Try Everything: Difference between revisions

** There was a similar experience in the original NES ''[[Metal Gear]]'', made even ''worse'' by the fact that he would only answer your calls if you called him from [[Guide Dang It|certain rooms]].

* One ''[[Asterix]]'' story sees Getafix deranged by a bash on the noggin, so they repeatedly hand him cauldrons and potion ingredients in the hope that he'll mix up a potion to cure himself.

** Some puzzles, however, have no brute-force method. And others have multiple digits or use entire words; in those puzzles, trying the brute-force method would take ''ages''.

** Doing this out of court has a running gag of Wright showing off his Attorney's Badge, something nearly every NPC responds to. Main characters (such as Maya and Gumshoe) will note he has shown them before.

** If you're [[Genre Savvy]], you never even bother with your attorney's badge, just to save time. {{spoiler|Which will screw you over in 1-4, since it's the ''only'' item that gets the old guy to respond. In the following case, if you show your badge to Gumshoe, he will ''still'' say you're "always flashing it around", despite you never having shown it to him before.}}

** Apollo Justice takes most of the fun out of Trying Everything outside court rooms by replacing the usually unique dialogue to a certain clue by replacing most of the dialogue with "I don't know" dialogue usually unless it's the key item.

* The first two [[Discworld]] games suffer from such ridiculous (albeit hilarious) logic that this is required more often than not.

* One tried and true method when getting stuck in adventure games is the brute force method -- try to combine every item with every other item until you find something that works.

* Although ''[[A Vampyre Story]]'' mostly averts this trope, it has one puzzle that appears to be designed around it -- you have to take an item from a stack of several, try to use it, return to the stack, notice that one of these things is not like the others, then take ''that'' and use it to solve the puzzle. The problem is that until you try using the incorrect item the game won't acknowledge that there's anything notable about the rest of the stack, nor will it give you any other hint that might suggest a need to return to something you've apparently exhausted. It looks as though the designers expect you to get desperate and start trying everything to eventually bring you back to the stack to find out that "hey, this one looks different, let's try it."

* ''[[Theresia]]'' does its best to avert this by way of [[Booby Trap|Booby Traps]]. Clicking on everything tends to result in getting peppered with arrows or stabbed by a flying knife.

** One method is [[Bolt of Divine Retribution|lightning bolts]]. It even warns you about this in the manual. It even shows you a picture of exactly what will happen to you. These usually are used when the developers don't want you to just whip everything in the room to try and solve a puzzle. Sometimes this behavior makes sense, because Lemeza is nominally an archaeologist; sometimes it just seems cruel.

*** The lightning bolts are particularly evil because the game has optional collectibles, some of which can only be found by randomly whipping every wall looking for secret areas. Then again, they are mostly optional.

* The barrel puzzles in the Fade in [[Dragon Age 2]] avert this. If you don't solve them within a certain number of moves, they vanish and a bunch of demons show up to attack you.

* The players in ''[[DM of the Rings]]'' respond to the entrance of the Moria mine in this way. They are on their way to chop down some trees to construct a battering ram when the DM ends up screaming the answer to them in frustration.

* Quite common in [[Text Adventures]] (and other [[Adventure Games]] as well), where players tend to pick up ''everything'' and, when confronted with a puzzle, immediately try to apply everything to it.

** A variant is the "guess the verb/noun/adjective or pronoun on rare occasions" puzzles, where the player has no choice but to resort to trying every variation on "use the thing on the other thing" until they find the right combination of verbs and nouns. For example, in one real-life example, "use whip on lion" gives a failure message ("You're too afraid of the lion!") while "whip lion" works perfectly.