Control Room Puzzle: Difference between revisions

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.

 

 

This often becomes annoying for one of these typical reasons:

 

* ''[[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.

** 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.

* 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.

* ''[[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.