If you beat these games without any outside help, then good on you! You just might be a genius. Some believe video games to be a mindless activity, but that is far from the truth. Some games require plenty of skills in the areas of music, math, and science just to figure out a puzzle. And while there are plenty of great puzzle-oriented games out there, there are some video games that feature particularly mind-boggling puzzles.
While they can be fun, they can also be very frustrating for the gamer if the puzzle causes them to get stuck. Luckily, the internet has plenty of walkthroughs and spaces for players to give each other advice. Here are ten such games that had at least one puzzle requiring a genius-tier intellect to be solved alone.
10 King’s Quest
With the series' oldest game coming out in 1980, and the most recent in 2016, the King's Quest series has made a lot of games. They are your typical puzzle adventure game. Some of their puzzles have gone down in video game history has the most difficult. The one that is most talked about is a puzzle where you had to say Rumplestiltskin's name backwards and in a made-up order of the alphabet where A becomes Z and B becomes Y and so on.
There is another about saving a rats life from a cat, or else you will die later in the game. It is the sort of puzzle game where you need multiple save points or else you may have to start over if you do not do the right thing at the right time.
9 The Longest Journey
This point and click game had players looking up walkthroughs and asking the internet for help. A lot more often than is usual for modern games, to say the very least.
The most infamous puzzle this game throws at you has become known the "rubber duck puzzle." You go through an outlandish number of events just to retrieve a key that got lodged into a subway track. What you have to do to get the key out includes feeding crumbs to a seagull near a rubber duck so that the rubber duck is damaged and then you use that duck as part of a incredibly odd tool to get the key.
8 Gabriel Knight 3: Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned
This game series is by Sierra Studios, who also made the King's Quest series. Like King's Quest, it is also a point-and-click game with puzzles involved. While the game had a lot of difficult puzzles, none were quite as memorable as the one fans call the "cat mustache puzzle."
In that puzzle, you had to create a disguise in order to continue the story. You had to disguise yourself as someone, and that someone did not even have a mustache. The puzzle demanded you make one anyway, and it had to be made out of cat hair.
7 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
This text-based game came out in 1984 and is infamous for its "Babel fish puzzle." The game, like the book and film, has pretty humorous and strange puzzles. The Babel fish one crossed a line in how crazy it became though. The fish is actually a universal translator that is dispensed from a machine.
You do not just press a button and get one though. Shenanigans happen and you use up all five fish in the machine and have to get the last one. If you don't, it'll be game over later.
6 Grim Fandango
This critically acclaimed adventure game looks like something out of the movie Coco, but it actually came out in 1998, and saw a remastered version released in 2015.
It is a game where is it not uncommon to get stuck. Players either overthink or under-think the puzzles. Some players have gotten frustrated enough to say that the puzzles do not make any logical sense. Even puzzle game veterans have to pull out walkthroughs and hints for some of these puzzles.
5 Fez
Some game puzzles are so despised by the gaming community that they get their own articles in places like Kotaku. All the fans and publications discuss one puzzle the most: the "Black Monolith" puzzle. The final puzzle is so difficult and cryptic, players have just resorted to brute forcing it through trial and error.
To that point, no one feels like they really completed it to this day. That goes to show that even when a puzzle is beaten, that does not mean it is necessarily understood.
4 Codename: Iceman
This is the third game on this list made by Sierra Studios. Unlike the others though, it did not turn into a series. Like the other Sierra Studio games, you do point-and-click and solve puzzles by using the right item in the right place.
While this game had numerous difficult parts, the most hard one had to do with luck instead of skill. You have to play a dice game against a crewman who get a certain item. The most mean-spirited part is that if you load a save file to retry the game, he notices and will no longer play with you because you are cheating. So yes, you can break your save file.
3 Silent Hill 3
Silent Hill is well known for being a spooky survival horror masterpiece, but it's also filled with puzzles. Some are rather simple, while others have made players rage-quit. One of the most infamous Silent Hill puzzles is from the third installment and is known as the "Shakespeare puzzle." The difficulty of the puzzle does change depending on your difficulty settings, and the hardest setting really goes hard.
You must get a four digit code, and you have four Shakespeare tragedies that have to be in a certain order, which ends up taking a lot of reading and thinking to figure out. What is really intimidating is this is the very first puzzle in the whole game.
2 Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars
This point and click adventure game had an infamous goat puzzle that made players want to rip their hair out. You simply had to get past a goat that was blocking your way, but it always would headbutt you if you got near it. So what do you do? Players clicked everywhere they could and tried every item but the trick was to click on a certain part of the screen while the goat was mid-headbutt.
This puzzle was so hard that it made gaming news and even has its own Wikipedia page.
1 Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
Like Silent Hill, Resident Evil is one of the greatest horror games of all time. Resident Evil is also similar to Silent Hill in that its a horror franchise with puzzles mixed in. Like the third Silent Hill game, the third Resident Evil game also had an infamously difficult puzzle known as the "water sample puzzle." The complex puzzle has actually four different correct answers, so at least that is something.