so rewarding when you finally crack a puzzle you’ve been stuck on. Breath of the Wild with its dungeons and shrines was the same way too, especially with how flexible it was in the solutions it let you come up with.
Puzzles that are so obtuse it becomes frustrating aren’t for me though. I was a bit soured on Tunic by the end with its end game puzzles- no way in hell I would have seen the proper ending without using a guide, those puzzles were properly insane. But I get that that was the whole point, and I admire the complexity of it all but even if I had the time to try and work it all out there’s no way I’d have got there. Not for me.
@LightningHart I got those puzzles! TBH, I was waiting for something like that throughout the game. Having played Day of the Tentacle, I was actually expecting there to be more puzzles that crossed between the two characters in Broken Age.
I liked Brothers before that puzzle, but I love them exactly because of it. Great idea, beautiful execution, marvelous.
I actually thought of the Brothers solution when you mentioned that your part of the controller didn't do anything. However, I do get what you are saying. Just the other day, I was playing SMT 5, and a disgusting puzzle came up. There's an area where gusts of winds blow and they will push you into unfavourable or favourable areas depending on where they are positioned - you have to avoid or embrace them accordingly. Now this puzzle required you to figure out how to harness the power of multiple such outlets to reach a higher platform, without having any visibility of the whole path, and before this instance, you only worked with single instances of those gusts. I don't know why they did this, but I don't like it at all when games try to throw this kind of tangents at you - it's more of a technical flaw in my opinion than a clever puzzle. (Hope I have not spoiled too much of SMT 5 here. )
@YoshiF2 Another Code: Two Memories was a DS launch title and did it first, so it deserves all the credit
I've thrown Tantrums many times with in game puzzles so I just end up turning the game off and going back to it another time.
@Gitface Same. I cried my eyes out over Brothers. It's still one of my top ten favorite puzzle games.
Brothers kept crashing 20 seconds before the end. That was frustrating.
I miss being stuck at a game for months before finally figuring it out. They don't do games like that anymore (which makes sense because most people would just play another game instead).
Tap here to load 40 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...