The Worst Puzzle of All-Time | Design Delve
Added 2023-12-08 16:17:10 +0000 UTCHere's today's episode of Design Delve, taking a look at what just might be the worst puzzle design of all-time!
Enjoy, or, don't?
Comments
That’s what I did to get the good ending. Didn’t have the time or patience to figure that out on my own.
BlueAversion
2023-12-15 00:48:56 +0000 UTCThe puzzle makes sense from a mechanical standpoint. They’ve established this mechanic of swapping spheres, and spheres naturally rotate, so in theory it’s a last hurrah. In practice, it’s moving through a small, barely interesting, and hidden state space at a snail’s pace. It would have been better to have responsive control and visibility into a large and complex state space.
Max Goldstein
2023-12-11 20:26:58 +0000 UTCThis reminded me of a couple of (keyword) *optional* puzzles in Tunic that I though were clever, to be fair, but once I figured out how to solve them and also understood how tedious the process would be, I simply looked up the answer to collect my reward and move on.
Bobby
2023-12-10 20:32:07 +0000 UTCThe minecart sequence in the original Myst comes to mind...
SirVanilla
2023-12-10 03:21:38 +0000 UTCGreat Delve! I remember though that the fire-marble puzzle in Riven was also ... an expletive to solve. Maybe it's a studio trademark to add one horrific puzzle in an otherwise awesome experience...
JC
2023-12-09 17:11:00 +0000 UTCYou're right, I just didn't spend the 12 minutes to check what JM8 said again ;) Clearly he also checked speedruns. The speedruns don't do it 3 times though.
Tristan
2023-12-09 11:43:14 +0000 UTCPleased to see Design Delve on Patron this week. 👍 This was another solid vid and I am not shocked by its solid viewing numbers. These just keep getting better keep up the good work 💪
Pete3.141
2023-12-09 11:07:22 +0000 UTCJM8 points out that playing perfectly (which in this case we can assume for speed runners who know what they’re doing), it takes the length of the video - so, 12 minutes. Not sure what optimisation you’re getting at
Pete Spicer
2023-12-09 08:33:54 +0000 UTCAbsolutely maddening, JM8. Loved it!
WordsmithofSol
2023-12-09 00:39:47 +0000 UTCI'm definitely here for a more emotional level of JM8. I think it lets us get an insight into JM8's personality a bit more rather than trying to be wholly impartial and explanatory. But I also used to like it when mini JM8 would scream at big JM8 in the first series. Also, I would glady accept more frequent occurence of the phrase "boils my piss" in my life.
Ian Watts
2023-12-08 23:49:47 +0000 UTCHonestly, this was the exact puzzle that popped into my head when I saw the title. Just such a miserable waste of time to complete it.
Anzer'ke
2023-12-08 22:08:31 +0000 UTCI do think JM8's solution is poorly optimized. I checked speedruns, and it seems it takes them about 12 minutes to solve this one. I think it follows typical Cyan puzzle philosophy, where you can eventually solve it with trial and error, but it's faster to solve with observation and planning. But I still think it's way too slow when you know what you're doing, and way too punishing if you don't.
Tristan
2023-12-08 20:53:09 +0000 UTCI played Obduction in 2016 and 2023, and back in 2016, each loading screen was several minutes. Obviously could be blamed on my PC at the time, but like, I wasn't going to spend a bunch of money on a new PC just to make Obduction tolerable. But even in 2023, when I knew exactly what I was doing, it was very slow, and not interesting enough to justify the time spent waiting.
Tristan
2023-12-08 20:43:55 +0000 UTCYeah I'll be that guy. I don't remember having much trouble with this at all. Although I did (awkwardly-worded to avoid spoilers) draw a few lines on a piece of paper so I could see/remember how many times to do the things when I got to the places to do the things, and I *didn't* have someone sitting next to me telling me how much I would hate this part of the game. Riven's similar puzzle took me longer to figure out and execute.
Marc Campbell
2023-12-08 20:04:10 +0000 UTCIt's a fine puzzle, a similar puzzle in Riven had me walking around more, and took me longer. Riven's still my favorite of theirs, but Obduction's my #2.
Marc Campbell
2023-12-08 20:00:30 +0000 UTCWithout wanting to be "that" guy, I've seen this criticism of this particular puzzle a few times, and it has always left me wondering: "Why are these guys taking the *long* way around?", because unless I'm completely misremembering (it *has* been rather a bit of time since I played the game), the game unlocks a shortcut that brings you pretty much right where you need to be. (I also see people complaining about load times... I suppose this is a low GPU RAM thing? -Because as far as I recall, a lot of stuff gets cached between level loads, so that swapping back and forth between two recent worlds is a lot faster than loading either from scratch.)
Jonny Johansson
2023-12-08 19:54:24 +0000 UTCI think you're right. I was going to say The Longest Journey's blue duck floaty puzzle was the worst, but I don't know if I would tolerate this even if I had a walkthrough
pscrosta
2023-12-08 18:26:26 +0000 UTCI backed this game on Kickstarter, and have completed it twice, once on pc, once in VR and have loved it... that said this one puzzle is Really Bad, but the rest of the game is Really Good. Great episode by the way, I do wonder what you though of the rest of the game...
John Cripps
2023-12-08 17:16:48 +0000 UTCFantastic episode! I love the style of this. The episode itself reminds me a little of playing Shadowgate 64 and despising everything about how the logic of its puzzles worked...I think there was one part you had to walk across a deteriorating ceiling and it was a maze, essentially, but you couldn't actually tell where you were/weren't allowed to step, so you just randomly fell to your death over and over again until, I guess, you brute-forced your way to memorizing what the correct path was. At least, that's how I remember it now...
Alex Bajcz
2023-12-08 17:02:33 +0000 UTCFun epsiode!
Eating Pancakes Right Now
2023-12-08 16:46:27 +0000 UTCWell based on this, you might want to reconsider if you value your sanity!
Andrew Keen
2023-12-08 16:46:07 +0000 UTCIt sound like it shouldn't be :D
Steve Kaye
2023-12-08 16:37:36 +0000 UTCI started watching but had to stop because Obduction is still on my “one of these days” list.
Taigan
2023-12-08 16:22:16 +0000 UTC
