The Worst Puzzle of All-Time | Design Delve

The puzzle makes sense from a mechanical standpoint. They’ve established this mechanic of swapping spheres, and spheres naturally rotate, so in theory it’s a last hurrah. In practice, it’s moving through a small, barely interesting, and hidden state space at a snail’s pace. It would have been better to have responsive control and visibility into a large and complex state space.

This reminded me of a couple of (keyword) *optional* puzzles in Tunic that I though were clever, to be fair, but once I figured out how to solve them and also understood how tedious the process would be, I simply looked up the answer to collect my reward and move on.

Great Delve! I remember though that the fire-marble puzzle in Riven was also ... an expletive to solve. Maybe it's a studio trademark to add one horrific puzzle in an otherwise awesome experience...

Pleased to see Design Delve on Patron this week. 👍 This was another solid vid and I am not shocked by its solid viewing numbers. These just keep getting better keep up the good work 💪

Absolutely maddening, JM8. Loved it!

I'm definitely here for a more emotional level of JM8. I think it lets us get an insight into JM8's personality a bit more rather than trying to be wholly impartial and explanatory. But I also used to like it when mini JM8 would scream at big JM8 in the first series. Also, I would glady accept more frequent occurence of the phrase "boils my piss" in my life.

Without wanting to be "that" guy, I've seen this criticism of this particular puzzle a few times, and it has always left me wondering: "Why are these guys taking the *long* way around?", because unless I'm completely misremembering (it *has* been rather a bit of time since I played the game), the game unlocks a shortcut that brings you pretty much right where you need to be. (I also see people complaining about load times... I suppose this is a low GPU RAM thing? -Because as far as I recall, a lot of stuff gets cached between level loads, so that swapping back and forth between two recent worlds is a lot faster than loading either from scratch.)

I think you're right. I was going to say The Longest Journey's blue duck floaty puzzle was the worst, but I don't know if I would tolerate this even if I had a walkthrough

I backed this game on Kickstarter, and have completed it twice, once on pc, once in VR and have loved it... that said this one puzzle is Really Bad, but the rest of the game is Really Good. Great episode by the way, I do wonder what you though of the rest of the game...

Fantastic episode! I love the style of this. The episode itself reminds me a little of playing Shadowgate 64 and despising everything about how the logic of its puzzles worked...I think there was one part you had to walk across a deteriorating ceiling and it was a maze, essentially, but you couldn't actually tell where you were/weren't allowed to step, so you just randomly fell to your death over and over again until, I guess, you brute-forced your way to memorizing what the correct path was. At least, that's how I remember it now...

Fun epsiode!

I started watching but had to stop because Obduction is still on my “one of these days” list.