Moon Logic Puzzle: Difference between revisions

** There is a way around not having the game case: call Campbell about four times and Meryl's number will be added to your list of Codec frequencies.

* While the puzzle isn't particularly difficult or strange in terms of effect, ''[[Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake]]: Solid Snake'' deserves a special mention for containing one of the [[So Bad It's Good|best]]/worst puzzles ever to be placed in a video game. It is replicated here in text form for your troping entertainment:

{{spoiler|You must backtrack to a laboratory, where there's a pair of eggs which can be taken. One egg will hatch into a snake, which eats your rations - the other will hatch into an owl, which will eat the snake if it hatches while the snake is in your inventory. Hatch the owl, and head back towards the fence. Then, equip the owl. The owl hoots, the guard, despite the BROAD DAYLIGHT, declares it night-time, and switches off the gate.}} }}

** That really is strange. [[Comically Missing the Point|Wouldn't they want the gate to be on during the night?]]

** It's worth noting that in this series, your goal during cross-examination is seldom to disprove what the other person is saying directly. It's to find anything, anything at all that's contradictory about their statements and jump on it. Phoenix admits to himself (and the player) that he's just blindly bluffing a lot of the time.

* The first ''[[Discworld]]'' adventure game. Most of the puzzles don't make sense even in retrospect. [[Terry Pratchett]] jokingly summed it up as follows:

* ''[[Professor Layton and the Curious Village]]''

** One puzzle which frustrated many players literally requires knowledge of the QWERTY keyboard layout -- which is, of course, not actually used within the game, but which can be found within PictoChat on the DS if someone doesn't have a keyboard at hand. It also requires seeing that the candy bar on which the puzzle is written has {{spoiler|bite marks in it}} which are easily missed, but which make up part of the solution, and which are not mentioned in ''any'' of the in-game hints. Oh, and also, the puzzle is phrased in terms of SMS messaging, thus suggesting a completely different keypad layout that's entirely a [[Red Herring]]. This puzzle was so absurd that it was completely changed in the European release of the game, replaced with a mathematical puzzle.

** Also in the second game, near the end you have to use an elevator, but the door won't close because the combined weight of Guybrush and a huge immovable crate exceed the weight limit. Guybrush has to be holding a balloon and two surgical gloves filled with helium in order to be light enough to ride the elevator.

** ''[[The Curse of Monkey Island]]'' has an even better one. You need to make a snake throw up (let's ignore for a moment whether or not snakes ''can'' throw up). So what's the answer? Put an ipecac flower into a carafe of pancake syrup!

* ''[[Laura Bow|Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra]]'' has this. The player will be hinted toward two questions throughout the game {{spoiler|"What room do you leave without entering?" and "What room do you enter without leaving?"}}, twin riddles that will come to haunt you near the end of the game {{spoiler|in the cult of Amon Ra's secret meeting room}}. The answers ''are'' given, but in a slab found in Olymia's office. [[Bilingual Bonus|In hieroglyphs.]] Even if you take the time to decipher the message, it is told in a long passage that still doesn't ''directly'' give you the answers and, to the ones that don't know the answers otherwise, will sound interesting but otherwise useless and will be very easy to overlook what the answers were. {{spoiler|womb and tomb.}}

* ''[[A Vampyre Story]]'' has a lot of [[Moon Logic Puzzle|Moon Logic Puzzles]]. The solution to almost every puzzle is hidden either in dialog (when you look at a critical item, its ingredients will be described; you will later need to replenish this supply, and to complete a different puzzle you collect the source of these ingredients), in characterization (you need to distract a man; he's a bit of a womanizer, and if you're willing to stretch your imagination real hard, the courtesan outside could be considered mildly attractive), or in the expectation that you will possess some bit of knowledge which is fairly common, but easy to overlook because it's not brought up in conversation much (I shit you not, one puzzle requires you to know basic color theory and the attendant terminology).

** Humorously, Sam and Max comment on how gullible whatever mystical force controlling these gongs must be for that to work.

* One of the first interactive-text games, ''[[Colossal Cave]]'' (aka ''Adventure'') required you to state what weapon you were using to attack an enemy. If you just typed "attack monster", the game would reply, "With what? Your bare hands?" Normally, you'd have to enter "attack monster with sword". An exception to this rule was when you were faced with a fire-breathing dragon ...

[[Blunt Yes|YES]]<br />

[[Crowning Moment of Awesome|>Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (hard to believe, isn't it?)]] }}

* ''[[Police Quest]]: Open Season'': The skeleton key you have to obtain from a mundane-looking soda can, and the lighter in the mouth of the severed head in the refrigerator, which you combine with a can of hairspray to make a flamethrower to neutralize the Big Bad (the lighter isn't there the first time you look in the fridge, [[Guide Dang It]]).

* The following quote for the [[Zero Punctuation]] [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/31-Zack-Wiki review] of ''[[Zack and Wiki|Zack & Wiki]]'' is actually talking about how the game ''averts'' this by only holding one item at a time.

* [[Douglas Adams]]'s text adventure ''Bureaucracy'' is filled with this; in order to progress, you frequently have to use [[Insane Troll Logic]] to deal with a world designed and run by demented [[Obstructive Bureaucrat|Obstructive Bureaucrats]]. (For example, what good is a check for negative three hundred dollars?) On the other hand, there's one puzzle, consisting of a [[Locked Door]], for which the solution is ''so straightforward'' that being too familiar with adventure game tropes can be a problem. {{spoiler|To get inside, just knock on the door.}}

* In ''[[Time Gentlemen Please]]'', there's a moment where you have to uncork a bottle, obtaining both the cork and the bottle's contents. The bottle is made of glass. However, Ben pointedly refuses to break the bottle with any of the heavy or sharp junk in his inventory, and refuses to open it with his bottle opener magnet, insisting on uncorking it. Turns out uncorking it requires a pig's corpse and a time machine.

* There's apparently the special sort of bad gamemasters who turn games into "read my mind" puzzles. Usually the players either get too frustrated and never return or go loonie and ram everything they can [[Off the Rails]] with extreme prejudice on general principle. As posters on /tg/ [http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12853680/#12853835 described the experience] -

{{quote|

'''poster 2''': The description I got from a friend who had to deal with a DM like this went "It was like playing Sherlock Holmes in a sensory deprivation tank." }}

* The much-hated "Rockbusters" segment on ''[[The Ricky Gervais Show]].''

** Karl also thought up a few "lateral thinking" puzzles. They prompted Ricky Gervais to respond with this one:

* Lateral thinking puzzles, when they actually give you enough information to solve them on your own and don't have an out-of-left-field [[Tomato Surprise]].

* There is [http://www.chessbase.com/puzzle/christmas2004/chr04-6a.htm one particular puzzle] which you will either get right away (if you have the right mindset) or be stumped on for hours (if you don't). As explained by the article writer:

** The answer is: {{spoiler|if the grandfather died immediately, [[Undead Author|how do we know what he was dreaming?]]}}

*** This is the basis of a ''Twilight Zone'' episode, sort of. {{spoiler|A man comes into a room, feverish, ill, lies on a couch, and falls asleep. He dreams of terrible tortures, and running from his unseen tormentor, before dying by falling off a cliff. When he is discovered to have died of a heart attack in his sleep, someone comments that he wants to go like that, "Peacefully," in his sleep.}}

* The Ace Attorney online gag-trial "Glase Canon: Ludicrous Lawyer" is full of (failed versions) of this.

* ''Sideways Arithmetic from [[Wayside School]]'' is built around weird puzzles. How much is EARS plus HEAR?

{{reflist}}