The sounds for that puzzle in Myst is actually explained in Achenar's room in the Mechanical Age. The problem is many people get intrigued by the spaceship and go to the Selinitic Age before the Mechanical Age and then you have to do trial and error to complete it.

Tunics Mountain Door (Golden Path) is one of the craziest and hardest puzzles to solve. By connecting all pages and finding all golden paths to then figuring out the secret code with all 50 strings is insane and one of the most rewarding puzzles ever made.

Don't know if this one counts but for me it is one of the mounts in WoW. In german it is called the Lucider Albtraum, a black unicorn. If I remember correctly the mount wasn't even announced offically until some player found the data in the gamefiles. The mount is locked behind a series of ridiculous puzzles like secret notes u have to find, a labyrinth, a code, some kind of light the lights to get a geometric pattern and I don't know what else. It's not like every puzzle in this was very hard but there are so many puzzles and riddles u have to solve that it is a hundred percent chance that there will be one that is extremly difficult for u just because of the variety. It took me days even with a guide. But it was well worth it. I am not playing WoW anymore but every time I got this mount by roulette I was proud as heck. :D

Lufia II's puzzles were really amazing for the time as no one expected SNES RPGs to have such technical, brain teasing puzzles, but good lord Dragon Mountains puzzles with the bushes and The World's Most Difficult trick were in a league of their own. Glad to see that puzzle get some recognition here.

0:29 The Witness is an awesome game. Made incredibly difficult for me due to my super rare form of colorblindness :(

I knew the subway puzzle in Myst would be on the list, trial and error got me through that back in the day. Tunic had some tricky puzzles throughout the game but the very last one when you go from the Glyph Tower to an actual website and need a good understanding of the in game language of Runic was very hard. I'd love a Tunc sequel.

Falcon is such a good host. He keeps it simple :)

The day Skyrim released, overwhelmed with hype when I got to bleak falls barrow I completely didn’t see the answer above the gate for the longest time so I googled it, realizing it was so simple 😅

Love that Witness was first on the list, because that was one of the puzzle games I remember most fondly. Just coming home from work, playing on a PS3 I bought with my very first self-earned money and taking pictures with my phone to try and solve stuff during downtime at work. I'll add that the most frustrating puzzles for me, are the Guild Wars 2 jumping "puzzles". Not only do they vastly differ in what you're required to do, but the engine is clearly not meant for precise platforming, so more often than not you have to trial and error a jump, die, start over and keep doing that for 8 hours until you get enough lucky jumps chained to finish the thing. Or just pay some purple man to teleport you across the room.

I thought Resident Evil 3 Nemesis was a pain. For me, puzzles in a game are good to a point. When it becomes too difficult, it takes the fun out of it.

If part 2 is going to be created, some of the secrets in World of Warcraft took years to be discovered and are absolutely worth it to be checked out. Great video!

I’m 35 and work over 40 hours a week, if within a few minutes a game puzzle is clearly going to take too much time. I KZfaq it. I don’t have the time or patience anymore and honestly don’t care. I hate puzzles in games. They are second only to one hit kills in terms of horribly designed things.

Wow, honestly I expected the marbles from Riven to be a lot higher in this list, the only puzzle that really, truly stumped me. Can't believe there's games with even harder ones than that. Mind kinda blown. But the Myst Selenetic Age gets a LOT easier if you go to the Mechanical Age first, the sounds are well explained there.

Honorable mention: Every last water temple in every Zelda game

heads up: Elemental Workshop 3 is only on Runescape 3, not on OSRS

I am very proud to say, I solved the Talos Principle all by myself. But there is some kind of mechanic in the game that is absolutely not intuitive and does not get explained. Since it's been so long I do not remember it clearly either anymore *BUT* -> inside Gehenna there is a level where you need to connect the lasers by somehow "safing" them if that makes sense. You must safe them for the "laser-turret" you carry around. Until that point in time I played the entire game without that mechanic. Yeah... that was wierd. 🙃

I remember how big brained i felt when i figured out Jindosh's lock in Dishonored 2. Its so much fun when you figure it out

I remember there being some from the Professor Layton series of games that were just absolutely impossible when I was little. Those games were TOUGH!

Loved Lamulana. Hardest puzzle I found was the unlimited hallway but there is some hints to solving it and where to go. When you finally figure that puzzle out though you realize just how obvious the puzzle really is. I know he avoided community puzzle solving but honestly it was the reason why i got into Destiny 2. Various of the expansions you can no longer get in the game were stuff we as the players were solving together to figure out. Like reading Norse letters hidden in levels thatt you needed a specific gun to view through a lens to read out or even figuring out the Raid puzzles in Forsaken. If anyone wants they should look at the race over that one and you'll see what I mean. Forsaken expansion particularly did it well with all the Wish discovering and hidden platforms and just about everything. It's probably one of the only old pieces of content they left in the game which is sad as a lot of the levels were pretty good for similar stuff. However it was literally that stuff that made the game interesting for me.

In what world are Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello "obscure" Shakespeare plays? They're some of the most well known of Shakespeare's works. Most people would be exposed to them in highschool if they did basic humanities.

The piano puzzle in The original Silent Hill kicked my ass for years until I was old enough to be allowed on the internet 😂😂😂

I got the subway puzzle in Myst fairly easily. It was the spaceship keyboard puzzle that frustrated me to no end

The damned billy goat in ireland in the original Broken Sword gave me and my parents trouble originally. It was such a different solution to any other puzzle in the game!

Bonus points to when I made one of the Pokemon games hard on myself by selling the TM (not HM in that game) Flash. I wandered through the completely dark cave for at least an hour.

Actually Silent Hill 2 had the riddle difficulty as well.

I just finished playing The Ezio collection of AC recently, and I have to say that some of the later puzzles like the number wheels in Brotherhood gave me tons of frustration.

Recently went through OOT without a guide and got to the Water Temple before needing it. I realized the singular portion that matters most is going down when you raise the water level. It specifically shows the camera pan UP and pulls your focus up with doors and a gold skulltula and this misdirect happens only again in this dungeon. Mix this with needing to stand against the wall to activate the water change system and its honestly just minor game design choices that can make an entire dungeon seem impossible just for an overly well done misdirect.

I love playing Myst and Riven. Grew up playing them and never got sick of playing them. Riven was so big at the time it had seven discs and you had to almost constantly swap them out

I'd love to see more puzzle difficulty options in games. I really want to hate playing the game like on SH3

Honourable mention: “Remnant: From the Ashes” had some very obscure puzzle sequences for special rewards. Luckily for me I joined a random co-op game back in the day with someone super friendly and we had a lot of fun playing together so they ended up showing me all the secrets 😄✌️

The water trap puzzle in Genma Onimusha(Onimusha Warlords) was INSANELY infuriating. I couldn't complete it without a guide. On top of being a slider box puzzle, it's a timed, water is rising, type of trap. Love the channel, I'm glad to have found it!

Your comment about changing difficulty in Silent Hill 3 kind of hit me just right. I had to look up two different puzzles in Myst. The one you were talking about and another that I don’t even recall anymore. Friggin’ Myst lol

The Horror MMO The Secret World had some really difficult puzzles. I remember that before the game came out their whole publicity was done through some well made puzzles that had you go through some websites in order to get the clue to move on to the next phase.

The generally accepted solution to the Mantras puzzle is "just chant it in every room until it does a thing".

Shoutout to most of the puzzles in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, ESPECIALLY the puzzles in the super-dungeon at the end of Nenio's companion quest.

The big stone door for page 1 in tunic was insane to solve since it requires you to even go into another "special" save to get a single part of it

I am very satisfied to see Elemental Workshop included on this list haha it is well deserved.

The puzzle in Knights of the Old Republic on Tatooine, where the guy was trapped by his very angry wife reprogramming his battle droids to explode if he moved. Three of the four were not too tough, but there was the one that was not solved mathematically, but rather with a verbal trick. It just made me roll my eyes when I looked it up.

Love The Talos Principle coverage!

Falcon, I thought of a video idea seeing the Lufia 2 bit on this one. “Best games/challenges within a game”. Include the Ancient Cave mini game. Such a great addition to an already great JRPG.

Those secret caves in Final Fantasy X-2, in the Thunder Plains. After beating the beast guarding the entrance, once inside it was basically a math nightmare to open the walls and proceed. I still have the PAGES of notes I wrote about it.

Some of the later puzzles in Grim Fandango were pretty hard as a kid, and other older adventure games

I'm surprised Tunic didn't make the cut for the list. I didn't play it but watched my BF play it on twitch and wow! So much puzzle! like a bunch of sound and background image puzzles and things.

Loved this video. I haven't played any of these games except for Myst. The commentary was hilarious 😂. Definitely going to try and get my hands on these other titles...

Destiny 2 had three super complex puzzles that no sane person would try to do without a guide. The Black Armory DLC (season 5), added the "Niobe Labs" where 3 players had to shoot a long sequence of symbols that were invisible unless you aimed with a specific weapon. The world first completion was supposed to unlock the Bergusia Forge activity for all players, but it took so long for people to figure it out that Bungie just unlocked the forge a day later. The Joker's Wild DLC (season 6) added the "Zero Hour" mission where players had 20 minutes to navigate a trap-filled gauntlet and a hidden vault in the ruins of the old tower, then fight a boss. In the vault there were 7 rooms each with 7 terminals that had to be activated in a specific order which was extremely difficult to decipher (an online tool was made for it). It could only be done on the hard mode with a longer gauntlet and before you could even do this puzzle, you needed to find four hidden items across the gauntlet and make it there with enough time left to complete the puzzle. The solutions were also different depending on which terminal you had to activate first and you had to do it 49 times to get the final reward. FORTY-NINE TIMES! The Season of Dawn (season 9) added the "Corridors of Time" where players had to solve 19 sequences of 7 to unlock 19 lore pages, and one sequence of 11 to get an emblem and exotic weapon. The emblem + exotic puzzle was brute-forced but was later solved properly, and they just gave out the exotic for free a week later. Corridors of Time was removed with season 10, and Niobe Labs and Zero Hour were removed from the game with season 12.

Honestly shocked "The Goat Puzzle" wasn't on this list. Despite the game being ancient at this point, people still talk about how absurd that puzzle from Broken Sword was.

So glad to see baba is you on this list one of my all time favorite mobile puzzle game ever. Makes me feel smart after 10 hours of trial and error and then finally solving a puzzle

#6 is a Klotski puzzle. The main puzzle pack from Windows 3.1 that had Klotski, that looks to be about puzzle 13 of around 60. The last puzzle dwarfts #6. I remember my dad being pretty proud to get his solution down to 3000 moves.

I remember the sliding picture puzzle in Parasite Eve 2 being one of the hardest puzzles i ever came across as a kid

Marquee has some great puzzles too especially one where you have to shrink and enlarge a key to a door.

Love Talos Principle and I played most of these on list, BUT what really bothered me was a Puzzle in Scooby Doo game, where you've got to mix colors. As a 6-7 years old I had no idea what combination of colors gives you what, i always got stuck there on that game!

The water puzzle on the original Onimusha I remember that being an all day thing where I got frustrated and took a break because I couldn't figure it out.

I played the remaster of myst on game pass and when I got to the underground cart puzzle, I ended up taking pencil and paper and mapping out all the possible directions and dead ends in order to solve it. It’s the hardest puzzle in the game, not by being well thought out but by pure tediousness.

I didn't have too much trouble with the sound puzzles in The Witness, you can brute force them anyway. It was the damn Tetris shapes that caused me the most grief. Never really quite grasped the rules. Missed a trick with a rhyme here though: "Can't do a list like this without Myst"

Was definitely expecting to see the Golden Path from Tunic in here. Maybe I'm just slower than most but solving that was beyond satisfying

Oh man, I remember the feeling when I finally solved the Riven marble puzzle as a tween, so satisfying! I had an entire notebook full of written notes and clues for the various puzzles in that game. Also, as a minor correction, the Elemental Workshop III quest doesn't exist in OSRS, it's an RS3 exclusive quest.

I actually solved the shipwreck puzzle in the witness without any guide, it was honestly a good puzzle for the people who solved everything else and wanted one last challenge. On the contrary, the maze with the gravel puzzle stumped me because I didn't have my headphones on at the time.

As someone making an open world puzzle game, this was really interesting to watch. Having a few really challenging puzzles for the selected few is a must!

That god damn tourniquet puzzle in Silent Hill 2!!! Took me ages to solve it back in the day and I will always remember it.

8:49 - WOW right in the Nostalgia!!!! Back in the Day before DVDs were ubiquitous, I was into PC gaming a bit... I got an internal 5inch DVD drive for my PC, like $600 at the time - Had it's own dedicated decoding card that had to take a PCI slot... Well Riven was one of the games that had a DVD version which brought the game down to less discs and higher res videos At the time I still barely got anywhere and just replayed the first 2 hours like 20 times... 😑

I solved the Myst subway puzzle by making a map. I didn't recognize the sounds as significant...

Guardians Of The Galaxy level with the repeating paths in smoke. Legit gave up and googled it.

Myst was great, played it so much after it came out. And then Riven was even better, not to mention that it came with 5 discs that you had to swap out for each island, haha. And the Exile, and I think there were 5 or 6 games to myst, though I can understand those with hearing issues, the first 2 only have one direction to go, so you get which direction those mean, and the 3rd had 2, which 1 of them was one you previously figured out, so the fourth one could only be that last one. What got you was the combination tones for NE/SE/SW/NW, if your hearing wasn't good enough, it could be hard to decipher the 2 sounds Yeah and the marble puzzle omg. To figure out what you even needed to do, that this was to power the books, using the one island to locate where the domes were on all the islands, finding all of the roller balls and their symbols on all of the islands so that you can match up the colors with the underwater viewer so you can match up the color to the island location, and there was 1 extra color and one island didn't tell you its color. I admit I still have the original Riven guide for this puzzle, lmao. Though now that I know the trick, it is easier to figure out. And back tracking on the original version made it even worse with having to swap out discs constantly and being careful that you don't scratch them up.

Playing Runescape while you talk about a puzzle in Runescape was quite a weird surprise to me since Runescape isn't generally talked about much outside the community haha. However, regarding the puzzle in Elemental Workshop 3, I didn't actually have that much trouble with it, or at the very least as much as everyone else. I solved it relatively quickly compared to my brother and now I know the rest of us scapers lmao. I never knew it was supposed to be so hard, I didn't even use a tutorial. (Also, you mentioned barely responding to inputs, I think you may misunderstand that the game runs on a tick system of 0.6s per tick, but it could be made much worse with internet issues, so I do see your point).

that was rs3, not OSRS.

A couple I remember having to pull up Google Breath of the Wild Constellation puzzle. Felt like an idiot Astral Chains Traffic Control 3. Painful slide puzzle Onimusha. It was a slide puzzle, but with a timer that resulted in game over. Annoying place to put the checkpoint. Unsighted. 2d Zelda like. There was an optional dungeon with a slide the blocks on the ice that had me stumped hard.

I made it my goal over Lockdown when Covid hit to earn the Quest Cape in OSRS. I finally achieved the Cape and haven’t really played since. The point to me saying this is that I quite literally must have blocked out eternal workshop 3 from my memory because some of the quests sent me absolutely nuts. I fell short to the Wiki gods on a couple off occasions although the quests are fantastic to work out without it if you have the time.

What made "Return to scenic pond" awesome is that it's the exact same level as "scenic pond", except for one free space at the edge of the field, which provided just enough wiggle room to make the level just about possible to solve, even though it was really, really hard. And then they take that one field away. The edge is fenced up neatly. The field that made solving the level just barely possible is gone.

You guys should definitely do more puzzle videos. I loved watching this.

Love your content

"Return of the scenic pond" 100% deserves its spot here, as hard as Baba is You is, that level somehow pushed it to the extreme. It doesn't utilise ant hidden trickery or things you haven't seen before, it's just so convoluted and technical that you're unlikley to solve it without systematically going through every possible action you can take

9:45 Another honorable mention for Runescape would be the quest "Mourning's End Part II". Even with a guide the light puzzle took me hours to do. You're basically hopping between multiple floors, redirecting beams of light. It doesn't sound bad like that but it was painful.

It took me almost 20 yrs to beat the banjo & kazooie puzzles lmao

The famous water puzzle in resident evil 3 nemesis could be on the list too

I remember Lufia II had some of the most frustrating puzzles out there. Made more aggravating when it was a blockbuster rental and you had no guarantee you’d get your save file back when you had to return it.

Hi Mr falcon, thank you for the upload, can't wait for your Ubisoft show breakdown .

I'm actually very surprised World of Warcraft's Hivemind puzzle wasn't included in this. I know Falcon said they tried to avoid community puzzles, so I'm not sure if the whole Hivemind puzzle (Which requires exactly five players to fully complete) would count. But even some of the early portions of that puzzle, which you have to do on your own, to get colored monocles, were pretty difficult. Most notably the yellow monocle, Which involved going to the Halls of Origination, and completing a ridiculously difficult switch puzzle, that spanned the entire floor of the room. I got the other three monocles, relatively easy, but even with a guide, I gave up on the yellow monocle, and kinda just got lucky that someone else in my group had gotten it, to proceed with the rest of the Hivemind puzzle.

This comes out just as I complete the hidden cappy mission in fallout 4 that I definitely didn’t google for help ;)

Good video, made me discover new games (and remember the old ones ^^)

The Eyes of Ara is an indie 3D puzzle game that had a lot of challenging head-scratchers, but the concentric ring puzzle in the cellar was the worst (or best) of them.

The first 2 Monkey Island had a few which you could spend hours on going back forth, just knowing there is something your missing. It's like you know what needs to happen but you just can't work out how to go about it. No google then as well.

That Uncharted 3 wall puzzle is the worst for me lol. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Anyone remember 7th Guest? A puzzle filled game but the toughest thing in there, imho, was the microscope game. I think the setup of the game and its rules provide a huge advantage for going second, which the player can't do. It was hard but i loved playing it. I had a save game reserved so i could go back and play it over and over.

I've played a lot of point and click and there was one called Discworld from Terry Pratchett's books, it had pretty absurd problems to solve and gave me hard times...

Some of the puzzles in Jedi fallen order really stumped me.

I hated water sample test from old Resident Evil 3.

I can't believe you didn't mentions the puzzles in RAMA or The Dig. ^^, both from the MIST era. There chance to get online solution to those games on that time was ultra low if any. You might need to make several videos about this, we also have games like Professor Layton too.

An honerable mention goes to the whole „lucid nightmare“ mount riddle chain in WOW especially the maze part. It’s almost impossible to figure out on your own what’s going on AND then it’s different for every player even if you know what to do. You can’t get around drawing a map while you doing it. And even that can be really difficult. The whole process of people getting behind the whole riddle chain is worth a video on its own.

I actually think the Challenge from the Witness was much more frustrating as it was time limited AND reshuffled each time you retried.

The statue puzzle before the Master Sword in Twilight Princess. Tried it for like a minute, quickly noticed that I'm never gonna solve this on my own and looked up a video for the solution.

I know it had some ARG elements BUT the OUTBREAK prime quest when it first dropped was nuts! I was lucky enough to be in one of the first groups to get it but most definitely rode on the backs of the math class 🤣. I did my part lol

The original Myst came with a notebook you could write stuff in as you went along, and when I played it as a kid I didn't get the sound cue in the caves because I hadn't done the mechanical age beforehand, so instead I just mapped out the whole thing in the notebook and while doing so found the myst book by dumb luck, which is the only thing that is in the caves anyway. When you go far enough off piste the sound cues stop completely and I remember starting to feel very alone in this dark empty abyss in the ground

I’m actually kinda surprised that the quantum moon and the ash twin project from outer wilds didn’t make it to this list Still a great list tho!

Am I the only one who struggled to find the correct hole in the floor that the gold pole had to be placed in uncharted 3?😂

Man dude I love just listening to Falcon speak. His voice soothes me.

Puzzle that gave me the most trouble when I was younger was the Queen puzzle from 7th Guest. Remember that game? What a hit that was back in the day.

Back in my day, “walkthroughs” found on the “internet” was called “ask your friends and if they don’t know, tough luck”. There are more than a few Sierra and Lucas Arts games I never finished because I couldn’t figure out some obscure part of a puzzle and my parents wouldn’t drive me to Babbage’s to buy the hint book.

I'm a huge fan of puzzle games, so seeing The Talos Principle, Myst, and Riven in here (as far as I've watched), is wonderful. Definitely some of my favourite games of all time, although Soulslikes and story-driven shooters tend to be my tops. Regarding the mine maze in Myst's Selenitic Age, the sounds are the same as the rotating fortress in the Mechanical Age, so you've got some help there. Although doing them in a different order to how I did it is perfectly possible: I couldn't even get into the Selenitic Age for a year or two (I started the games in 2010) because some of the sliders in the rocket ship to get into the Age just didn't sound right to me. So I was getting the combination wrong for a long time.

gotta give props to falcon for his flow at 5.24, mad dope rhyme schemes

So nice to see puzzle game content, for we puzzle/adventure gamers!