Control Room Puzzle

A video game puzzle which presents the player with an array of toggle switches. Usually, only one configuration will let the player proceed past some obstacle or series of obstacles.

At best, the game will only give you cryptic clues as to the proper way to set the switches. Many players rely on Strategy Guides just to get them through these puzzles.

This often becomes annoying for one of these typical reasons:

The obstacle(s) affected by the switches are located really far from the control room, so that a lot of tracking back and forth is needed to solve the puzzle.
It isn't obvious which obstacle(s) might be affected by the switches.
The only way to test if the obstacle is activated involves trial and error, where error means the brutal waste of one of your precious extra lives.
The game becomes Unwinnable if you mess up once in the control room, either because you can't return to the control room, or the switches can't be reversed once triggered.
If the room really was a Control Room you could reasonably assume that the switches and what they would do would be at least labeled and perform some sensible task.

Examples of Control Room Puzzle include:

Lufia 2 had quite a few of these (though thankfully, the switches directly affected whatever platform you were on, keeping the whole thing nice and self contained), often in two difficulty flavors apiece - "Required", and "Complete". Only a few switches were required to be turned in order to proceed with the dungeon, but most players would still try and complete the puzzle absolutely for the excellent loot.
RuneScape has a very difficult Control Room Puzzle in "Ernest the Chicken", one of the earlier quests available. To make it worse, the old installment didn't even give any indication whatsoever of when a switch the player pulled locked or unlocked a specific door, forcing the player to just try and brute-force the whole thing through trial and error.
- Not to mention Elemental Workshop 3, where strategy guides quickest routes involve about 100 or so steps. Screwed up? There's only 5 points to continue from.
Resident Evil games do this quite often.
Star Wars: Dark Forces had one of these in its Coruscant mission. It consisted of a spiral corridor, divided into sections. Each section had a switch, and you had to flip each switch in a specific order as you worked your way through the sections. Flip too many, and everything behind you would seal off, and getting that last door to open was maddening. One might reasonably ask how the stormtroopers manage to successfully use this thing every day. They can't even shoot straight!
- The sequel (Jedi Knight) had two similar puzzles involving systems where you have two blocks or two containers of liquid, and you can adjust the level of one (which adjusts the other). Both are quite simple if you know which button to push, but getting it right without a guide means a lot of running around while getting shot at.
The Myst series is practically built on this, although without the possibility of getting killed. And, thankfully, trial and error, or extensive trekking. This does not prevent them from being mind-bogglingly hard.
Pokémon Gold and Silver has one of these in Goldenrod City.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has two such puzzles: one at Woohoo Hooniversity, and the other when Luigi is alone in Guffawha Ruins.
Zork: Grand Inquisitor had one of those when you were escaping from jail, where you have the ability to open or close any cell block in the prison. As one of the last major puzzles before the end of the game, the solution is quite obtuse, and requires reading a map, watching camera footage , tracing air vents, and realizing the map is a side view instead of a top-down. Any wrong answer leads to death.
Knights of the Old Republic has this on the Mannan Sith base, and an NPC remarks on what a pain in the ass these puzzles are.
The hidden summons in Wild ARMs 2 is protected by a switch puzzle. The player has to push some panels in the walls in a certain order with only a cryptic message about spirals for a clue. The puzzle is especially awkward because of a poor cultural translation. The Japanese original was based on the the names of weekdays. In Japan, these are linguistically transparent and well-known. When they decided to make the puzzle the same, but convert it to English, it ended up much more obtuse..
Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow has a Control Room Fifteen Puzzle: fifteen rooms in a 4X4 grid, each with exits in certain parts, which you had to shuffle around to reach various paths that led out from the puzzle. Luckily, there wasn't just one "correct" solution, and the paths were easy to make with a bit of thought; it also came with a handy Puzzle Reset button in the control room.
Marathon had a lot of these, but the one that sticks in everyone's craw is the platform puzzle in Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap!. Several platforms need to be adjusted to the correct height using switches so that you can jump atop them and reach a high alcove, but all of the switches are far away from each other and the platforms, and you must use grenades on each try.
- Or you can Take a Third Option and bypass it.
Fallout 2 has an area where a "switches opens doors" puzzle is taken to its logical extreme - a surprise door maze. There are nine connected rooms in the Oil Rig area, and the whole setup has four exits. Each room has a console and using different consoles toggles the state of different doors. The objective is to move through the rooms, using different consoles to open different doors, to get to the four exits. The floor is frequently electrified.
- Worth noting that its possible with appropriate character skills to untrap and unlock the doors as well as shutting the floor electricity, thus brute-forcing your way through.
The Glider PRO scenario "SpacePods" had four control rooms with eight switches each. In each one, you had to toggle the correct four switches, with only cryptic clues to guide you. Players of the scenario "Sky Links" by the same author were relieved when, in the part recalling the environment of "SpacePods", they were directed to just hit all the switches on the control panel.
The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass has this, but there are usually stone tablets with the proper switch sequence written on them.
Secret of Evermore had small one of these to get to a hidden boss.
The real-life puzzler: There are three light switches. One controls a lightbulb in the next room, which you cannot see from the switches and can only enter to check once. How can you tell which switch controls the light? Turn the first switch on and leave it on for ten minutes. Then turn it off, and turn on the second switch before entering the room. If the bulb is off but warm, is #1. If it's on, it's #2. And if it's off and cold, it's #3.
The Altador Plot in Neopets did this near the end. If you failed, Altador would be flooded, and you had to restart.
Subverted in Eye of the Beholder- In one of the later floors, there is a room labeled "Combination Lock- Be Quick" with 5 switches and a group of items on the other side of a pit (by this point, the game has already established that pits can be moved or gotten rid of entirely). Each time a switch is hit, the party must move quickly to dodge a fireball that gets launched from the other end of the room. The player obviously thinks that they need to find the right combination to get rid of the pits; the catch, though, is that it's actually impossible to remove the pits, the switches do nothing, and it's just an excuse to frustrate the player.
The medicine puzzle in La-Mulana is a Control Room Puzzle in disguise: here, the room is actually a corridor, and toggling switches is replaced by casting spells at fairies. If you get it wrong, you have to go all the way back to the sage before trying again. Another Control Room Puzzle, lying in the second level of the Endless Corridor, is so cleverly disguised it doesn't even look like a puzzle at first.
System Shock has one puzzle with a force-bridge that must be extended section by section, by hitting the right combination of buttons on a control board. This is not very difficult, since there is no penalty for getting the wrong combination, and the player can see the bridge from the board. Throughout System Shock there are also many doors opened by controlling the flow of power through little stylized circuit boards, where switching each of the elements the power passes through also changes other elements, making it easy to undo your progress. These puzzles range from very easy to quite difficult by the end, but a few single-use "logic probes" that can solve them instantly are scattered throughout the game.
Duke Nukem 3D has a lot of these, in the form of doors (or other objects) which can only be activated by a "combo lock" that is composed of three to five big switches. Opening the lock is just a matter of pressing the right combination of switches, which can be easily brute-forced (and it's the only way to open them). The only exception is on the secret level of episode four, where, to finish the level, you have to find out a ten-button sequence; you've got to find one of the two places in the level where the sequence is shown.
Appropriately enough, the Shrine of Control in Ultima VI.
Mass Effect has one where you need to set a bunch of switches to get a door to crush a geth ship's landing claw. This one is relatively sensible as a control panel, the switches are properly labeled and it's really a matter of simple addition to figure which switches to press for the right pressure. There's even a pressure gauge as such a control panel should. Needless to say it isn't much of a challenge as a puzzle.
- Mass Effect 2 has the player have to do one of these during a side quest to unlock a door in the central room. It's insultingly easy.
That Damn Tank in Another World.
Super Paper Mario had a room where you had to hit colored blocks in a certain order to first get to Flopside.
- While it can be tricky to figure out on your own, there's a sign elsewhere that indicates that you just have to hit each block once. As long as you hit each one only once, it doesn't matter what order you hit them in.
There are about two close-together control panel puzzles featured near the end of LucasArt's Full Throttle. There are only about two commands that really still work somewhere in the maze of options. An earlier puzzle involving projectors also applies.
In The Dig there was one of these. You had to use some unlabeled alien controls to pick up a focusing lens at the bottom of a pit. Problem was, it was unclear what you needed the control panel for rather than how to operate it.