I was hoping that this thread would serve as a place to vent and as warning to developers of how not to build their game, while highlighting some of the fine frustrations of certain puzzles. I'll provide my thoughts on a few common examples, but feel free to highlight a particular puzzle or type entirely that rattles your bones.

Sliding puzzles. Nothing quite brings the action to a halt than an entire genre of solved puzzles. No matter the variant, ranging from the "classic" 15, Sokoban, or the slightly obscure Klotski, nothing tends to make my eyes glaze over and my mind realize, "Hey, there's something more fun! Let's go watch the paint!" than when a game issues one of these. Just to spite this entire genre of puzzle, I'd put in a 15 that if you were insane, you could solve normally, but I'd also give the player agency to just rip the pieces out and put them in the correct order.

Speaking of solved awful things, how about the Towers of Hanoi? (AKA: Tower of Brahma or Lucas' Tower) is the crappy puzzle where you have to move crummy disks over from left to right or some other asinine balancing act. Even more annoyingly is that this puzzle tends to turn up inexplicably in high profile games such as Mass Effect. This one is annoying in games because in our physical reality, we can just be pragmatic and throw the Tower of Hanoi into a nice fire, as it makes excellent kindling, but in games, they restrict you annoyingly to solving this clunker properly.

I'll skip over "make all the circles align", seeing as I've already covered the quibbles with it.

Peg Solitaire. For people too dull for normal cards or even checkers, peg solitaire truly brings solitude to oneself. As in screams for need of social activity, not tranquil oneness. Thankfully fairly rare in video games. Peg solitaire is the sort of joy you'd attain from asking someone to describe a good book, only for them instead to describe the quality of the binding glue.

So what kind of puzzles get on your nerves?

I can already feel myself being triggered by this thread.

Don't mind me. I'll just be over here. Waiting for the comments.

The worst ones I've encountered are not that common thankfully. It's where you are supposed to memorize some in-game tale/story in order to solve a puzzle.

In itself this is tolerable if you are informed about this beforehand or if the game keeps some kind of log of this particular tale/story. However some games are not that generous and do neither of these. JULIA Among the Stars was one of these games.Overall I liked the puzzles in that game, but it had a couple of these really annoying puzzles.

Oh, I encountered one of those in a Legend of Mana. Except it was short enough to write down and you only had to repeat 3 bits of this short paragraph. As I take it, the Opera Scene from FF6 or the play from Final Fantasy 9 are more unforgiving about timing and placement.

I assume by sliding puzzles you mean rearranging tiles to make an image rather then Zelda style block pushing. Block pushing I can do, but tile sliding is indeed the most tedious form of puzzle.

Not keen on memory stuff either. Thankfully I find many games do at least sign post stuff like that, but if the clue you need is more than a screen away the designer is the devil. Though at least these are easily solved by walkthrough.

I can't say I play a lot of games where puzzles feature heavily, and I think those two are probably the most annoying for me.

Though I'd probably add pitifully easy but time consuming puzzles. As in you immediately see the answer but because the controls aren't quite right or the design is a bit poor it takes you twenty minutes to actually complete it.
If I have to spend 20 minutes on a puzzle let it be because it's challenging and not because it's stupid.

Anything timed.

Oh, yes, slider puzzles... I hate those, having never learned the proper strategy for solving them. Usually I just click on the tiles wildly until I get something resembling a picture. Or go to YouTube for a step-by-step solution. What's worse, slider puzzles are very popular; there are so many point & click adventures that feature at least one.

What's worse is that such puzzles in the true sense are poorly integrated into the game. They take you right out of atmospheric/immersive exploration and into a separate window so that you can solve them and proceed. The worst offender is the Tex Murphy series, which often features back-to-back puzzles in its later parts. And they certainly aren't logical. Who would lock their valuables behind a puzzle that anyone could solve, instead of just using a lock? Puzzles are used as games in the real world, not as a security measure!

Other illogical puzzles are very large puzzles found in ancient temples etc. For example, a large hall with a floor composed of tiles you must step on in the right order, or statues that you must turn in the correct way etc. Again, lock & key would be vastly more useful than spending so much money constructing an intricate system of pulleys, levers, gears and pressure plates (all subject to rust, jamming and other malfunctions) on a grand scale just to lock a door.

Even though Black Mirror III features several of such puzzles, it also parodies them: in one scene, a supporting character gives you a box with an intricate puzzle locking it, and asks you if you can solve it. Your main character wordlessly takes the box, places it on the ground and stomps it with his foot. Well, that's one way to solve it!

E.g. adventure game puzzles are really difficult to design, so I'm not hating on the developers for sometimes taking the easy way out.

Still, basically anything you'd find in any other puzzle magazine is just lazy, Tic Tac Toe is the ultimate bore, and crate pushing so 1980s it's not even funny any more. :)

It gets worse when developers repeatedly use the same mini-game/puzzle as some kind of adventure game content in an RPG (like when hacking or lockpicking).

If you can't design novel and engaging puzzle challenges, don't make games that rely on those mechanics. :|

It's a worthwhile consideration, but it does indeed limit the designer's creativity. The adventure game in particular is one in which many game mechanics converge, so it might be next to impossible for game designers to keep the group they exclude small.

Red Thread Games are i.e. full to the brim with such considerations. But Dreamfall Chapters is still a 3D third person adventure game, and not everyone will be able to manage these controls. In one situation where I could personally get involved (because she was German), the player could only use one hand, and that in only a limited way. Now that was a puzzler. I'm uncertain whether these particular problems could ever be satisfactorily solved with the type of game that this adventure happens to be. The devs intended to help... not sure if it ever happened.

I could be of more help to the deaf guy who landed on the Telltale forums because he just couldn't get through one particular puzzle. Turns out he needed to follow certain animal sounds through a labyrinth and couldn't hear the animal sounds. It was just one puzzle in five episodes, but it was there and definitely prohibited access in a way. It was easy helping the guy out of course, and it was a great and innovative puzzle, but at the very least they should have clearly signaled that it was an audio based puzzle.

As to the problems of a legally blind co-moderator I worked with at the time at Telltale... well.

Oh, bugger, I forgot about Simon/follow the sequence games. Like I know my short term memory shouldn't be that short, but the game shouldn't also require me to stretch my memory more than say, 8 inputs without a refresher or button guide. Speeding up is just rude at that point. Actual memory puzzles, like remembering a short sequence or an item from earlier in the game is a bit more forgivable. Note taking is a classical part of games, after all.

Block pushing is a little boring, but thankfully kept to brief sections, unless your name is Nethack and you haven't gotten around to slaying the player. In which case enjoy an entire Sokoban section.

As for braindead easy puzzles, I tend to forget the even happen.

This! The worst culprit I can think of at the moment is Broken Sword 4. Shit controls and camera coupled with timed puzzles ruined the game for me.

I hate the "easy" ones. Like the rotating pillars in Skyrim. If you're going to make it THAT simple, why have a puzzle there at all? I prefer more challenging puzzles, but not arbitrary or trial and error puzzles (I don't mind some trial and error, obviously, but making a puzzle basically "guess the order" is a sin). Silent Hill series did it somewhat correctly, with some challenging puzzles that mostly made sense, except the aglaophotis in the first one. Who in the living fuck would do all of that in a natural play through?!
So too easy and impossible/random ass guessing are my least favorite puzzles.
Silver, the bell puzzle. Timing is tied to CPU cycles and makes the game nearly unfinishable at this point with modern PCs unless you use an artificial CPU clocker.

Other people have already some of my most hated - just listing them again in support-
audio only puzzles (I remember the one in the original Myst - I even got a screenshot of the solution and it still took dozens of tries to solve it)
tile sliding
timed puzzles that have no in-game explanation
precise timing puzzles out of nowhere in games with vastly different gameplay

Other puzzles I hate include:
puzzles that you only have to solve because your game character is obsessive - both doors to a room are wide open, but you can't proceed unless you rearrange the cans in the cupboard

unrealistic mazes - the maze is in a 1-foot tall hedge that your character couldn't possibly step over or every room in a maze looks completely identical in a way that real rooms don't

having to learn a made-up alien language to solve the puzzle

having to answer questions with no in-game clues that someone could easily find the answer for on the Internet - so you have to leave the game, get the answer, and then go back to the game

I like the puzzles in Riven. They are very difficult, yes, but they are integrated into the world in such a way that you never feel like you just hit up against a brick wall by having to solve another small "puzzle" but instead you feel like you are exploring the world and learning more about the culture of the strange island.
Well, most of the time.
But I feel that that game got it perfect.



Now, The Seventh Guest? Those puzzles are just annoying.