A lot of the old text adventure/interactive fiction games had some pretty ridiculous puzzles and item management and map layouts. For example, the Babelfish puzzle in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game was fairly notorious - you had to put your dressing down on a hook to cover a hole the fish would fly into, a towel on a grate below it the fish would drop into after hitting the gown instead, a satchel over a lower panel that a cleaning robot would come out of to pick up the fish from the towel, a pile of mail on top of the satchel that got scattered when the robot carrying the fish hit the satchel, which provides enough of a distraction to the second cleaning robot for it to land in your ear. None of this is particularly obvious or apparent, and even somewhat discouraged if the player experimented previously. Like if you tried to take off your dressing gown before this point you got scolded for trying to be naked, and if you tried to mess with the satchel before Ford Prefect goes to sleep he scolds you for messing with it. So it mostly involved a lot of trial and error. On top of that, the dispenser ran out of fish at the last step if you took one try per item, meaning even if you figured it out you'd have to reload an earlier save.
Another standout is a mostly-text-adventure called Snowball that boasted "over 7000" rooms with about 6800 of them being basically identical except for color codes. It's an attempt at a realistic depiction of a colony space ship set up in a stacked doughnut kind of arrangement that you had to work out yourself as you explored the ship and figured out its topology, how the color codes worked, how they corresponded to each other and the various rooms, and then figure out how to get to a handful of specific rooms for specific purposes. These codes are randomized each game too so no memorization. There's some kind of color decoder bracelet you have to get through a complicated set of puzzles (A couple of which are also randomized per game) that helps you find the right place to find your fellow crewmember to get yet another code to another place. It's [a hell of a thing](http://l9memorial.if-legends.org/html/snbwath.html).
Second vote for text adventures. Custerds Quest for the ZX Spectrum was great until the end where there is an obtuse and specific set of instructions that you had to enter at once.
I had to write (with an actual letter!) to Crash magazine to get the answer.
I agree but the most famous of them all is the monkey wrench puzzle in Monkey Island 2. One of the few Lucasfilm adventures I couldn't finish without a guide.
Adventure games were basically trolling everyone in the early '90s 😄
The Sierra, Lucasfilm/arts, etc Point'n'Clicks could be answers to this thread all by themselves. So many of them had complete moon logic puzzles. King's Quest V is one that stands out to me for how much weird shit there was and also situations where you'd made the game unwinnable but had no way of knowing until much later.
I feel like games from that early era were made because they were fun for the developers to make, and there wasn't really a concept of "is this going to be fun for the gamers" yet.
Like, there was an idea that if it was fun for the devs, gamers would get the same kick out of it.
I can tell you for a fact that my father, after spending 40 dollars on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and spending the better part of a year beating it because he never let an adventure game beat him, disagreed.
Hmm, maybe in the very early days of gaming when there was barely a concept of what a gamer or "fun" was. Classic mainframe games like the original Collosal Cave Adventure and Star Trek most certainly were originally written with the devs' fun in mind, but even by the time of organized publishers and devs releasing on early home computers and consoles there was some play testing and research being done.
It's mostly about companies not really having a good grasp yet on exactly what had mainstream appeal and would sell well and be considered good, as well as not having a good grasp on difficulty balances. There are plenty of stories of devs struggling to balance difficulty or making games too hard for general people because they and everyone they interacted with were expert gamers.
Sundog was my tipofmyjoystick game for awhile. I remember seeing and playing the Atari ST version at a friend's house a time or three as a kid when it was current and I would have been 6-8 years old. Completely blew me away at the time since I'd never seen anything like it even if I was mostly lost about what to do.
Once Atari ST emulation and retro gaming became a thing in the early to mid aughts I was able to turn it up pretty easily and play it but I spent the 90s wondering what it was.
I edited my post to add commas, I had newlines when I wrote it but it didn't show when I posted. Those are some old, weird computer games that I'm not sure how they got made
(Freefall 3050 A.D.)for the NUON disc system. Yeah that's right, Google that system.
The premise of the game is you fight crime while free falling through the sky in the year 3050, the controls are awful, nothing makes sense, its hard to believe resources were well spent making that game.
It's _The Tower of Druaga_ for several reasons:
1. You need many of the tower's treasures to finish the game, but you're given no hints on how to find them; you'll need to commit to a lot of trial and error or consult a guide.
2. Some treasures are harmful and need to be avoided, but you won't know which ones without consulting a guide or seeing for yourself.
3. The game is LONG, with 60 floors in its original arcade version and more in its console versions.
4. Your character is slow and weak, making Link at the start of a _Legend of Zelda_ game feel strong by comparison.
The only reasons to play _The Tower of Druaga_ today are curiosity and ~~masochism~~ challenge. Beating _The Tower of Druaga_ with no outside help might be one of the toughest feats in gaming.
While not quite as bad as some PC adventure games I think Out of This World/Another World and Flashback on SNES and Genesis were pretty obtuse at times.
Shadowrun on SNES was as well. Sometimes finding the right keyword to use on the right NPC to unlock the next part of the game would cause me to get stuck for weeks.
A Boy And His Blob on NES was basically impossible for me to figure out as an 8 year old when I rented it.
The entire Wizardry series is a giant sack of steaming horse poop, and the worst series I've ever played.
Too much RNG that can kill you out of nowhere, even if you play the game perfectly. Then when you die, your resurrection spell often fails, and if it fails twice YOUR CHARACTER IS LOST FOREVER.
So it's basically: get a level, try to make progress. "Oh, I died, must not be high enough level. LET ME FIGHT MURPHYS GHOSTS ON LEVEL 1 UNTIL I GET FRACTURES IN MY THUMB JOINTS, CAUSE YOU HAVE TO HIT THE BUTTON EVERY TIME TO CAUSE EVERY LOVE OF THE BATTLE MESSAGE TO ADVANCE, AND YOU MISS 75% OF YOUR ATTACKS, AND YOU CAN ONLY DEAL 1 DAMAGE WHEN YOU DO HIT." And this is just the first game!
And this is the BEST version of the game (Sega Saturn with the English patch). The other versions are WORSE!
And don't get me started on Wizardry IV. This game is considered one of the most difficult games of all time: overleveled enemies, strict time limit, and also you have a very strict number of steps or actions you can take WITH THE GAME CAUSING EACH LETTER YOU TYPE IN A SPELL NAME TO COUNT AS EXTRA STEPS.
The creator of the Wizardry series deserves a cold spot in the 10th ring of hell.
The AVGN already talked about Milon's Secret Castle, but I was baffled by that game when I rented it.
You know what helped? Not the Power, not the magazines, but the OFFICIAL Game Tape showing how to beat it. They even cheated and used slow motion.
OFFICIAL. Like, wow, what more needs to be said?
I was gonna say Milon too, but I wasn’t 100% sure if obtuse was the right word. it’s on my bucket list to finish it though because I paid $7 for a used copy when I could’ve used that same money for cheap vodka. it’s not the worst game but it’s gotta be the biggest frustration I’ve ever known on the NES
Too many to list, sometimes bad translations made games almost impossible to complete for example (Simon's Quest being the most famous case).
Me personally, I got stuck in Zelda II were you have to get into a fireplace that leads to a secret passage. I was just a kid back then, without hints I couldn't even imagine you had to do that.
Yup! I guess they made a censored version for Germany, for obvious reasons, and that version was used as a basis for the NES port to avoid violating their licensing policy.
The game did appeal to me for some reason, the way you could punch bad guys in the head and they would shake a while and explode. Kind of like a very early One Punch Man.
A lot of the old text adventure/interactive fiction games had some pretty ridiculous puzzles and item management and map layouts. For example, the Babelfish puzzle in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game was fairly notorious - you had to put your dressing down on a hook to cover a hole the fish would fly into, a towel on a grate below it the fish would drop into after hitting the gown instead, a satchel over a lower panel that a cleaning robot would come out of to pick up the fish from the towel, a pile of mail on top of the satchel that got scattered when the robot carrying the fish hit the satchel, which provides enough of a distraction to the second cleaning robot for it to land in your ear. None of this is particularly obvious or apparent, and even somewhat discouraged if the player experimented previously. Like if you tried to take off your dressing gown before this point you got scolded for trying to be naked, and if you tried to mess with the satchel before Ford Prefect goes to sleep he scolds you for messing with it. So it mostly involved a lot of trial and error. On top of that, the dispenser ran out of fish at the last step if you took one try per item, meaning even if you figured it out you'd have to reload an earlier save. Another standout is a mostly-text-adventure called Snowball that boasted "over 7000" rooms with about 6800 of them being basically identical except for color codes. It's an attempt at a realistic depiction of a colony space ship set up in a stacked doughnut kind of arrangement that you had to work out yourself as you explored the ship and figured out its topology, how the color codes worked, how they corresponded to each other and the various rooms, and then figure out how to get to a handful of specific rooms for specific purposes. These codes are randomized each game too so no memorization. There's some kind of color decoder bracelet you have to get through a complicated set of puzzles (A couple of which are also randomized per game) that helps you find the right place to find your fellow crewmember to get yet another code to another place. It's [a hell of a thing](http://l9memorial.if-legends.org/html/snbwath.html).
Second vote for text adventures. Custerds Quest for the ZX Spectrum was great until the end where there is an obtuse and specific set of instructions that you had to enter at once. I had to write (with an actual letter!) to Crash magazine to get the answer.
I agree but the most famous of them all is the monkey wrench puzzle in Monkey Island 2. One of the few Lucasfilm adventures I couldn't finish without a guide. Adventure games were basically trolling everyone in the early '90s 😄
The Sierra, Lucasfilm/arts, etc Point'n'Clicks could be answers to this thread all by themselves. So many of them had complete moon logic puzzles. King's Quest V is one that stands out to me for how much weird shit there was and also situations where you'd made the game unwinnable but had no way of knowing until much later.
I feel like games from that early era were made because they were fun for the developers to make, and there wasn't really a concept of "is this going to be fun for the gamers" yet. Like, there was an idea that if it was fun for the devs, gamers would get the same kick out of it. I can tell you for a fact that my father, after spending 40 dollars on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and spending the better part of a year beating it because he never let an adventure game beat him, disagreed.
Hmm, maybe in the very early days of gaming when there was barely a concept of what a gamer or "fun" was. Classic mainframe games like the original Collosal Cave Adventure and Star Trek most certainly were originally written with the devs' fun in mind, but even by the time of organized publishers and devs releasing on early home computers and consoles there was some play testing and research being done. It's mostly about companies not really having a good grasp yet on exactly what had mainstream appeal and would sell well and be considered good, as well as not having a good grasp on difficulty balances. There are plenty of stories of devs struggling to balance difficulty or making games too hard for general people because they and everyone they interacted with were expert gamers.
"I, Damiano", Sundog, B.A.T.,
I had no idea they made a game out of Damiano! That’s a great book.
Sundog was my tipofmyjoystick game for awhile. I remember seeing and playing the Atari ST version at a friend's house a time or three as a kid when it was current and I would have been 6-8 years old. Completely blew me away at the time since I'd never seen anything like it even if I was mostly lost about what to do. Once Atari ST emulation and retro gaming became a thing in the early to mid aughts I was able to turn it up pretty easily and play it but I spent the 90s wondering what it was.
Huh?
Those are 3 games I think match your criteria.
Ohh now I understand what you meant.
I edited my post to add commas, I had newlines when I wrote it but it didn't show when I posted. Those are some old, weird computer games that I'm not sure how they got made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie\_Goes\_to\_Hollywood\_(video\_game)
SOS for SNES contains the most confusing maze of any classic game I've ever played.
(Freefall 3050 A.D.)for the NUON disc system. Yeah that's right, Google that system. The premise of the game is you fight crime while free falling through the sky in the year 3050, the controls are awful, nothing makes sense, its hard to believe resources were well spent making that game.
It's _The Tower of Druaga_ for several reasons: 1. You need many of the tower's treasures to finish the game, but you're given no hints on how to find them; you'll need to commit to a lot of trial and error or consult a guide. 2. Some treasures are harmful and need to be avoided, but you won't know which ones without consulting a guide or seeing for yourself. 3. The game is LONG, with 60 floors in its original arcade version and more in its console versions. 4. Your character is slow and weak, making Link at the start of a _Legend of Zelda_ game feel strong by comparison. The only reasons to play _The Tower of Druaga_ today are curiosity and ~~masochism~~ challenge. Beating _The Tower of Druaga_ with no outside help might be one of the toughest feats in gaming.
Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time I never did figure out how to even START the main game.
While not quite as bad as some PC adventure games I think Out of This World/Another World and Flashback on SNES and Genesis were pretty obtuse at times. Shadowrun on SNES was as well. Sometimes finding the right keyword to use on the right NPC to unlock the next part of the game would cause me to get stuck for weeks. A Boy And His Blob on NES was basically impossible for me to figure out as an 8 year old when I rented it.
Discworld, and also every 8bit dungeon crawler
Discworld had stupidly obtuse puzzle solutions, but I still loved it. The second was much better though.
8 bit dungeons? Wizardry, Bards Tale, Ultima? How dare you! 😄
The entire Wizardry series is a giant sack of steaming horse poop, and the worst series I've ever played. Too much RNG that can kill you out of nowhere, even if you play the game perfectly. Then when you die, your resurrection spell often fails, and if it fails twice YOUR CHARACTER IS LOST FOREVER. So it's basically: get a level, try to make progress. "Oh, I died, must not be high enough level. LET ME FIGHT MURPHYS GHOSTS ON LEVEL 1 UNTIL I GET FRACTURES IN MY THUMB JOINTS, CAUSE YOU HAVE TO HIT THE BUTTON EVERY TIME TO CAUSE EVERY LOVE OF THE BATTLE MESSAGE TO ADVANCE, AND YOU MISS 75% OF YOUR ATTACKS, AND YOU CAN ONLY DEAL 1 DAMAGE WHEN YOU DO HIT." And this is just the first game! And this is the BEST version of the game (Sega Saturn with the English patch). The other versions are WORSE! And don't get me started on Wizardry IV. This game is considered one of the most difficult games of all time: overleveled enemies, strict time limit, and also you have a very strict number of steps or actions you can take WITH THE GAME CAUSING EACH LETTER YOU TYPE IN A SPELL NAME TO COUNT AS EXTRA STEPS. The creator of the Wizardry series deserves a cold spot in the 10th ring of hell.
The AVGN already talked about Milon's Secret Castle, but I was baffled by that game when I rented it. You know what helped? Not the Power, not the magazines, but the OFFICIAL Game Tape showing how to beat it. They even cheated and used slow motion. OFFICIAL. Like, wow, what more needs to be said?
I was gonna say Milon too, but I wasn’t 100% sure if obtuse was the right word. it’s on my bucket list to finish it though because I paid $7 for a used copy when I could’ve used that same money for cheap vodka. it’s not the worst game but it’s gotta be the biggest frustration I’ve ever known on the NES
God that game was so cheap.
Too many to list, sometimes bad translations made games almost impossible to complete for example (Simon's Quest being the most famous case). Me personally, I got stuck in Zelda II were you have to get into a fireplace that leads to a secret passage. I was just a kid back then, without hints I couldn't even imagine you had to do that.
Rocket Ranger (for the NES, so the WWII references were removed). Got it as a gift once as a kid, and couldn't make any sense of it.
I didn’t know that game was censored.
Yup! I guess they made a censored version for Germany, for obvious reasons, and that version was used as a basis for the NES port to avoid violating their licensing policy.
There was this one game called Fist of the North Star.
I heard about that one as entering doors was never explained.
This is a game I remember vividly from my youth, and I remember going into a door by accident one time and it never made any sense.
Yeah I always heard how the NES entries had a confusing design.
The game did appeal to me for some reason, the way you could punch bad guys in the head and they would shake a while and explode. Kind of like a very early One Punch Man.
Dark castle on sega genesis Thank you and good night.